Know What You're Doing When You Write Violence

We live in a violent world. It’s a part of life. Animals die violently in nature to feed other animals. We walk across a beautiful bed of grass―and squash the life out of ants and other insects that were busily going about their lives thinking, “I’m so happy to be doing this.” And then … crush. They’re gone. We may not have intended violence, but tell that to the bugs.

Violence, like the characters in your stories, is more complex than it may appear on the surface.

You have to ask yourself: Why did that person commit that act of violence?

No human is a single person. We’re all each of the people we’ve always been, when we were children, when we were teenagers, when we young adults, when we were middle aged, and when we’re old. We carry around with us all those people we’ve ever been―all the fears, all the joy, the anger and the love. Most of us deal with these things over time and manage to bring all those people into a balance that allows us to function. Some of us never quite find that balance and this can cause us to act in ways that surprise us. We might suddenly snap at someone for no reason, or we might overreact to some little thing that goes wrong. We have no idea where this comes from. It could be from problems in our everyday lives, or it could be from some long unresolved hurt in our childhood, still festering and calling out for help in our adult lives.

It’s this richness of experience and the emotional impact it has on us for our entire lives that makes every person complex and multi-dimensional. No one person is completely bad and no one person is completely good. If you have a character in your story who is completely evil with no redeeming characteristics, then you have a piece of cardboard. Even a psychotic personality may have a deep fondness for chocolate ice cream. Adolf Hitler played a game with his general staff. When one of them saw a man with a beard, they yelled, “Beard!” The one who saw the most number of beards won. This man who caused the death of millions of men, women and children had a sense of play.

An experiment performed in a US school in which students were to re-enact the rise of Nazism as part of a history project got so far out of hand in just a few weeks that most of the students had to undergo extensive counseling. In a matter of days, normal children were converted to fascism.

We’re all a mixture of many personalities, but we all have two sides―a dark side and a light side. Most of us manage to stay within the bounds of the light side, but the dark is always there. As writers, we have to accept both sides. We may not agree with some of the things that our characters do, and we might not like them if we were to meet them on the street or at a party, but we have to accept them for both their good and their bad.

It starts by loving our characters, unequivocally. If we love them enough to create them in the first place, then we have the responsibility of loving them enough to go the whole course and give them life. We show the good in bad people and the bad in good people. We keep it balanced.

If you have a violent character, don’t let the violence just hang there. Show where it comes from. You have the breadth of story-telling in a novel to do that. Sometimes, just the mention of a scar that the character rubs after committing an act of violence may suggest something deeper and give some understanding or meaning to the violence or the character. Sometimes, you can do this through back-stories that track back to an incident in the character’s life that feeds violent behavior throughout their lives.

Violence: Physical and Emotional

Violence is not always physical. Emotional violence can be just as destructive and sometimes even more so than physical violence.

I was in the checkout at the Superstore one day when I heard a man call his wife a fucking bitch a few aisles down. They had three children with them. He told her how useless she was and called her a fucking bitch several times. Everyone could see that she was humiliated and close to tears. It wasn’t a big jump to assume that this is what she lived with every day.

The man in the supermarket might just as well have punched his wife in the face. Our bodies heal quickly from physical violence but emotional violence lingers inside us and punches us in the face moment-by-moment, day after day. It eats at our souls and strips us of our pride and self-worth.

Whenever you can, try to show both sides of the act of violence, including the victim―if only through the expression in the victim’s eyes. As for the man in the store, I’m guessing that someone in his past probably called him every name in the book.

Ask Yourself: Which is worse, physical or emotional violence?

Violence Pointers

Never throw gratuitous violence into your stories. Violence is a part of life and therefore has meaning in life. It comes from your characters; treat it with all the respect you give to the people you’re creating. Make your violence appropriate.

Don’t overdo it. You don’t have to describe every physical blow or every hurtful word. Focus more on the effect it has on your characters.

Make your violence reveal character, not obscure it.

Try This

You’re a child in a playground. The school bully comes after you, insults you and slaps you in the face. If you do anything to defend or protect yourself, the bully will beat the living daylights out of you. Write about your thoughts as this is happening, right from the moment you see the bully heading toward you, through the taunting (“Hey, ya four-eyed runt,” etc.), and finally to being slapped in the face.

OR

Write about a man or a woman punching another man or a woman in the face, over and over. Get inside the person doing the punching. Write only about what's going on inside the head of the person doing the punching. You can state it explicitly or you can hint at it … but try to show where the anger and violence are coming from.

OR

Try both.