Writing Violence

Exercise Your InkTank
Extreme Violence

The conversation about violence in storytelling is often one about the writer’s intent. If the writer’s intent is to shock the audience with extreme violence for the purpose of mere entertainment, we tend to categorize the violence differently than we might other kinds of violence in writing—we call it gratuitous. But violence that is sneakily used for the purpose of teaching readers a lesson might also be accurately called gratuitous. In both cases, readers have cause to resist and cause to dismiss; in both cases the reader’s sensitivity to violence is subject to the writer’s designs.

That said, I do think there is a place in literature for crazy gonzo blood splat gratuitous violence, as well as preachy politico tearjerk baby bye-bye violence. But what I’m more interested in talking about tonight is storytelling. The fact is that violence happens in the world. And the fact that it isn’t pretty or pleasant shouldn’t keep us from writing about it, though it may make the task more challenging.

If you slow down the pacing of the story around the violence, embellishing it with lots of details, the word gratuitous may stick to you—you may even be accused of glorifying violence. But if you speed it up and race right past it, you may be justly deemed a scardey cat. If the violence in your stories always happens off screen, it may be that you are mistaking your own fear, for the desires and needs of the story.

Here’s some advice from Chris Offutt, a writer who knows a good deal about it. I’ve summarized things he has said on the subject in workshop and out: write violence if you must, because you must, but write about it with the same care you’d take with anything. Your prose should be energized, not hyper. If you decide to take a clinical distance, don’t make it so cold you disappear. Be there.

A writer who does this well, I think, is Denis Johnson. This is an excerpt from “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” from the short story collection Jesus’s Son:
And later, as I’ve said, I slept in the back seat while the Oldsmobile—the family from Marshalltown—splashed along through the rain. And yet I dreamt that I was looking right through my eyelids, and my pulse marked off the seconds of time. The Interstate through western Missouri was, in that era, nothing more than a two-way road, most of it. When a semi truck came toward us and passed going the other way, we were lost in a blinding spray and a warfare of noises such as you get being towed through an automatic car wash. The wipers stood up and lay down across the windshield without much effect. I was exhausted, and after an hour I slept more deeply. I’d known all along exactly what was going to happen. But the man and his wife woke me up later, denying it viciously.
“Oh-no!”
“NO!” In a minute the driver, who’d been slumped over the wheel, sat up and peered at us. His face was smashed and dark with blood. It made my teeth hurt to look at him—but when he spoke, it didn’t sound as if any of his teeth were broken.
“What happened?”
“We had a wreck,” he said.

A literary writer who is known for his extreme violence is Cormac McCarthy. No conversation about violence in the literary world would be complete without him. Here’s an excerpt from the novel Blood Meridian:
And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.

And now a little challenge:

In order that there be some correspondences between our work tonight, I’ll ask that we all write about the same scenario and that’s the scenario presented in the excerpt from “Car Crash.” In other words, let’s write about a car crash. Why didn’t I just say that? Write against the impulse to glorify violence and against the impulse to hide from it.