Disturbing Yourself

Yeppers. I treat it as the new line that I won't cross in any of my ficiton.

I once wrote what was essentially a torture porn scene - really, really disturbing. It was violent and graphic and probably the last straw in destroying the character. Luckily, the thing I was writing it for died without a bang and I never had to go back to it.

I've now written a different version of the scene - different time frame, different perpetrator, different reason for it happening - and it's been dialled down to probably a tenth of what it was, and it still stands out to people as really dark when compared to the tone of the rest of the work. That's fine with me, it's supposed to be really rather horrific, and be a truly dark moment, not to set a new tone.

Dear JustGo:
I've recently had that experience after writing a scene of emotional /physical abuse against a mother and child, and I absolutely felt cruel and heartless after I was done. Like (I think) you're describing, I was actually shaken up by it, because I hate hearing about anything bad happen to a child, and I was so upset by it the rest of the day that I had to put down my writing for a while and just try not to think about it.

My writer's group really helped, when they validated my feeling of "I hate that guy!", and they helped me discuss how it really was key to my story. Also, picking apart the mechanics of it kind of helped me - what word choice do you want here, do you want to extend this section, add a certain image, pare back on the adverbs - all that revision stuff you have to go through. Getting either far enough away from it to see it in the scheme of things, or close enough up to it to pick apart all the writerly little details, really seemed to help.

And I can tell you the feeling eventually went away for me. Maybe it's totally different from your scene, but I was - like you describe, I think - totally shocked that I could write such a thing and totally shaken up by its imagery. I don't think you're ever as close to it as when you write it, which is a cold feeling that separates you from the emotion of it because you just have to get it out. After you're done writing it this feeling explodes in a kind of a hot dread of all the emotion and energy you've just conveyed, which is what shakes you up so much. I think I'd describe this last feeling as that of having just been the perpetrator, and the victim, and the witness, and finally the redeemer in the scene. You get to live out every player's part, and the indifferent passerby's, and finally, "God's", if you will.

For what it's worth,
Jill.

I know exactly what you mean. I once wrote a very graphic scene of a teenage boy being molested/raped by an older man he trusted. God I felt dirty afterward, but I had to do it for the story.

I understand. Once I wrote a short story murder mystery - most disturbing thing ever. I was so creeped out that I deleted the whole thing, and I've never written anything like that again.

I haven't disturbed myself yet, but I did write a scene that almost made me cry!

Writing what is abhorrent as a fiction is a huge exercise of our will to put it on the page--and go on.

Doing it as a release from something that horrible that we experienced and survived--I would think that's much harder.

My trunk novel contains a relatively graphic description of ritual murder. I had to call my best friend and go hang out at her house for a couple hours after I wrote it because it completely creeped me out. My beta reader still looks at me funny for it, in fact, and she's known me for years.
It's one of the scenes worth salvaging from that effort, though I don't know if I ever will.

JustGo said:

Being fairly desensitized, I have never done this before. However, I wrote a new torture scene in the course of revisions today - well, I suppose it was always there, in the white space between chapters and the back of my mind, but I never wrote it out. When I finally got around to writing it out today, I thought I wouldn't have any problem with it, and it flowed perfectly. Afterwards, though, I felt really... disturbed.

It wasn't nearly as graphic as a lot of other scenes I've written - I wanted to keep it toned down so it was more about character development and not torture porn - but I've never written anything so utterly heartless. I can't shake the feeling that I've done something awful, and I may end up deleting the scene, but I feel that it's important to the story.

Has anyone else here had any experiences like this?

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Yes, I wrote a psychopath, and everytime I wrote her actions, it disturbed me all day. Then I wrote a depressed person, and I got depressed. She told someone she didn't want anything, and later that day, I told someone I didn't want anything.

Spoooooooky!!!!

Gynn said:

I haven't disturbed myself yet, but I did write a scene that almost made me cry!

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Yeah, I do that too, especially when I read them out loud. (Is it out loud, or aloud?)

I disturb myself rather too easily.
I'm looking forward to getting a bit desensitized.

I've never been disgusted--even by the worst stuff I've ever written--but I've shed a few tears over certain scenes.

Did I just admit that? I just violated my membership in the Man Club and now I have to return my Man Card to their office so they can shred it.

Here's how I look at it, and what my creative writing teacher said:

If it serves a good purpose, it's not all that shocking. Heh.

Yep, I don't know how you guys do it. I write light-hearted romantic fiction and sometimes even that gets a bit difficult to get through as I tend to feel what I am writing so deely. Can't imagine writing mysterys or thrillers and having to feel all that as I write. My hats off to you.

It is interesting this came up. My WIP has a devastating ending as it is. I totally did not want to do it, because it is the opposite of what anyone would want to read. So somewhere around the middle of the book I wanted to show that the antagonist was a miserable cur, so I had him bludgeon to death the MC's house sitter just on a whim. I was suddenly unable to write for about 2 weeks. A short time ago, today, I finally decided that it was literary malpractice, and why is it every frigging book has got someone killing someone else. I now think it is beneath the story to include the scene. I do like some descriptions of the MC's living room, so I will keep that detail, but otherwise, the story going to work without a murder. The Antagonist is still a creepy bastard, but does every story have to look like Jeffery Dhamer wrote it? I don't know when it happened, but every movie I see, and most recent books in the genre I am trying to write in have these really toxic murder scenes. This story can play without any blood letting.

I am trying to do the sort of classy Hitchcock style James Stewart/ Grace Kelly style noir without the staticco mob talk. Although they did have murders in them, they were usually off-stage. I think the Potential that my antagonist has for criminal behavior is more important to the story, because the story is based on perceived threat, not actually murder. There will be a few punching fights, some drug use and some rough sex, but I don't want to actually kill anyone.

I think I stopped writing because my mind was rebelling against what I had done. And I really think I put it in because I felt "forced" in some way-- as though all good books were supposed to have murders in them. Does this make sense? I think it does to me.

Well, off to re-write the plot.

Well, mine's about war, so some descriptions are called for.

Others, I should probably seek help for.

Yea. The scene where my first-person protagonist murders her kid brother was pretty tough....left me a little shaky. A few weeks later I wrote out a scene where she prepares to murder her husband's lover and her own children with him. I had to put myself in that emotional state first...it was insane. And thrilling. One of the best scenes I've ever written, and it might not even make it into the finished story.

Not directly, at least.

Turns you inside out

Your characters turn you inside out -- first they nag you to be written, then they do really bad stuff and blame you for it!

Bustardos!!!

I once so freaked myself out writing a supernatural scene, I had to turn around my desk so that it faced the door to my writing room. I couldn't stop looking over my shoulder - weird.

For the next few days I kept visualising someone standing at the top of my staircase and, eventually, I had to put the thing away for a week so I could get a grip! I almost couldn't stay in my own house!

JustGo said:

Has anyone else here had any experiences like this?

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Actually it is surprisingly easy to do. You are so in to the story that it just comes out.

As to deleting it, just ask yourself, who are you writing too, and would you like to spend the evening with the person who is going to enjoy reading it.

-MM

I've felt rather uneasy about some things I've written, but I think this was more about me worrying what others would think of me after they've read it, than me just being disturbed by my own work. Truthfully, by the time a scene has played itself out in my mind enough times for me to write it down, I'm not really disturbed by it. Other emotions, perhaps, but not that one.

I think I need a certain distance to feel disturbed by something--meaning, if someone ELSE wrote it, I can feel plenty unsettled, but if I wrote it, I'm too close to it to feel that way. Not sure if that makes sense or not.

I've written some pretty horrific torture scenes, too.

Oddly though I find I'm not usually so much disturbed by certain works, as terribly depressed--and not usually in relation to graphic violence and such. I guess emotional works hit me harder than grotesque ones. Instead of focusing on the violence or something in a scene I'll probably focus instead on the characters' emotions.

OH! You know what? I just thought of ONE instance where something I wrote creeped me out afterwards--a violent scene with a character of mine, where he was portrayed as completely unsympathetic. He's a "good guy," but has lots of flaws. It was an early scene with him and later scenes built on his flawed character so that it was made clear he wasn't as heartless as he was in that one scene, but still, that scene really does unsettle me because it makes him seem so loathesome. And there are other scenes for other characters which I have in my mind, but so far have been unable to put down on the page, the thought unsettles me so much; they're not all necessarily violent, but they make me think about my beloved characters in kind of uneasy ways. So I guess I do kind of know the feeling!

Been there, done that.

It wasn't my usual sort of thing; it was a short story written in a bit of a rage, inspired by someone else who I thought had gotten a perfectly good plot all wrong—and it was a sort of redemption story. But for the lead to be redeemed in such a shattering way, I needed to have him be bad. Seriously bad.

And then for some reason I wrote the piece in first person.

I was simultaneously disturbed and relieved: disturbed by what was coming out of my fingers, and relieved because I was seriously squicked by the racist, hateful language my character used. I mean, intellectually I knew that the plot required someone who absolutely didn't seem redeemable, but . . . uggh.

I'm probably never going to publish that story. If I do, it certainly won't be in that form, because there were a few things wrong with it besides the fact that it bugged me. But you're right, it was a seriously weird experience—the more so because I felt that I had to write the story just to get it out of my head.

Izunya