What is the lowest point you've ever brought a character to?

In my WIP, the mc, a PI, is beaten severely in an alley by two thugs. He spends most of the book in casts and bandages and on crutches. His girl friend cheats on him, and his former partner on the force (before he was fired) considers him a person of interest and threatens to lock him up. He drinks a lot. Who wouldn't?

One of my secondary characters gets captured and beaten the crap out of. He ends up with a head injury, which wipes the chip implanted in his brain, and he suffers seizures during an extremely important mission. They manage to escape, but not only is the key information stored in the chip destroyed, but so is the rest of his memory.

I made my protagonist a writer.

Made immortal (as a vampire) and locked in an undergound prison for over a century where she was left alone to subsist on a diet of vermin and go mad.

These Mean Streets said:

I made my protagonist a writer.

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You monster!

One of my characters voted Liberal Democrat

Little Ming said:

You monster!

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I made a man admit he was wrong, and ask for directions.


Okay, hand amputation, check. Realise he's been working for the bad guy all along. Realise that while he thought someone was betraying him (so he gets revenge, big style) he finds out actually they were trying to save him...Made a cocky MC realise he wasn't God's gift to women, made a man chose between his god and a woman, made a man fall in love...

'Worst' depends on the person.

Little Ming - I was just thinking the same thing.

I buried one protagonist alive along with a supporting character and a demon (a rather hostile one). Things got better though.

Character:Amelie Beauchamps
Acts Of Writer Cruelty:
Her family was murdered by Riordan.
Faith and soul broken.
Driven completely batshit insane.
Turned into a vampire against her will.
Basically remade into an eternal daughter for Riordan,despite her wish to reunite with her family.

Father sold daughter (MC) to Carpetbagger for money to pay taxes in Georgia. MC runs away when she finds out she's pregnant and gives birth on the run to Louisiana. She leaves her son at a church in New Orleans where he's adopted by a couple headed west - she never sees him again. After trying her hand at being a housekeeper, governess, and French tutor on her journey up the Mississippi, she eventually has to turn to selling herself. She runs afoul of a brutal and sadistic sheriff in Dakota Territory. When she becomes the cause of a man's and his three children's deaths at the hands of said sheriff, she runs again - back south this time - to wind up in the saloon at the center of the Newton, KS, massacre. Then she meets the hero and the real trouble begins.

Can I just say that I feel all tingly and happy that I am amongst such sadistic folk?

Hampton Beach-Dan Marlowe

In my novel "The Boss of Hampton Beach" the protagonist, Dan Marlowe, a reformed cocaine addict, is bound to a chair and forced at gun point to drink a glass of beer laced with a large dose of coke. Then his tormentors smokin' hot girlfriend, whose also coked up, sexually teases him mercilessly.

My MC saw her parents murdered, was raised by people who orchestrated said parents' deaths, made to work for the organization responsible, fell in love with one of their loyal minions (who was sent to spy on her), nearly got killed in an escape attempt in which she worked with The Most Hated Enemy of her employers, was interrogated and tortured in the aftermath, and that's before the book starts.

MC get's limbs chopped off, eyelids cut off, forced to watch his family is toutured/raped and then buried alive.

He's granted life once more to hunt these men down.


Another one is having my almost invisible MC to battle a army of 150,000 men. 7 days later he walks through the thin oceans back to his woman, covered in dried blood. Quite gruesome. He could not die or escape, go figure.

Do all of you write horror? Or is this romance?

I can't speak for the others, but... yeah. Mine's a romance. Technically.

I stuck my MC in a monotonous marriage...correction, monogamous...if that ain't torture at times, then I don't know.

Hmm one of the children characters in one of my stories (who is a very shy timid child) overhears her parents arguing about her in the middle of the night, in a moment of hurt, and simply not wanting to hear her parents fight she sneaks outside into the dark.
She ends up terrified, outside alone in the woods behind her house in the dark, feeling like she's the reason her parents fight.
It has a happy ending though, with the girl finding courage she didn't know she had.

I could tell you.

But then I'd have to kill you.

I write Horror. It is my favorite genre to the point that when I work on my other books,it always manages to sneak in.

I tried middle grade once and it turned into a werewolf snacking on the kiddies.

Abused as a child, lived in isolation most of his life, forced to kill hundreds of thousands of people, and finally lost all of his family, who he just found again. That about sums it up.