(Cue Gregorian chant) Let us all give thanks unto Ceiling Cat, for after several weeks of whine, there is finally a post about writing. (End cue)

Or maybe curse Basement Cat, because for reasons known only to itself, my fried excuse for a brain is stuck on the question of how to handle the icky bits – and I’m not talking about the naughty icky bits, either.

The thing is, unless you’re writing for specific audience segments where there’s an expectation that ick will either not happen, be soft-pedaled, or be gracefully skipped (and these segments are getting smaller and fewer which is not necessarily a good thing), most of the time in F & SF there’s an expectation that the usual nastiness that goes with whatever you’re talking about will happen. Which is a really wordy way to say that if you’ve set up that your bad guys won’t hesitate to kill someone slowly, you’d better have some example of the fact there somewhere, and probably also have your hero or someone important to them facing the prospect of the bad guys doing their thing to them.

If torture is normal in your world, it needs to have some visibility in your plot. No, this does not mean an obligatory torture scene. What it does mean is that somewhere that norm must impact your characters. If you can’t write it, don’t try: instead consider the impact of your characters finding what’s left of a friend after they got tortured and killed (the two aren’t necessarily synonymous, but for plot purposes it tends to work that way) – or nursing said friend back to health and dealing with the fallout (this is why for plot purposes “and killed” often happens absent miracle-level technology or magical healing).

Similarly in a violent society, there needs to be violence. And bloodshed, because violence rarely happens without it.

That doesn’t mean you need to do the gross-out thing and lovingly describe buckets of blood or injuries that leave internal organs in places where internal organs were never intended to go. That kind of writing has a place, but the place isn’t necessarily your book. Rather consider your characters and their level of experience. Then show their reactions to what they see, hear and smell (only the sick bastards go tasting and touching the results of extreme violence – although a sufficiently strong smell can be tasted). If your hardened soldier sprints for the loo to empty his stomach, that shows that what he’s seen is pretty damn horrific. At this point nothing you describe will live up (or down) to the imagination of your readers, so don’t even try. A few references to blood spattering way further than it should have and… bits… will usually give the impression of a horrific bloodbath without you needing to make yourself queasy figuring out exactly who did what to whom.

This method is actually more difficult than the detailed descriptions, but it has a lot more impact if it’s done well. I used it a lot in ConVent and – to a lesser extent – in Impaler. ConSensual (I have seen a cover draft. It’s almost there….) uses the same technique as well, although like ConVent, I added in the twist of playing it for laughs. That’s harder. For that it helps to have a completely unshockable character, or as close to it as you can get. I guess a vampire who’s thousands of years old and has seen damn near everything that people can do to each other is pretty close to unshockable – although I still manage to rattle him a fair bit.

If your plot requires a major character to suffer something horrible, it works better if you don’t shy away from the horrible, but you can still give the horror its full impact without the every-drop-of-blood level coverage. For that kind of thing I’ll build up the emotional impact on the character as they realize they’re in deep trouble and begin to understand what’s about to hit them. If I’m writing a major character who gets tortured (which happens, particularly when writing medieval-ish fantasy – not that SF doesn’t include that particular peril), I’ll often write up until the ‘fun’ starts, then end that scene with a bridging sentence that makes it clear things get a great deal worse. Then change scene. If I’ve got multiple points of view I won’t come back to that character for a while, partly because the POV of someone who’s unconscious or delirious tends not to be terribly useful from a plot perspective, and partly because I’m evil and I want my readers wondering if the poor sod is going to survive – or if it would be better if he didn’t.

When I do return to that character, I focus on their emotions as much as their injuries, and usually don’t go into specifics because someone in that state is going to be paying more attention to the logistics of “It hurts” and “I need out of this mess” than to what’s been broken, burned, crushed, cut off or the like. If they’re able to escape under their own steam, the difficulties attached to said escape get shown. If not, I’ll often have them pass out again about when the rescuer shows up, then switch to the rescuer’s POV – which will show the rescuer’s reaction to the state of their friend, but mostly focus on the challenges of getting said friend out of their predicament.

When I’m writing from the villain POV, I take a rather different tack. Even if my villain is outright evil (who am I kidding? Most of my characters including the heroes are outright evil), I focus more on their goals when they’re causing mayhem than on the actual bloodshed, and on whatever gratification they get out of it. If the villain is driven by a lust for power, the power over the captive is what drives them. The sadistic sorts I focus more on the emotions of the victims than on the physical suffering. The ones that get off on it, I tend to aim for just enough shown that readers can guess the rest. If anything this is where I flinch, not because I have issues with what’s happening, but because I know damn well my ick settings don’t get triggered until just about everyone else has run screaming into the night.

What I tend not to do, no matter what, is describe everything in loving detail. Partly because it’s not helpful to the plot, partly because readers who are turning interesting shades of green aren’t reading my book, and in all honesty? Mostly because it’s boring. Seriously. One set of human innards is much the same as any other set of human innards, and if it’s not inside the skin where it ought to be, that’s usually enough for any moderately imaginative person. Who wants to read a scarlet-tinted anatomy lesson when the hero comes across the aftermath of a gruesome battle?