Last night I was writing a particularly violent scene in book #2 of the Phil Riley Novels and I confess, I got a little excited. Geez, I'm kinda getting into this, I think to myself. Method acting for actors is a commonly accepted approach to "getting inside a character's head" - why shouldn't it be the same for writers? I don't recall Robert DiNero donning a Mohawk and gunning down pimps in New York City. I think that would have made the papers. So clearly playing Travis Bickle hasn't had a lasting impact on his psyche. Maybe I'll be okay then, huh? Maybe I won't become a psychopathic killer like some character in one of my books, maybe? But what does it mean if it doesn't bother me to write violent scenes?
You talkin' to me?
9 comments:
Let me put it this way. I routinely murder dozens of people in my novels. I write about terrorism, after all.
And although I'm a step away from a black belt in karate, I've never been in a real fight (and intend to stay out of one, if at all possible). Don't own a gun and think they're a bad idea to own one.
Yet I get a good bit of adrenaline rush from time to time while writing my better scenes. Certain the last 20 or 30 pages of The Serpent's Kiss, hand-to-hand on a catwalk in a stadium, a remote control in the hand of the bad guy, sarin gas...
Well, you get the idea.
I’ve lost count of how many people Lynn Sholes and I have killed. Our spree started innocently enough with a handful in THE GRAIL CONSPIRACY—a fashion model, a news anchor, a Nobel laureate, and a few others. In THE LAST SECRET, we got the hang of it and shot down a commercial airliner full of passengers, caused the Queen of England to kill her corgis, then herself, and made the occupants of the International Space Station go insane and murder each other. We also bumped off a large portion of the student body of a Chinese university along the way. There were planes falling from the skies in THE HADES PROJECT just before things got really bad. And in our next thriller, BLACK NEEDLES, the death toll could number in the millions. But who’s counting?
Has it affected either one of us? Our therapists say we’re doing much better now.
"Yeah, I'm talking to you."
If you don't go deep into your character, neither will your readers. And you want them to feel what's on the paper.
Read a story about when Mark Harmon played Ted Bundy. He had worked himself up so much for the scene when he comes down the hall ready to kill the nurses, that they threw him into the showers afterwards to calm him down. Now that's an actor getting into his role of rage.
I've taken a shower after writing a particularly nasty scene. It comes down to the point of doing what you have to do in order to get the scene down on paper with all the due emotional impact necessary.
"Here's looking at you, kid."
-rick
http://muse-needed.blogspot.com/
"There were planes falling from the skies in THE HADES PROJECT just before things got really bad"
Now that made me smile. How twisted is that?
From my brother the PhD in music's description of one opera: I've turned half of your family into frogs, the other half into flies. They're eating each other. Now I'm going to really get nasty.
Once I needed to write a rape scene and I just couldn't get into it. It bothered me as a woman to write about the attempted rape of another woman, even a fictional one. Finally, I drank half a bottle of wine, laid down and shut my eyes and tried to imagine the horrific thing happening to me personally. After about 15 minutes, I was back at the computer, typing wildly, sobbing, and ready to gut any man who came near me with a nail file. (But like most great ideas, it passed.)
Rick is right, if we don't go deep, neither will our readers. I'm a firm believer in bleeding on the page.
My amateur sleuth--so far--has never actually killed someone. But as a writer, I can visualize the necessity to do so. I can even visualize feeling *justified* in killing a bad guy (or bad gal). Don't worry about the emotion. Just worry about the execution-on-page.
My ability to horrify myself with what comes out of the dark recesses of my mind is, at times, a mite troubling.
I sincerely appreciate that you all reach so deeply into the recesses of your talented minds to describe and feel these emotions and actions for your readers. I really do.
I'm wrestling with the third book in The Black Widow Agency series because I have an opportunity to have a body appear and I don't think I can bring myself to do it.
I've written the BWA as a lighthearted series filled with double entendres and humor. If ever it gets a tad dark, someone cracks a joke or throws a sarcastic comment out to lighten it back up. Part of that comes from my own caustic sense of humor and part of it comes from the fact that I've spent many years being exposed to the reality and images of violence in my day job and just can't bring myself to put anymore out there. But that's my own personal choice and I'd like to think that my characters are no less realistic for it.
A mystery series with no bodies? We'll see...
I supposed it's quite the irony, that after 30 years saving people's lives as an ER nurse, that now I'm getting paid for killing people. While my heroine hasn't had to kill anyone, I have personally enjoyed the "revenge" factor of killing off my truly obnoxious victims. To the point (I now realize after 3 books in the series) that I make my villains very sympathetic. I'm fairly sure my readers have wanted to kill the victims at least 2 chapters before I do! And, of course, I have no problem with describing dead bodies, wounds, symptoms of poisoning . . .
But then (as the MI author whose books have likely the highest romance factor), I also "get into character" for the love scenes. A nice Yin and Yang! ;-)
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