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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/30949
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Something doesn't always need to be graphically described to be powerful, and sometimes less can be more. There's a scene, in the original novel version of the _Godfather_, relevant to today's headlines, where the mafia's lawyer goes to see a top Hollywood producer. While he is at the producer's office, he sees a stage mother and her young daughter go in to see him. When they emerge, the little girl's makeup is smudged, and she looks dazed and unsteady, while on the mother's face there is a savage look of triumph.

With such small details, Puzo sketches a sordid and disturbing scene that is all the more indelible for the fact that it takes place entirely "off screen." What makes it so hideous is the portrait of the powerful exploiting the powerless, and the complicity of the mother, the child's putative protector. We get all that in just a few words, without anything graphic or explicit. The obscenity is in the situation, not the words.

The reader's own defense mechanisms may cause them to disengage from, or even just skip over anything too horrible or disturbing. But you can work with that instead of against it. Show the character's mental blocks about the incident, their reluctance to revisit it, the emotional damage they feel from it. Then, if you actually do describe it, do so plainly and simply and directly. A good example is Murakami's _Wind Up Bird Chronicles_ which is arguably all about an assault, but where the assault itself is barely even mentioned --everything is about the psychological fallout.

Original score: 13