Show the visible effects of the pain. Let the reader feel it.

I think the issue is that you're being sidetracked into trying to describe the feeling of pain. Pain is a very subjective feeling. It is so subjective that in the medical profession they try to ascertain the degree of pain by either asking the patient to choose from a spectrum of emoticons, or to give it a number between 0 and 10. Only then they ask precise question on whether it is a stinging pain, a pulsing pain and so forth: oftentimes the patient is unable to properly characterize their pain besides its intensity, despite external suggestions from the physician.

While the feeling of pain may be taken to the grave by the one experiencing it, the outcome on their actions and looks is very much objective. Regardless of whether a pain is the worst of one's life, the feeling of it may cause one to recoil, to squirm, to scream or to even madly fight back in a primordial attempt to get rid of the cause.

Even if you haven't experienced the pain, you are somehow familiar to the reaction to pain. You would easily identify whether a living being is hurt. It is that information that you need to give to the reader. Actually, it would be a great success if you manage to stab the Dragon and make the reader feel its pain, without using the word 'pain'

For instance, if we tried to show a dragon in pain, like an outgrown lizard in pain:

the Dragon howled with a shriek that shook the cave. It raised its eyes to the sky, and pointing at the knight, it snorted, steaming from the open mouth, but not a flame came out of it. It clasped the bottom of the cave with its claws, scarring the granite, twitching and splashing in its fuming blood.

posted about 5 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

_X_‭

420 reputation 20 121 65 1

When I don't know how to do something, I look for examples of how somebody else did it. Here's an example from Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series. The main character, a wizard, had a kinetic shield spell ready, while the enemies came with a flamethrower. Turns out shield doesn't stop heat:

It hurt. Oh, God, it hurt. The fingers of my left hand were the first to feel it, and then my palm and wrist, all in the space of a second. If you've never been burned, you can't imagine the pain. And my fingers, where millions of tactile nerves were able to send panicked damage-messages to my brain, felt as if they had simply exploded and been replaced with howling agony.
I jerked my hand back, and felt my focus waver, the shield start to fade. I gritted my teeth, and somehow managed to dig up the strength to extend my hand again, hardening the shield and my will. I backed away in shuffling half steps, my mind almost drowning in pain, desperately keeping the shield up.
[...]
I saw blisters rising on my left hand. I felt my fingers curling into a claw. They looked thinner, as if made of melting wax, and I could see the shadows of my bones beneath the flesh.
_{Jim Butcher, Blood Rites, chapter 33}

There are several things going on here.

First, there's what is happening. A man's hand is being burnt. You think of that, it makes you shiver. And there's detail: the fingers curling involuntarily, the flesh melting away from the bone. Your thought is made to linger on that uncomfortable shiver. You imagine the pain, you don't even need to be told that it hurts - you know it does.

Second, we are told that it's painful: "it hurt", "my mind almost drowning in pain". Such statements are empty on their own - we've heard them too often. But within the picture already created, they support the overall structure. They are like the cerebral part of the mind registering that "it hurts".

Third, "Oh God". This is the cry of pain that escapes one's lips, the loss of control. It's almost an involuntary reaction, very familiar to anyone who's experienced any sudden pain. It's an accent, and a signal.

Fourth, there is the description: "my fingers, where millions of tactile nerves were able to send panicked damage-messages to my brain, felt as if they had simply exploded and been replaced with howling agony". One image. You don't want more than one - it becomes confusing and repetitive. That one image makes the reader linger for a moment on imagining the pain - while they're reading this description, they cannot move on. This image needs to be sufficiently imaginative and brief - otherwise boredom sets in, we lose sympathy for the character. And again, it cannot stand on its own.

Do you need all those elements? Definitely not. They are tools you can use. And there are other tools, such as the physiological reaction to pain (dizziness, nausea, etc.)

The most important thing is, you don't need to describe pain. You need your readers to imagine pain. Those aren't quite the same thing. Sometimes less description, less detail, can do the trick - you give the reader enough, and let them fill in the blanks. In particular, it's very hard to imagine "abstract" pain. One imagines a particular kind of pain (burns feel differently from blunt trauma, for instance) in a particular organ. So before you describe pain, you need to paint the picture of what's going on. Once you've done that, the reader's imagination will do half the work for you. We're wired to empathise.

(Which by the way makes the task of describing a non-humanoid's pain harder - I do not intuitively feel what wings or air sacks feel like. You'd have to do the work for me - compare the sensation to something I know better. Sure, air sacks are like lungs, I understand that. But I don't feel that, unless you evoke some sensation - being unable to get enough air, or something similar.)

posted about 5 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Galastel‭

1885 reputation 81 551 319 3

You can't. You can't describe pain. You can't describe what things taste like. You can't describe much at all about our physical sensations of the world. Language just does not seem to work like that. There are no adequate words for any of it.

What you can do is evoke the memory of sensations that the reader has felt. You may also be able to provoke them to intensify the memory (maybe). You do this by writing about things that evoke those feelings and sensations in memory. Talk about holding your hand over a candle flame and anyone who has ever burned themselves will have some memory of that that feels like.

But be cautious here. Your reader may not actually be looking for your prose to create or recall the sensations of pain from their past. Pain is ickey. People tend to read so they can have dangerous adventures without the ickeyness of actual painful and unpleasant situations.

This does not mean that they don't want to read about events that involve pain and suffering, but don't assume that they want to imagine themselves suffering that pain. More likely they want to observe your characters suffering without experiencing it themselves. So think about what it is like to know that a friend (or enemy) is in pain. Try to evoke a memory of what that feels like.

posted over 4 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Mark Baker‭

4371 reputation 12 1104 744 58