Effective techniques for describing pain
I've noticed something in writing: it's difficult to convey pain, and even specific types of pain, to an audience who's comfortably sitting at home in an easy chair.
I can hardly imagine pain until I'm injured myself, in fact. The sting of freezing never hits home until I find myself on a mountain slope. I've no problem with the situational tension, but conveying the suffering (sharp or aching, burning or freezing, immediate or escalating) seems to be harder.
What techniques can I use to really make the audience empathetic? What's proven to be the most effective? Something prose-based? Reactionary? Who writes pain extremely well?
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It is hard to describe great pain if you've never felt it yourself.
It is better to write scenes like this in an omniscient POV, because you can focus both on the feeling itself and on what is happening. If you were in a first-person POV, the focus would be more on the pain. Here are two examples:
Then the knife slashed at my arm. Pain erupted, blocking my vision. My arm felt like it was on fire, and my head spun. I could barely see what the man standing above me was doing. My eyes rolled back in my head and I gave a deep, guttural roar of pain.
Then the knife cut through his right arm. He writhed, roaring with pain on the ground. The man above him laughed and wiped the knife clean, ready for a more fatal stab. His eyes rolled back in his head and he gave the loudest roar of all, a shout that shook the walls.
As you can see, with option one, there is a more blind perspective of the situation that leaves out the key details, of, for example, the man readying the knife. Option two, however, gives a more broad overview of both the man's and the rest of the perspectives and feelings.
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I'm answering this myself as well, because after mulling it over for a week I've come up with some thoughts not yet mentioned, and I'd like to flush this topic out. Who knows-- it might be helpful.
- Let the reader handle the pain part. Write what physically happened (works best in an omniscient POV), and the reader can fill in their own blanks. Simply saying that someone's fingernail was removed will shake people all on its own. The tender skin beneath need not be agonized over in every case.
- Reactionary. Describe pain through the actions of the character. There are outward signs of pain, and the difference between a normally lively character to someone who will not move will worry a reader if your characterization is strong enough.
- After-effects / non-reactionary results. For a more subtle pain, what steps are needed to cure it can be detailed instead. Jumping from doubling over to next-day post-surgery is jarring, and evokes very strong associations.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/7490. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Take notes when you're suffering for later use.
No really. Get into the habit of carrying something to jot down your thoughts on (phone, tablet, moleskine notebook, marbled notebook, whatever) and when you're feeling something intense, write it down. Describe it. In the moment, write down all the things you're feeling, no matter how repetitive or hallucinatory.
This will teach you (a) observational skills (b) the habit of putting nonverbal things into words. As you get better at noticing and then describing how it feels when the wind blows through your soul on a cold mountaintop, and your thighs are prickling as they turn numb and your sinuses ache dully at the bridge of your nose and your scarf is wet and slimy from the condensation of your breath and your lungs feel like they're stabbed every time you inhale, you won't have to struggle so much to come up with ways to make your reader feel the cold.
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