Pain can be an interesting emotion to write about. It gives authors the liberty to merge their character’s emotions and surroundings to create beautiful metaphors and graphic descriptions that draw their readers in and convey their character’s struggles. However, if done wrongly reading your descriptions of pain can feel like a chore to your readers. Unsure how to accurately describe pain in your writing? Here are some tips to help you get started.
Use The Five Senses
As humans, we possess five senses that dictate our reactions to the world around us. When writing, it is important to use these five senses rather than just relying on what your character can see. Talk about the sound, the smell, the taste, and even the feeling.
If your character just got burnt, talk about the sound of sizzling flesh and the slight numbness they feel. Mention the terrible smell of burnt flesh, and make your character feel dizzy with fear as their eyes finally land on the horrific wound.
Internal bleeding makes people spit blood and taste iron and partially healed wounds feel itchy and irritant.
There is so much more to pain than what you see, and simply talking about your character’s wounds isn’t nearly enough to make your readers wince in second-hand pain. In fact, they are more likely to skim your passages in boredom.
Show your readers what your character is experiencing, and then go on to describe their reaction to this situation.
Build It Up, Then Break It Down
Pain doesn’t just suddenly come from nowhere. It starts with something small, blossoms, and then spreads. Your character won’t just suddenly get a third-degree burn the size of a baseball by leaning against a hot steel wall for the briefest of seconds. It starts with a light reddish-brown mark, then darkens, maybe even blisters.
You can’t go from 0 to 100 in one sentence. You need to build it up and show your readers how your character’s pain was found. Then, break it down.
Pain doesn’t come from nowhere, but it doesn’t suddenly disappear either. Show us how your character’s wound heals. Does the wound mark from where they hurt their knee turn into an ugly brown shade for a couple of weeks? Do their burns gradually fade from red to pink, or turn darker?
It’s important to show your readers the aftermath of your character’s pain. A character who just had a bullet pulled out of their shoulder with a hot knife can’t suddenly just jump up and start firing at the enemy with perfect aim.
You don’t need to overdo it and constantly mention their wounds during the healing stage, but something as simple as ‘her bandages uncomfortably scratched at her back every time she lifted her hand to eat’ or ‘his fingers subconsciously shifted to run over the remains of his burn mark even as his eyes remained trained on the blackboard’ will suffice.
How Does This Affect Your Character?
Physical pain aside, wounds can also have an effect on your character’s dynamics with others as well as your plot.
It’s important to take into account how they got this wound, how the other characters might react to it, and internalised conflict caused by it. Maybe your character injured their fingers during a game of volleyball and now they’re staring at their final exam paper with tears of frustration brimming their waterline because it hurts too much to write.
Maybe your protagonist suffered a small burn while sneaking out to go to their friend’s house and their parent or mentor saw it. Or maybe your protagonist won against the antagonist but suffered a grave injury to their legs and now cannot fight during the next confrontation, resulting in a chaotic outbreak at their headquarters.
Think about the internal as well as the external damage your character’s wounds can cause, and then use that as a plot device to further your book.
Do Your Research
It’s very important to accurately portray your character’s level of pain and consider whether or not they would realistically incur such injuries from such a wound. When writing about a character’s wound or pain consider doing some research about that type of wound.
Here are some things you need to check when researching the wound type:
How much blood would they loose with this type of wound?
What are the side effects?
Could this be fatal?
How long will it take to heal?
How long does it take for a wound to get to that extent? (for example, if you’re writing about a third-degree burn, research what it takes for a burn to be considered third-degree).
What are the major veins, arteries, and other important body parts in that part of the character’s body? For example, if your character is supposed to be injured on their arm but it’s not supposed to be serious, you need to consider whether the wound could realistically have ruptured their radial artery, resulting in death.
Will there be any scarring? What about any long-lasting wound marks?
You could also take a look at historical events similar to the one you’re writing. For example, if you’re writing about an assassination attempt consider researching the most historically renowned assassination techniques.
It’s also a good idea to ask your families and friends about their experiences with the type of wound you’re writing about (so long as it’s not a sensitive topic). Maybe you have a cousin who suffered a third-degree burn once or a classmate who has a scar from a graphic wound across their arm.
I hope this blog on how to accurately describe pain in writing will help you in your writing journey. Be sure to comment any tips of your own to help your fellow authors prosper, and follow my blog for new blog updates every Monday and Thursday.
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Are you an author looking for writing tips and tricks to better your manuscript? Or do you want to learn about how to get a literary agent, get published and properly market your book? Consider checking out the rest of Haya’s book blog where I post writing and marketing tools for authors every Monday and Thursday.
Want to learn more about me and my writing journey? Visit my social media pages under the handle @hayatheauthor where I post content about my WIP The Traitor’s Throne and life as a teenage author.
Immersive, vivid descriptions are vital to any good story. In this short series, I'll try to give you as much helpful advice as I can about
sometimes the algorithm does throw me gems - this little video series is so good: short, well-presented advice for improving your descriptions, and the explanations are really well done without going into the You Must Do This! style that a lot of writing advice videos often do
Hey you! Yes, you, all you writers out there (aspiring, accomplished, original fic, fanfic, you name it).
Do you want to get better at writing descriptive prose? Flex your descriptive muscles? Just vibe with a pretty picture and write about it? Then I've got a challenge for you.
Rules: choose one of the provided images (or pick one yourself from a site like Unsplash, Pixabay, Pexels, NASA, or similar, or grab a screenshot from your favorite video game, movie, or TV show), and then describe it like it's in your story. Use a full paragraph (or more) and go ham on the details. Let your writer heart run free. Then describe it again, but in just a couple key sentences (three max) to hit the highlights. Share your results if you want. The point is to practice describing a scene fully and describing it efficiently.
I'll be doing three images at a time, and running this maybe twice a month. Here are today's three images (all from Unsplash):
Inspiration for this challenge below the cut.
When I was in high school, my Creative Writing teacher had us do an exercise very similar to this (the "efficiency" part of the challenge wasn't included). She'd printed out (or cut from a photography journal) several vivid pictures and posted them on the board, and then we were to each choose one and write out a whole passage of descriptive prose. She wanted us to not just list what we saw, but imagine textures, smells, sounds, and inject that into the prose we wrote. She wanted us to think outside the box. She wanted us to invent moments around those pictures to write.
I've always loved that exercise, and have encouraged others in the past (on Reddit) to do that as a warmup or if they feel their description needs work. So now I'm sharing it with Tumblr.
Some initial (no pressure) tags to get the ball rolling. Trying to remember who writes and might want to know about a recurring challenge like this. I'll worry about an official tag list for this challenge later.
I had found myself stuck, unable to string together a sentence that made sense. I was looking for something to describe a character who initially felt nervous about certain things that were going on in their surroundings but had regained their composure and needed to show that they had. I understand that many people in the writing community are opposed to using AI tools like ChatGPT. However, I find these tools helpful when I'm feeling stuck and need inspiration or assistance to overcome a writing hurdle I've encountered. My goal is to help others with this.
Here are some unique ways to describe someone who is nervous but has regained their composure, emphasizing subtle shifts in behavior, body language, or demeanor:
Facial Expressions
"A flicker of unease still lingered in their eyes, but their features settled into a practiced calm."
"Their lips pressed into a thin, deliberate line, masking the quiver that had been there moments ago."
"The faintest flush on their cheeks betrayed the storm they had just weathered."
"A deep breath smoothed the tension from their brow, leaving only a faint shadow of their earlier panic."
Body Language
"Their hands, once trembling, now rested firmly on their lap, though their fingers still curled just a little too tight."
"Straightening their posture, they planted their feet as if to root themselves against the lingering jitters."
"The rhythmic tap of their shoe stopped abruptly as they forced their legs to stillness."
"A subtle tremor in their fingertips betrayed their effort to appear unshaken."
Speech and Voice
"Their voice emerged steady but a pitch too high, as if they were holding it in place by sheer will."
"The first words came hesitantly, then picked up confidence like a wheel finding traction."
"They cleared their throat once, as if brushing away the last remnants of their nerves."
"Each word sounded carefully measured, a deliberate contrast to the rapid stammer from before."
General Description
"They wore their composure like an ill-fitting coat, tugging at it every so often to keep it in place."
"The calm they projected seemed fragile, like a vase glued together after a fall—whole, but only just."
"Their collected demeanor had the feel of a freshly painted wall—polished on the surface, but still drying underneath."
"The storm inside them had quieted, though the air around them still felt charged."
Hello writers of Tumblr! I've got a quick question for you
Do you find the term "fox faced" offensive?
no
yes
maybe? (insert reason in comments/tags)
generally no, but yes if used in (blank) way
yes, unless it is used in (blank) way
idk man/not applicable/other
Voting ended onAug 27, 2024
Background for said question for those that want to give an informed answer: I myself am white and on a quest to find enjoyable and inoffensive language to describe wide ranges of people, specifically nonwhite folks and have come across the term while reading through a Tumblr post about a king and his group of concubines with various government backgrounds.
The description piqued my interest and I immediately liked it, looked it up, and loved it even more, since from what I know, foxes are pretty much the one animal nobody has a problem with being compared to. Silver foxes, vixens, or just regular old "you're a total fox" comments. But now that I've thought about it a bit more, I'm curious.
I've looked into it. On Google, on the handful of blogs dedicated to writing poc correctly such as @writingwithcolor, and even a reddit post or two. But very few were actually about what I was looking for, and even fewer had anything to say other than "it means a person with high cheek bones and narrow eyes"
So before I do any writing with it, I'd like to know what you guys think.
