I can’t watch gross-out tv shows or movies.
I don’t like close-ups of extreme emotional anguish either and most readers don’t either. But sometimes we have to write scenes of extreme events.
When we subject our reader to discomfort, we’re making a choice that might cause them to put the book down. This doesn’t mean we eschew difficult situations or topics in our novels. Quite the opposite.
If you’re writing horror, that’s what the audience wants.
But what if you’re not writing horror, or over-the-top brutality a la Quentin Tarantino?
There’s a technique that allows us to spare the reader the gory details so they can keep reading.
Zoom out or cut away.
And why would we want to do that? Well, we want them to keep reading, right? Just because an emotion or scene is “real” doesn’t mean anyone wants to suffer through it.
Imagine a scene in a PG movie, where the badguy has a kidnapped victim in his control. The ransom has been refused, and he’s going to make an example by shooting the victim in the head.
What does the filmmaker do? How does she convey the murder?
Not with a gruesome close up. Not even a quick blast and splatter.
The filmmaker might show a close up of the villains face, we hear the gunshot, and then the drop of a body. But we don’t see it.
OR the filmmaker zooms out to a wide shot of the warehouse and we see a flash in one window as the gun goes off.
OR the scene cuts to next morning as cops throw a sheet over the body on a gurney.
These choices spare the viewer the gross-out and the high-discomfort of such a moment to different degrees. Remember, I said it was PG. So, generally okay for older kids to see.
In a Tarantino film, we see a lot more viciousness and blood.
So this choice is about audience.
Let’s look at a different example. In Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, the audience is subjected to horrific WWII battle scenes, bodies blown to bits, shaky cam, confusion, explosions, gore, death, hopelessness.
And that’s just the opening ten minutes of the movie.
But later, when a pastor and army officer drive up a long farmland driveway to tell a mother that three of her four sons have been killed in action, Spielberg doesn’t show us her hearing the news.
He shows everything leading up to it.
He shows her collapsing in the doorway before the men have even gotten to the house. She knows what this visit means. We don’t hear her scream or sob. We’re behind her, we can’t even see her face in this moment.
The scene cuts away, respectfully, so she can mourn in privacy.
We’ve been spared the full barrage her agony. This sort of distancing is a kindness to the audience, and when handled deftly, adds enormous heft to the moment.
Watch it, imagine this in prose.
We want our audience to be moved, feel joy and pain, experience the range of emotion a story provides. But we don’t want them putting the book down. We don’t want our audience so repulsed by the telling that they miss the story.
Contrast this to the death of Boromir in The Fellowship of the Ring. We see very arrow strike, we see Aragorn comforting him, hear Boromir’s final words. Not a dry eye in the theater when I saw it. So why did director Peter Jackson keep us so close? Why didn’t he cut away to spare us?
Boromir tried to steal the ring from Frodo just prior to this, an act he instantly regretted when he realized the effect the ring had on him.
So when the hobbits Merry and Pippin are best by orcs, we need to witness his valor and thereby earn his redemption. But note that Jackson keeps it fairly bloodless. He’s not trying to gross us out because that would draw our focus away from the emotion of the moment.
Put these ideas in your creative toolbox, and the next time a scene of extremely uncomfortable emotion or repulsiveness comes up, you can choose to zoom out or cut away. Show the shadow of the stabbing taking place, rather than the stabbing itself. Or cut to the POV of someone else disturbed by the sound of screams. Or cut to the next day when the body is found. All valid choices.
Or . . . show it all in excruciating detail. Whatever is appropriate for your audience.