Fable & The Verbivore

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Episode 54: Writing Suspense and Violence

Bethany Stedman

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Ep 54: Writing Action and Violence Fable & The Verbivore

In today’s episode, Fable and the Verbivore tackle the topic of writing violence and action. Within this topic, we look at the perspectives and lens you can take – as well as what makes these sequences hit home and resonate rather than fall flat.

We start off by discussing that there is a range that writers can work within between more detailed and overt depictions to the more subtle and implied descriptions – or even having these sequences appear off the page and only include allusions to them in the text. We reference an article called "Make Violent Scenes Matter" by author Carter Wilson that recommends writing a violent scene in two ways to determine if a more direct or subtle approach serves the story best.

Throughout this conversation, we discuss finding the personal and emotional connection within a violent or action sequence, writing these scenes with the goals of the book and what the reader expects in mind, and weighing the emotional costs to the story and the reader when considering killing off a character.

Lastly, we discuss how the choice of the point of view and distance to the violence is similar to how a director decides to frame and film a scene - where they choose to place the camera. It’s useful to pay attention in a given book or film scene to those viewpoint decisions and explore how they personally make you feel.

We hope you enjoy listening to this episode! Keep reading, and writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore  

Notes:

Fable referenced a quote by Richard Price about approaching writing in a war context. Here is that full quote:

  • “You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.”

The Verbivore references a scene from the animated Disney movie Mulan where a doll stands in for the loss of an innocent child in the war with the Huns. Here is a link to the scene which introduces that story element:

The Verbivore mentions the aspect of human psychology that it is easier to relate and empathize with an individual than with a large group of people. The example used was that you can feel sorry for one dog that has had it’s tail stepped on, but what if you are told that thousands of dogs have had their tails stepped on. This is known as Psychic numbing. Here is an article if you are interesting in researching into this further:

The Verbivore references the idea of ensign redshirts in Star Trek, which in the fandom refers to characters who are expendable and are killed off to up the tension and stakes in a given storyline.

The Verbivore brings up a quote from the disorienting opening of the novel The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. Here is that full quote:

  • “The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.”

We used many different resources to prepare for this episode including our own experience. Here are a few resources we found useful:

The Verbivore brings up the idea of awkward violence and mistakenly references the movie Inside Man, the movie was actually The Nice Guys - which was written and directed by Shane Black.

Books Mentioned:

Movies Mentioned

Music from: https://filmmusic.io
’Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)