A Violent Balance

Writing crime fiction requires knowing when to show violence and how much

Photo by Myles Bloomfield on Unsplash

I once had a creative writing professor tell me my writing was too violent. This was the same professor who also told me I shouldn’t use the word “fuck” in my writing. This article in LitReactor was my ode to that professor. Needless to say, I discounted the advice at the time.

However, as I’ve grown as a writer, I’ve learned that there is a fine balance in the violence writers should show on the page and the violence they should leave off the page. In crime fiction, you will inevitably run into violence. It’s what you’re chasing as a reader who picks up such books and stories. The question is: how will that violence manifest itself?

Good writers know when to paint every detail of the bloody, ugly crime on the page. When to pull the reader along in the stomach-turning description of a murder scene. When to suggest the horror of a character being tortured instead of showing it. But where is that line? How do writers know when to cross it and when to toe it?

I think the answer comes down to experience. That professor I had in my undergraduate studies was right. My early writing was probably more violent than it needed to be. Not gratuitous necessarily, but it left too much on the page. The blood splattered writing took away from the story. Remember, the violence itself is not the story. The crime and the characters are the story. Later, in my graduate studies, I had a professor who pointed out examples of writing where the suggested violence was worse (in a good way) and more powerful than if the writer had chosen to show the full scene. This helped me as I refined my crime writing. I don’t claim to be a good writer, but I do think I have a good grasp of when to show violence and when to suggest it.

The idea for this article came as I was reading Jordan Harper’s A Violent Masterpiece. The title should tell you what to expect. And if you have ever read Harper’s work, you know, he uses the blood and gore as a story-telling device as well as anyone. His writing and his stories benefit from the blood on the page. It needs to be there. It cannot remain a mere suggestion.

Without giving anything away from his new novel, I can highlight examples of this violence in a scene where one of the victims of a serial killer is found. Harper does not give us the news report style description of this victim’s death. We get the first-person view. Not only does the violence shown in this scene shock, it serves an important purpose in the story. I’m not going to name that purpose here because you need to read the book and I don’t intend to spoil it. But trust me, had Harper not walked us (literally) through the crime scene in gritty detail, it would not have worked.

Another book that comes to my mind often when I think about violence on the page is David Joy’s Weight Of This World. David Joy is an incredible author. His books are some of my favorites. He writes with a level of empathy that every crime writer should try to emulate. His characters are flawed and often downright bad. But Joy does not allow himself to judge these characters in his writing. He let’s them live, for better or worse. And then he lets them die (sometimes).

In Weight Of This World, one of Joy’s characters completely snaps and tortures another in such a sickening way I actually had to put the book down. It was necessary to have that violence on the page, though. It showed just how broken the character was. Had Joy left the torture off the page and simply shown us the outcome, we wouldn’t have felt the character’s fall so viscerally. The violence served the plot and led directly to subsequent scenes that just could not work if the torture was off-page.

I could go on and on with examples of violence on the page (Don Winslow’s Border Trilogy, S.A. Cosby’s King of Ashes, etc). But we should explore counter-examples. Where the violence is better served off the page because putting it on the page would slow the plot, hurt the story.

You’ll often find violence off the page in mystery novels because the violence itself it central to the mystery. In Ivy Pochoda’s masterful Visitation Street, violence comes from mother nature and teenage stupidity. But you never see it. You only see the aftermath. The impact. The violence sits in the shadow of the psychological impact the characters must carry. And it’s a different kind of violence than in the books I mentioned previously. Had Pochoda chosen to show this violence, it would have made the book decidedly worse.

I recently finished Tana French’s In The Woods, and this novel (also a mystery) perfectly highlights what I’m talking about. There are two bits of violence in this book that are kept off the page. There’s the original crime that took place twenty years before. We never see the violence that led to a little boy standing in shoes filled with blood, but it hovers over the entire story. It’s a great example of not showing the actual violence on page. The other example in that book is the central murder. We hear how it happens, but we never see it. The violence of it is not something we need to see. It’s the emotional fallout that is most important.

I could go on and on with examples from both sides. So, the question is: how does an author know when to go all in and when to hold back?

I don’t know if I’m the best person to answer this, but I’ll give it a shot. I think the answer is feel. Authors know the feel of the book. They know the tone. Does the violence play a critical part in the story, or would it provide more depth if it were kept off the page. Only the author can know this, and they can only know it by feeling things out. I don’t think this can easily be surfaced in an outline. It has to be felt through writing.

Back To You

This all, of course, is one writer’s opinion. What do you think? Do you prefer stories of one type versus the other? How and when should the violence be shown on the page and when should it be held back?

Thanks for reading!