What is the worst scene you have WRITTEN?

Maxinquaye

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Sometimes things go in threes.

I was reading THAT scene in my second to last book, in order to get back into it so that I could do the necessary edits. Then I come here onto the board and read the thread about the darkest scene you’ve read.

So here's the third. What I want to talk about is dark and hard scenes, because THAT scene in MY book is still fresh in my head, and it’s possibly the toughest scene I’ve written. This doesn't fit into the other thread, so hence a new one, with a new focus.

There are so many things going on in THAT scene.


Do you know that death can be very still; almost serene. This at the same time that it crumbles your inside and trash your brain. You stand outside, looking at how you fall apart - yet there’s this calmness. This serenity. This big quiet with bird song and fluttering butterflies and sunshine and buzzing flies on bloody rags of bodies. This I wanted to capture in this scene.

The scene is the pivotal one which launches my male teenage MC into his story arc. He has disobeyed his father who sent him to urgently fetch help to protect their village from an army that has appeared out of nowhere. But the MC makes a detour, because he thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, particularly his father, and it means he doesn't arrive to get the help quickly enough, and he's injured and even more delayed.

So, the pivotal scene comes when he’s coming back to the village, and he’s got a fair amount of guilt and trepidation already. And as he walks into the commons and see the bodies of everyone he’s ever known, liked, disagreed with, argued with, loved, hated lie strewn around there’s this stillness even as his eyes register every detail of what he sees, so that he can replay that every moment of every night and blame himself.

I think that’s the darkest, and toughest, scene I’ve ever written. It balances so between despair and melodrama and incredulity. But I think I pulled it off.

What’s your darkest or worst scene?
 
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Stiger05

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I think my darkest/worst is yet to come in my current WIP. It's the darkest subject I've tackled, and I anticipate several dark scenes ahead.

But strictly speaking of the darkest think I've written so far, I literally tortured a MC in a sci-fi thriller. More psychological than physical torture, where she believed she was being physically tortured.

She was locked in a room alone without food or water for so long she lost track of time, then her tormentors strapped her to a chair to start the psychological torture. They made her think she was in a dirty room with tons of dolls (her personal worst fear) with broken faces, missing hair, no eyes, and sharp teeth. The dolls attacked her and tore out chunks of skin. Next she was back in the cell, handcuffed to her own dead body and had to drag it around. Someone came to rescue her. She followed the guy through a room of animal fetuses in jars. The fetuses came alive and dragged their half-formed bodies after her. She ran to the guy helping her, but when he turned around, he'd transformed into this creepy half man, half-demented rabbit (inspired by pictures on Etsy like this one) and chewed off half her face. Finally, she was strangled in the dark by a creature she couldn't see, but whose fingers felt like dry snake skin around her throat.

I'm pretty sure my current WIP is going to top that, though. So I might have to update after I write those scenes.
 

Becca C.

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I have a little-bitty WIP right now that already has the five-year-old MC's imaginary friend cutting his lip on a knife blade and then spitting blood in her face :/ it's a weird book.

But when I was 15-16, the novel I wrote had a scene where the male MC and his male best friend fought, information was discovered that the best friend had slept with the MC's brother, and then the MC kicks the best friend in the head until he passes out. I was a strange, messed-up teenager.
 

DrunkenLilacs

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So far, the worst/hardest scene to write for me was a struggle between an abusive dad and my MC, his daughter, who finally decided to defend herself. I think there was so much pent up anger and complete fear that she went ham on his face with a pan. Needless to say, as a terribly squeamish person, it was really difficult describing the blood and bruises and all that good gory stuff. I found it a good push to kind of explore something I've never done before.

Not sure if I'll try that again, but who knows.
 

ZachJPayne

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In the second book of my current series, my MC is going to be sent to a "conversion" camp for gay teens, which is just going to be hell to write. I've had a friend go to a place like that, and I also pulled a lot of inspiration from Gayle Forman's never-talked-about SISTERS IN SANITY.
 
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Zoombie

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Well...worst...

Lets see.

One novel has an entire chapter where the main character is tortured with a combination of virtual reality, time compression and reality. The scene would shift between obvious VR, obvious reality, and confusing mixes of both. There was water-boarding, electricity, removal of body parts...fun stuff.

Another novel starts with a planetary invasion by gigantic spiders with sword-like limbs, who arrive in our world/dimension by exploding out of the heads of anyone who falls asleep.

And I just finished a novel where a character is killed and wakes up as a ghost in the spiritual version of a concentration camp - literally, she had to spend her afterlife working herself to a second death to keep the war machines of the bad guys running.

THen I wrote a short story called "Milo Valentine and the Skinshaw Man." In it, teenage magical detective and mystic hermaphrodite, Milo Valentine, has to track down a magical serial kidnapper, who skins his victims alive and carves mystic runes in their exposed bones, then leaves them hanging upside down at ley-line nexuses, while keeping their still living faces on a wall, so that he can get a choir of 66 agonized people to sing him into godhood. And it works! He becomes a God, and turns Milo into an armless, legless slug.

Fortunately for Milo (and us), the Skinshaw Man's taboo is feeling pain. So, she/he lightly bumps against his shin and derails the whole magical train. Then she/he says: "You're under arrest, for kidnapping, torture, and attempted apotheosis."

Which I just thought was a cool line, so I shared it.
 

Blinkk

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I've got two.

When I was seventeen I wrote a fan fic about The Academy Is, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, and Panic! at the Disco. I believe Jared Leto was in it too...? Anyways, it was a vampire story. Basically, a vampire gets kidnapped and handcuffed to a bed that's bolted to a floor. He's on the second floor of a building, but that's all he knows. The tormenters deny him blood for weeks. At one point the tormenters bring their crazy friends to the second floor and have crazy orgies, purposely using human blood in their sexytimez. Of course, the guy who is handcuffed to the bed is going insane smelling the blood so close but not being able to have any.

I've got another character who is an assassin. He was sent on a nearly impossible mission from his king; the king requested the MC bring him a ghost. The MC kills hundreds of innocent people in search of a ghost and he starts to question why he became an assassin. He's trained to kill for political reasons, for war reasons, for safety reasons, etc. He can handle killing targets if it's meaningful. He wasn't trained to go into cities and murder people daily. There's more than one scene where he deals with the mental consequences of the never-ending murders. But if he goes back to the king and retires from the job, the consequences will be dire.

There's one scene where he tries to tell his mentor about his mental anguish, but he just can't say it. That scene was really tough to write.
 

J.S.Fairey

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In the WIP that's with my readers there's a scene where my MC is hallucinating all the terrible things she's done in battle. During those hallucinations she starts thinking about her daughter, and soon the two types of visions combine, and she ends up picturing herself shooting her baby daughter and laughing while she does it... she then accidentally/on purpose tries to drown herself (it's okay, someone saves her).

Yeah, I didn't realise it while I was writing it, but that was pretty dark...
 

LadyA

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I don't think I've ever written anything outright 'graphic', per se, but the scene that was the hardest to write for me was in the book I'm currently querying.
My FMC's dad is a paedophile who kidnapped a young boy six years ago, and the boy is now as good as her brother, her best and only friend. The FMC and boy have found a way to escape the dad, but he's guessed something's up.
In his way to prove to them that he's still in control, he violently rapes her 'brother' while she, shut in the room next door, has to listen helplessly.

Even though I wrote the rape from her perspective, not his, it was a tough scene to write. I had spent six months with those characters and I know, I know, they're not real, but I still hurt for both of them.
 

Jerboa

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I don't really write gory stuff. I've got a torture scene coming up in the current WiP but I don't know what I'll write yet. One of the MCs is a junkie and that's quite hard to write.

Worst thing (that I was ok writing as I was in character but really made me cringe reading back) was a short story called Loser Freak which was published by Short Story Me a few years back. The MC builds a robot to kill people, then masturbates while it murders a girl he liked.
 

CoffeeBeans

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I totally took the thread title of "the worst" in a different sense. Oops.

I'm a total wuss when it comes to gore/torture/horror stories, so I don't have a lot of it. The worst from a terrible/painful/hard to write sense, I had an MS a couple years back about a woman who worked at a resort and couldn't stop ruining the lives of the people around her.

Eventually, there's a flashback with the MC and her sister as teens. The MC got drunk at a Christmas party, and tells her sister to drive them home. It's icy on the roads, and her little sister had snuck a few drinks with her cousins, but as too afraid to say anything. Car crashes, and the MC comes to listening to her sister die in the drive's seat, while she tries to crawl out of the smashed car to get help. According to the doctors, after the accident, her sister was killed on impact. I have no idea who is telling the truth.

Some combination of the avoidability of the whole thing, and the horrible moment just makes that scene stand out to me...

As for the rest of this thread, thanks for the nightmares, folks.
 

Blinkk

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Car crashes, and the MC comes to listening to her sister die in the drive's seat, while she tries to crawl out of the smashed car to get help. According to the doctors, after the accident, her sister was killed on impact. I have no idea who is telling the truth.

That's a really interesting clash of facts. Very traumatic for the MC, I'm sure. :(
 

Maxinquaye

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I'm a total wuss when it comes to gore/torture/horror stories, so I don't have a lot of it. The worst from a terrible/painful/hard to write sense, I had an MS a couple years back about a woman who worked at a resort and couldn't stop ruining the lives of the people around her.

Hah, yeah, I didn't mean goriest or such. Just which scene was the hardest, or darkest, or most difficult to write. :) For me it was clearly the one I mentioned in the OP - and it's not very gory as such. It was just so bad for the MC.
 

The_Ink_Goddess

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Well, there's a scene in my contemporary YA where the MC, who initially appears to be a sweet but pretty intense teenager, shoots her boyfriend/"friend with benefits" in the groin before killing him (under white because of nasty) after he breaks up with her. I was pretty depressed when I came up with that and even now when I read it through, I shudder and ask myself if there is something seriously wrong with me. (I *believe* the idea I had at the time was to subvert the crime novel trope of the pretty young woman getting sexually tortured then murdered at the beginning. Still.)
 
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Becca C.

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Well, there's a scene in my contemporary YA where the MC, who initially appears to be a sweet but pretty intense teenager, [nasty omitted] (under white because of nasty) after he breaks up with her. I was pretty depressed when I came up with that and even now when I read it through, I shudder and ask myself if there is something seriously wrong with me. (I *believe* the idea I had at the time was to subvert the crime novel trope of the pretty young woman getting sexually tortured then murdered at the beginning. Still.)

I saw you'd posted in this thread and I was like "ooh! ooh!" :p That's a good scene!
 

VeryFairy

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It had to happen, but I still wonder if it will be the death of my book.

MC is caught in a place, magic is involved, where she must choose between the life of the child that is with her, (a young girl) or her own sister. After much mental anguish she chooses her sister over the random child.

It was hard to write, because it's the age old question. Would you kill to save your family? But if you let your family die, could you live with yourself??

After making the decision, she never quite lives it down, and it is the beginning of a downward spiral, poor girl :(
I do not live vicariously through my characters.
 

Emmet Cameron

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One reason I chose the agent I did is that in our first phone call, she pointed out a huge, glaring, obvious flaw in my writing that I had somehow never noticed and nobody else had ever told me about.

I write around the hard scenes. I show everything before and everything after, but the really intense bits are like a Victorian sex scene.

So that's something I'm working on. The hardest one to go back in and flesh out was in our most recent revision. It was a bullying scene, with a big public humiliation that shifts the character's relationship with her entire school for the rest of the book.
 

The_Ink_Goddess

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One reason I chose the agent I did is that in our first phone call, she pointed out a huge, glaring, obvious flaw in my writing that I had somehow never noticed and nobody else had ever told me about.

I write around the hard scenes. I show everything before and everything after, but the really intense bits are like a Victorian sex scene.

So that's something I'm working on. The hardest one to go back in and flesh out was in our most recent revision. It was a bullying scene, with a big public humiliation that shifts the character's relationship with her entire school for the rest of the book.



It's funny, something similar happened to me. I used to be very puritanical (?) - I don't know if that's the word - about my writing. I avoided writing ANYTHING that made me uncomfortable. When I started wondering *why* these things made me uncomfortable, it actually made me...inspired to write them? It's a strange feeling but, like, when I was drafting my now-querying novel, I had a fair few ideas that made me wince, or gross myself out, or think "I can't do that." In the end, I actually - did them. Writing them was a bit like digging at a scab but it was a rapid turnaround for me.
 

Justin K

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I get watery eyed when I think about the pivotal scene I'm going to have to write that bridges the first and second half of my wip (still on ch3 as of now). - The mc will desperately attempt CPR on his deceased ex girlfriend's cat in an attempt to hold on to the only relic from their relationship, and to his best friend. After realizing the cat has been out for over twenty minutes, the 4am dash to the 24hr vet comes to an end when the mc's new girl pulls the car over.

Why did I come up with this scene :/
 

Muldoon

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I wrote a little something that sent chills up my spine, It had to do with a post-apocalyptic scenario where earth is a homing beacon for aliens that upon arrival turn it into a massive game reserve. It was in the early stages of my story where I narrate what has happened to the world since the abrupt multi-race rogue alien invasion. How at night half giant aliens in black suits called, ''Human Catchers'' descend from the clouds in lifts ready to patrol the ruins for feeble humans to scoop up or just stomp on for fun. Whenever this happens a series of world war two British Air raid siren's start to go off to warn those outside to seek shelter or else fall victim to the Human Catchers.
 

Kayley

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I write a lot of dark scenes, so it's hard to choose between them, but the one that came to mind first upon reading the question was when one of my characters was so ravenous/insane she tried to peel off her own skin to eat.
 

mellymel

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My entire first novel was one big, horrible, cliched scene as far as I'm concerned. All 140K of it. *snort* Well, except for the fight scene at the end. That was pretty awesome IMO. ;)