The Difficulty of Writing Difficult Scenes

[This article originally appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Writer's Digest magazine.]

Writing a novel is hard, but some scenes are far more difficult than others. The chapters that give me the most pause feature scenes that are likely to be triggering for readers, moments where a beloved character dies or is injured or has a mental break, when a child or animal is harmed, intentionally or not, or any kind of sexual assault. The list goes on. For me, the most challenging scenes to write involve a combination of physical violence and emotional trauma. 

Thinking back to my favorite novels, the scenes I remember most vividly are the difficult ones. They hold the weight of the story. They are often pivotal to the plot and represent a climax or turning point. When done well, they resonate, speak a hard truth, and hold me captive despite the subject matter being outside my personal experience. The emotion I feel alongside the characters in these difficult scenes makes the book worth reading. Done poorly, though, and I’m certain to put the book down and never finish it. 

The work involved in writing and revising these scenes is arduous, and the stakes are high. I tend to save these tough scenes for last, but the book isn’t going to be finished until these scenes are written and polished and fit in with the rest of the novel in a way that is palatable for the reader. 

As I approach revision of a particularly difficult scene in my novel-in-progress, I’ve been thinking about advice I received from Greg Michalson, an experienced editor I have had the opportunity to work with, and three writers I’ve workshopped with over the years: David Joy, Nancy Zafris, and Crystal Wilkinson. They each speak to different ways writers can effectively render violence and amped-up emotion on the page, and their work is instructive of how writers can deliver these critical scenes and also build up to them. 

Greg Michalson suggests increasing the narrative distance, pulling the camera back and easing off of the character’s emotional response: “It’s almost always better to underwrite those especially emotional, difficult, and/or violent scenes than to overwrite them. Let the scene itself carry the weight.” 

When I was working on my first novel, Greg Michalson gave me this same advice. It countered the general recommendations I received in much of my creative writing instruction over the years: to go close, put the character’s body into the scene, and be the character. This is great advice in other kinds of scenes. But staying too close to my characters made two of my emotionally fraught chapters come off as overly sentimental. Before I employed Greg’s suggestion, I was detailing the emotional response so the reader could see it. Pulling the camera back invited the reader to feel the emotion instead of simply observing it. 

David Joy’s advice is to turn to poetry, to make the prose so beautiful the reader will want to keep reading even a brutally gruesome scene: 

I think the heart of the question is really the same for all editorial decisions: Does it serve the story? You kill your darlings when they fail to serve the story. It’s that simple. The major problem with violence and gore is that it often feels like the writer’s intent is shock value, and in my opinion that’s a piss poor justification for those types of moments. On the other hand, I think it’s equally dangerous to downplay or omit that violence for fear of alienating the reader. As the writer, you’re trying to walk a tight rope of remaining true to the reality of the scene without falling off into either one of those mistakes. There are lots of writers who do it incredibly well and they all seem to strike that balance in different ways, but the big influence on me personally was William Gay. I think about a story like “The Paperhanger,” a story filled with inconceivable violence, and he somehow makes it palatable by dialing up the language in those moments. In that story, we’ve got a man who has murdered a small child and kept the body in the freezer. That’s the kind of moment that could fall very easily into something self-serving, and yet it never feels that way. Instead, the prose, the musicality of the language, makes the moment not only digestible, but beautiful … That wash between the sacred and the profane, that’s what you’re trying to accomplish. 

This holds true in David’s writing. In Where All Light Tends to Go, the main character witnesses violent acts, necessarily so. It’s Southern noir, a story about a teen who is involved in his dad’s drug business. Throughout the book, violence is depicted in a mostly matter-of-fact way—it’s a normal part of this character’s life. But when he encounters a grisly scene involving someone he cares about, the writing is stunningly beautiful. This difficult scene opens with gentle brushstrokes: “Lightning bugs flickered across the yard, and for a second or two, I found myself remembering a time when I was small, filling a mason jar with bugs to keep as a night-light.” In the gory scene he soon encounters, he references the glow of light and ties the scene back to nature, the blood like rainwater. The violent scenes in David Joy’s latest novel, Those We Thought We Knew, are rendered with the same level of artistry. 

Nancy Zafris offered me gobs of writing advice over the years before she passed away in 2021. One gem: Leave the details of violent or overtly sexual acts in the margin. She recommended leaving enough clues so the reader will know what happened; it doesn’t need to be detailed on the page. The readers will fill in the blanks and paint the image themselves. 

In a particularly tragic chapter in her novel Black Road, edited by Greg Michalson, a character dies. As I look at that chapter now, I am struck by the fact I have a visceral memory of the scene and the moment this character takes her last breath of air. I would have sworn to you it was there on the page, but Nancy leaves it open-ended. Readers will know what this kind of death looks like. Our minds keep going after the last line of this chapter: “She jumped on her bike and rode toward the glowing beacon. Fly! screamed the voice again.” 

Crystal Wilkinson’s advice: “I think the key [to writing difficult scenes] is to spend it all, meaning write all of the action and emotion of the scene in one fell swoop. You can edit for nuance later. The other thing I’d recommend is to write the physicality of the hard scene first and allow the emotion to float underneath.” 

I had the privilege of workshopping with Crystal and attending one of her craft talks where she told the audience filled with aspiring writers that when we are writing difficult scenes and feel ourselves resisting and wanting to stop, that is the moment to push harder, to cut clear to the bone. That pain is where truth resides. 

*****

Genre matters. In even the most literary Southern noir, the reader knows from the start there will be a crime. It’s not likely to shock or put off a reader of noir when a graphic scene happens. But for literary fiction that does not cross over into thriller, crime, or horror genres, violence isn’t necessarily expected. Additional work is needed to alert the readers that potentially triggering scenes are on the horizon, to clue them in that these scenes are necessary to tell the larger story. Nancy Zafris’s and Crystal Wilkinson’s literary novels center around traumatic events that occur before the start of the story, events the characters need to come to terms with. Both of these authors use creative strategies in their novels to help readers who may not be expecting violent scenes. 

In her fiction workshops, Nancy taught her students to plant seeds, to do a gradual reveal rather than blurt things in the beginning of a work that would be more effective if postponed until later. In Black Road, a Greek chorus of community members leaves a commentary between chapters. Just before the second chapter, the chorus chimes in: “It happened six months ago. It happened on a February night.” No details. We only know something happened in the past. Something big. 

As the novel progresses, the warnings are more detailed. They pull us along and let us know what the story is really about. They serve as a heads up to the reader. A caution sign to let us know tough times are ahead in this novel. 

In Black Road, a judge is the one who first reads off the details of the crimes that were committed, presented as a list of civil complaints. Later, the crime scene is described from the point of view of a physician who is also a mother. She is simultaneously clinical in her assessment of the injuries and also very human in her spiral of worry over her own children. Both of these scenes would have been completely different and likely far less effective if they were delivered from the point of view of a family member or the victims themselves. 

Nancy Zafris employs subtle wry humor in Black Road that acts as a buffer to the violence. It gives the reader a little relief and acts as a sort of coping mechanism. Later in the novel, the previously sober Greek chorus transforms into a social media-esque commentary that is done smartly and honestly. It takes the edge off this tragic story and telegraphs a tacit message to the reader: Everyday horror happens. People make mistakes. And it’s OK to roll your eyes at people’s self-serving takes on it. 

There’s no humor in Crystal Wilkinson’s The Birds of Opulence, no attempt to ask the readers to roll their eyes and put themselves in a position to judge the behavior of her characters. She never nudges the readers to separate themselves from the story. Instead, the novel invites the readers to be a part of this family and feel the pain with them, which is highly effective. I feel like I’m in it, rather than watching it. Yet even as her character recalls in graphic detail the big capital-D difficult thing that happened in her past, she also recollects a joyous moment, “the one good thing that would carry her over.” When I read this in all its tragic detail, I too need this joyous image: “Those few seconds of touch.” 

In the opening chapter of The Birds of Opulence, Wilkinson invites the reader to be a part of the story: “Imagine yourself a woman who gathers stories in her apron.” She also offers the reader loving warnings along the way. At one point, one of the grannies in the novel warns her adult sons (and by proxy the reader) that we have to look backward at the past to see what’s in front of us. That moment in the book feels like that grandma is taking our hand in hers, offering comfort to the readers, telling us this is what we are doing, and it’s going to be hard, but it is also necessary. 

*****

Using any one of these tips could improve a difficult scene. Worst case, trying one out might lead you to a creative way to handle the gore and heightened emotion in a scene. In my recent workshop with David Joy, he suggested we study the writing of authors we love. All three of these writers are worth studying, and I recommend all their novels. The tips I list here likely only touch on the lessons to be learned from these talented writers. 

Joy, David. Where All Light Tends to Go. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2015. 

Wilkinson, Crystal. The Birds of Opulence. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. 

Zafris, Nancy. Black Road. Unbridled Books, 2022.