Emma Bull does it well in ‘Bone Dance’ and ‘Falcon’.

Also, though it’s not quite the same, the viewpoint character in Laurie King’s ‘Folly’ has fairly disabling mental illness (depression, panic, auditory hallucinations) described very well. King is also very good at emotional trauma (the Vietnam veteran in ‘Keeping Watch’, the separation between lovers in ‘With Child’)

As far as the real world goes, I think Anne KG Murphy (above) captured my experience of pain. Except I’d be Felix to her Mildmay… In my case, I live with someone who’s had something on the order of 19 surgeries on one knee, and maybe 15 on the other… and he gave up on the whole process, because it seemed more like they were experimenting than going in with a plan at some point. So he’s in constant pain (still) and I’m always asking why he doesn’t want to go for a midnight hike across the golf course or something, totally insensitive to the stumbling, ranting about the pill-seeking (which I know isn’t fair, because the pain is real), asking why he’s just lying there with the remote…

I suppose my point is, good writing about pain would have other people reacting to it, too. It’s not just the person in physical pain who experiences the pain. It’s there in some form for everyone, even when we’re bitchy and forget.

Writing physical pain is hard, I think, because there seem to be so few words to describe it. (Then again, now that I check my handy dandy dashboard thesaurus and it gives me a whole bunch, I realize that I just can’t think of very many off the top of my head. Bad writer girl.) Because pain is persistent, using the same words over and over again makes them lose their effect and gets really boring. The good writers seem to repeat it just enough to remind the reader the character is in pain, but not enough that it gets redundant.

Which is hard.

What appear to be cheerfulness-in-the-face-of-suffering, may be a natural resiliance to the particular pain. One wouldn’t, in that case, care to be smothered by the solicitous.

I would also be sure to write about all the pain besides for the major injury. For example, in a car crash where the survivor’s only major injury is a broken arm, she’s bound to be cut or at least scratched from broken glass, have a lump from banging her head, a bruise from the airbag inflating, etc. Writers often forget about all the little details surrounding an injury. Instead of focusing on just the broken arm, maybe also mention that it hurts to laugh because of the airbag bruise, etc.

Rather than focus on the pain itself (which sucks but isn’t all that interesting) I focused on the things that it simply made impossible. With my injury the pain was intermittent depending on whether a bit of the torn cartilage had flopped into the cup for the end of my knee bones or not. If not, I could do many things just fine, but always with the awareness that might suddenly change. If so, there were all sorts of things that were simply too painful to do–long walks, walking any distance more than about 50 feet without my cane, running, stairs, etc.

I think the random length cyclic nature of being able and unable to do things was the most interesting thing about the injury, so that’s what I focused on. Since that’s a component in many injury type pains it’s not a bad departure point.

I’m always smashing up my characters and then having to deal with it; in Guardian I gave the protagonist an injury at one point that I really needed healed before she did the next thing on her dance card. I spent two weeks of thinking-time trying to work out how to do it and not make the healing an obvious piece of plot contrivance. It ended up being a character point for the healer, and I promptly reinjured the protagonist, but I’m still not sure I managed to pull it off.

Annie Ernaux – I Remain In Darkness
William Styron – Darkness Visible
Bob Flanagan – The Pain Journal
Tory Dent – HIV, Mon Amour
John Berger – To The Wedding
Rebecca Brown – The Gifts Of The Body
Audre Lorde – The Cancer Journals
Denton Welch – A Voice Through A Cloud
Jean-Dominique Bauby – The Diving Bell & The Butterfly
Alphonse Daudet – In The Land Of Pain
Arthur W. Frank – The Wounded Storyteller

Kathlyn Conway – Illness & Limits Of Expression

One thing that often bothers me in books and movies is when an action hero is wounded and then pretty much just shakes it off. I took great care in my series that — even though sometimes, the character’s wounds heal incredibly fast — other times they get wounds that put them out of commission for weeks or months. It’s not easy to have holes torn in you. It’s not even easy when they are planned, carefully controlled and lovingly healed holes (i.e. surgery). You don’t just bounce back.

On the comedy side, Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently series (can’t remember which of the two books – I think the first) has Mr. Gently with a broken nose for a good chunk of the book. The reader is reminded of this through Gently’s speech which is significantly altered by the injury.

I agree with most others that my own physical pain has been sharp at the time but not particularly memorable afterward (including childbirth) – but for some reason the times I’ve been really, really sick (as opposed to injured) – I can remember what that felt like (the sore throats, clogged head, etc). I wonder why that is.

Writing pain in first person is harder, but I guess I have a better sense memory than some of the other commenters. I continually call on what that severely sprained wrist was like, how I couldn’t close my fingers properly, and how the dislocated knee made thought and speech impossible until it snapped back into place.

Although, the research in getting it right is something I’d prefer not to talk about. Or think about.

But to allow plausible time for that to develop he first has Maitland try to escape, in the course of which he gets hit by a car and gets a rather nasty leg injury (“The hip joint appeared to have been driven into the basin of his pelvis”). Ballard doesn’t forget it but keeps coming back to it: it’s painful, it’s stiff, it affects Maitland’s ability to do stuff and get around, and it makes him reliant on the other characters he meets.

There’s talk of a movie of it with Christian Bale (who played “Ballard” in Empire of the Sun) in the role.

David Gemmell also wrote some believable war veterans.

I don’t know. The older I get, the more chronic pain I have, and the more I wish writers would write about something other than the knee or back that aches with wet or cold weather. My old injuries don’t ache with the weather, they ache if I don’t move around and exercise and stretch them enough. (I’m only 34, but I sustained a bad knee injury when I was 14, sprained my ankles a few times (soccer did in both the ankles and the knee), threw out my back when I was 16, and tore the rotator cuff in my shoulder 4 years ago.) My left ankle was sprained often enough it got unstable, and now the bottom of that foot cramps terribly every so often, especially if I point the foot too much. But if I do my physical therapy the injuries don’t ache.

My worst chronic pain is my headaches, and honestly you can block those out of conscious awareness, probably in a similar way to how you can block them out of memory. Not always possible, but often. I try not to think about it too often, and I don’t talk about it much except to those closest to me. It does get boring. Well, and people tend to interpret indications of pain as indications you need help or shouldn’t be active or doing something. Sometimes, it’s true, you need to rest or do self-care, but sometimes self-care is being active.

And, well, people misinterpret admissions of pain. My mom was once complaining to me about how Sometimes, they’ll be over for dinner, and I’ll sit down and get a pained look on my face like I’m hoping someone will take care of me. She thought I was purposefully doing that as an indicator to those around me and was surprised to have me point out that, no, it’s just that I’m tired and the mask falls. I’m almost always in pain. I’m not asking for help, I’m just failing to hide it. But I intended to hide it.

With a fresh injury, assistance can be good and important. With chronic conditions, however, being treated as an invalid just gets annoying. Especially when people give you unsolicited advice.

So you say other people want people in pain to suffer in silence, well sometimes we want to suffer in silence ourselves. Sympathy and fuss don’t make it easier to be in chronic pain. Massage, a cup of tea, etc – those things might, though.

Similarly a friend of mine went through that Parkinson’s operation where they clamp and drill through your skull while you’re awake in order to emplace electrodes for deep brain stimulation controlled by a brain pacemaker (you’re awake as you have to comment on what the electrodes make you feel as they’re being positioned, and the whole thing took 14 hours). His wife reported from his bedside just after the op that he’d said it had been an extremely painful and horrible experience, and just thinking about it makes me wince, but when he was home some weeks later he had largely “forgotten” or suppressed it.

If you’re writing or doing continuity for film you soon get irritated by the sort of visible injury to a character that requires a regular scar or unsightly bandage; film forces you to remember those kind of injuries for pages and/or months on end, hide them under clothing or the hairline, or just make them not too obvious, bloody etc., otherwise makeup takes ages.