Mdthbs

So, I was doing a writing excersie, I came up with, to help me with sentence structuring and developing my style. One thing, I ran into, however, was that I couldn't describe pain very well.

The knight sunk the sword into the dragon’s chest. Gyvaris jolted back, his eyes widened in horror as he peered down. The sword was still lodged into him, painted crimson by his gushing blood. Just how far did it go? His stomach twisted. He felt heat, heat that mixed with cold as it pierced deep into him. Too deep. Then it hit him. Gyvaris screamed louder than ever before in his life. He collapsed on his side, sending another wave of agony through him. His body was weaving as it grasped for oxygen. His air sacs must have been punctured and now they were filling up with blood. The pain became more unbearable and the cold just grew with the puddle of his own blood. Why? Why did he have to end up like that? Why did he have to live through this? Why? He just wanted it to be over. He just wanted to die.

I'm not exactly proud of it.

Before you ask, no! I'm not going to mutilate myself nor pretend that stepping on a piece of Lego is as painful as having your leg torn off.

Yet I want to somewhat realistically portray suffering, both physical and mental.

I usually work with more focus on the mental aspect as that seems to help with sympathy, which in terms amplifies the effect of the physical aspect.

I decided to listen to a TED talk while editing the snippet in LibreOffice. It was about a lady who was almost stabbed to death with a machete. When she said she feels like people would never truly understand her, any mustered up courage went down the drain on my part.

I know how to collect info on what it feels like to be impaled with a HB pencil, and as a writer I have to be familiar with everything, but I'm still unsure how long does my already short creative license extend here. Sure, dragon physiology can be a neat excuse but still.

How can I describe pain, I never lived through, in-depth without coming off as disingenuous?

When I don't know how to do something, I look for examples of how somebody else did it. Here's an example from Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series. The main character, a wizard, had a kinetic shield spell ready, while the enemies came with a flamethrower. Turns out shield doesn't stop heat:

It hurt. Oh, God, it hurt. The fingers of my left hand were the first to feel it, and then my palm and wrist, all in the space of a second. If you've never been burned, you can't imagine the pain. And my fingers, where millions of tactile nerves were able to send panicked damage-messages to my brain, felt as if they had simply exploded and been replaced with howling agony.

I jerked my hand back, and felt my focus waver, the shield start to fade. I gritted my teeth, and somehow managed to dig up the strength to extend my hand again, hardening the shield and my will. I backed away in shuffling half steps, my mind almost drowning in pain, desperately keeping the shield up.

[...]

I saw blisters rising on my left hand. I felt my fingers curling into a claw. They looked thinner, as if made of melting wax, and I could see the shadows of my bones beneath the flesh.
_{Jim Butcher, Blood Rites, chapter 33}

There are several things going on here.

First, there's what is happening. A man's hand is being burnt. You think of that, it makes you shiver. And there's detail: the fingers curling involuntarily, the flesh melting away from the bone. Your thought is made to linger on that uncomfortable shiver. You imagine the pain, you don't even need to be told that it hurts - you know it does.

Second, we are told that it's painful: "it hurt", "my mind almost drowning in pain". Such statements are empty on their own - we've heard them too often. But within the picture already created, they support the overall structure. They are like the cerebral part of the mind registering that "it hurts".

Third, "Oh God". This is the cry of pain that escapes one's lips, the loss of control. It's almost an involuntary reaction, very familiar to anyone who's experienced any sudden pain. It's an accent, and a signal.

Fourth, there is the description: "my fingers, where millions of tactile nerves were able to send panicked damage-messages to my brain, felt as if they had simply exploded and been replaced with howling agony". One image. You don't want more than one - it becomes confusing and repetitive. That one image makes the reader linger for a moment on imagining the pain - while they're reading this description, they cannot move on. This image needs to be sufficiently imaginative and brief - otherwise boredom sets in, we lose sympathy for the character. And again, it cannot stand on its own.

Do you need all those elements? Definitely not. They are tools you can use. And there are other tools, such as the physiological reaction to pain (dizziness, nausea, etc.)

The most important thing is, you don't need to describe pain. You need your readers to imagine pain. Those aren't quite the same thing. Sometimes less description, less detail, can do the trick - you give the reader enough, and let them fill in the blanks. In particular, it's very hard to imagine "abstract" pain. One imagines a particular kind of pain (burns feel differently from blunt trauma, for instance) in a particular organ. So before you describe pain, you need to paint the picture of what's going on. Once you've done that, the reader's imagination will do half the work for you. We're wired to empathise.

(Which by the way makes the task of describing a non-humanoid's pain harder - I do not intuitively feel what wings or air sacks feel like. You'd have to do the work for me - compare the sensation to something I know better. Sure, air sacks are like lungs, I understand that. But I don't feel that, unless you evoke some sensation - being unable to get enough air, or something similar.)

I don’t feel that you have to experience intense near-death pain, describe it and be concerned that it would disingenuous. Why? Because your point of view is omniscient subjective. You are the narrator and the voice of the story. In my opinion, your paragraph does an excellent job telling us from your point of view as narrator what Gyvaris may be experiencing and thinking while the knight impales Gyvaris.

On the other hand, what if you were writing this story in Gyvaris’ point of view as opposed to your point of view as a narrator? In that case, you would narrate from Gyvaris’ point of view and convey the experience through Gyvaris’ action, thoughts, feeling and speech.

In either case the experience is written in context to the point of view. Again, in my opinion, I like what you have already. The only changes I might suggest is changing the first sentence. If it has been established who the knight is, at this point in time, in the story, then use the knight’s name. It seems like we know that Gyvaris is the dragon, so use Gyvaris name instead of dragon. First sentence could read like this:

Sir Debin sunk his sword deep into Gyvaris’s chest.

Also you make good use of some pattern of motivation reaction units too in the paragraph. I like that. Good job.