Too much gore?

Too much gore?

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Is it possible to have too much gore in a story? Yes! When I was at Western Michigan University and getting my MFA, you would turn in a piece of work one week and it would be reviewed in the workshop the next. One of the members of our group was a professional mental-health worker. I don’t remember if she was a psychologist or psychiatrist. She was writing a story about how a psychopath develops. One of the things that psychologists and psychiatrists know about psychopaths is as children they will mutilate and kill pets. She wrote about a psychopath who described his earliest killings. She wrote in remarkable detail from this psychopath interview about how he killed and tortured a group of kittens. It absolutely turned everyone off in the workshop. Some even said that description made them sick. Her intent was to show that the psychopath had no remorse and actually enjoyed killing. It was clearly too much for any reader other than someone in her field who was studying psychopaths. The answer is yes! You truly can have too much gore in a story.

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VC

” I am a writer and as a writer, I do not neatly fit into any category. I have written magazine articles, feature news articles, restaurant reviews, a newspaper column, and several book length nonfiction projects aimed at people interested in particular health problems for foundations and companies. As to novels, I have published some Kindle novels.”