Writing Blog Number 2

20250813 Bodily Functions In Writing

Bodily Functions In Writing

This came up on Discord in June, and I thought it would make for an interesting topic here.
When do we mention bodily functions in our writing?

Now, bodily functions are common. Of course they are. And we are not just talking urination and bowel movements here; we are also talking about eating and drinking, bathing and showering, sneezing and coughing, even farting and spitting. These are the things that everyone does all the time, and yet they get short shrift in the world of character-driven art.
         Okay, sure, sweating is often mentioned, and characters will drink on occasion, sometimes even have a meal, but apart from when it is needed to make a person desperate, hunger and thirst are rarely mentioned.

So, should we talk about the wide variety of bodily functions?

This is a question that will get you a lot of different responses. Some think that it is adding too much minutiae to a work, slowing it down, bogging the narrative in what are essentially irrelevant details. Others think it makes works more realistic, and so feel the inclusion is important. And then there are those who sit somewhere between these two extremes.
         As such, I went out of my way and sent emails to the three publishers who I am a regular contributor to, and a bunch of authors.
         They all said almost exactly the same thing: mention them, but don’t discuss them unless it is needed for the story.
         What this means is say that John went to the toilet, but don’t describe his bowel evacuation unless what he excretes is vital to the make the meaning of the story clear, or is going to come back later in some way. Likewise, say Jim and Sue had lunch, don’t describe their meal and how they ate unless it is important, or their discussion over the meal is going to be important (in which case, the use of food and eating can be a very good “show” way of indicating emotions). Going even further, a sneeze or cough can indicate an allergy or a sickness that can come into play later, but mentioning them in passing might not add a single thing except the way others interact; what that means is if a character sneezes and another says, “Bless you,” then the relationship is probably a positive one, but if they say, “Jesus, really?” then the relationship is negative, and done through this “show” technique.
         One other thing – if a person does not shower and does stuff to sweat, how putrid must they smell? Would other characters mention it? Surely they’d notice. What if all of them didn’t shower? Now that smell would give their position away, surely. Hiding would become harder. These are the little things that body functions lead to.
         Some feel that you should only mention them if they are important and not even in passing, but others feel this makes the characters feel unreal, and can take a reader out of a story.
         Here are two examples given to me.
         In a book one publisher rejected, a man rode a horse across a desert during the heat of the day, arriving at a farmhouse at evening. He left the horse at a trough to drink and took a second horse without stopping himself and then travelled all night. It was distinctly mentioned he did not take a drink between horses. The first horse probably would not have made it all day without water, he went on, and the man definitely would not survive all day and then all night with no sleep if there was no water or food, no matter how urgent his business. It should at least be mentioned he filled a waterskin, had a waterksin, or something; as it was, it did not work for his readers.
         In a short story, a writer told me he read back over it later and discovered a man had been drinking alcohol all afternoon, not moving from his stool once, explicitly stated, and then drove home in a drunken state where he was then forced to fight a home intruder. He had written this, it had been printed in an anthology, and the lack of toileting made it feel too unreal.
         In both of these cases, just a mention would have helped (apparently the horse-based book was not that great and wouldn’t have been accepted anyway).

So, while we don’t generally need to focus on the details, the intricacies, if you will, mentioning that these things happen can make readers feel like the characters are more realistic, even if they mean little to the story. It is not world-building, but it is character building. And characters make stories come alive.