It never occurred to him that now he was looking at his master, at the one person in all the world who held his fate right between her palms - me, in patched hand-me-downs and untrimmed hair and idiot smile - and that my hatred for him is pure and black and unforgiving. And that I don't believe in God, but if I did, if I did, it would be the God of Moses, angry and demanding and OUT FOR REVENGE.

It's impossible to stall a Lizzie.

I tend not to attempt to describe pain. I don't feel I can comprehend or re-create the personal suffering of others, so I simply try to tell what happened, or what I imagine happened. I also think it helps to let the reader fill in a lot of the blanks. Melodrama is patronizing. With a straightforward statement, readers can figure out for themselves what's going on.

It is so hard trying to say what you mean.

You can't just sit in a corner weeping or you'll die.

God knows what I thought! Your brain does amazing acrobatics when it doesn't want to believe something.

I think as readers we put ourselves in the protagonist's place because we want to be like that person. That's why sometimes we don't like protagonists who aren't all that nice; we want to relate to the protagonist.