My main character in the ARKANE thriller series (and alter-ego), Morgan Sierra, has been beaten up, stabbed, shot, scratched by demon claws, and almost blown up over the nine books I've been writing her story.
My name is Samantha Keel. I’m an author-entrepreneur, but I’ve also been a paramedic for the last 10 years. If it can be done to the human body, I’ve probably seen it, smelled it, or at least read about it. I also run the ScriptMedic blog, where my two passions converge.
Today I’d like to offer you the Top 5 Mistakes that writers – great and small – make when writing about injuries.
Mistake #5: The Wound Doesn’t Match the Outcome
Every time we wound a character, we’ve given them a cause. While that injury should come as an effect of some other element of your story, a great many writers fail to consider the effects of the wound they inflict on a protagonist.
While this can happen with any wound (and is usually a symptom of bigger problems with the relationship between cause and effect in a story), there are two, in particular, that drive me absolutely bonkers.
First is a case where we fail to see the effects of an injury on our hero. Action and thriller writers have a love affair with shooting their heroes in what they think of as the “shoulder” – right at or below the clavicle.
“Aha!” they seem to say. “How gritty! It’s a nothing wound – the hero will carry on anyway!”
The problem is that the last person I met with a gunshot or stab on that part of the body was dead as can be.
There’s a lot of stuff in chests. That region, in particular, has things like lungs and the subclavian artery. An injury to either can be fatal within minutes.
But if I could incinerate and destroy one fallacy writers fall prey to about the way injuries work, it’s the myth of the harmless knockout, what I call the “TKO TBI” – the Total Knockout Traumatic Brain Injury.
The problem is that this doesn’t just break the chain of cause and effect. This one actually kills people.
Culturally, by propagating this trope, we teach people that head injuries are No Big Deal™. But the fact is that neurological injuries – particularly ones that result in unconsciousness – are deadly. They’ll kill 45,000 Americans this year.
(Sorry I don’t have the numbers for the UK, Joanna!)
Treating severe injuries this way not only cheapens something tragic, it teaches us that it’s no big deal to hit someone in the head. They’ll wake up in a few minutes!
Unless they never wake up. It can, and it does happen.
Mistake #4: They Cut Off the Story Arc (Along With the Limb)
Injury plots, when done correctly, have a distinct pattern that they follow. It’s a six-part arc, one that follows a Beginning, Middle and End, just like so:
The Beginning
- The Inciting Injury, the moment and manner in which the character gets hurt.
- The Immediate Treatment, what the character does to feel better and avoid further injury in the moment. This can include everything from returning fire and fleeing the scene to bandages and impromptu splints.
The Middle
- The Definitive Treatment, when the character receives definitive attention for their injury. This is often, but not necessarily, surgical.
- The Rocky Road to Recovery, when the character faces challenges relating to their new disability and how they cope with those problems during healing.
The End
- The Big Test, the moment when a character must overcome a larger challenge related to the global plot – while still recovering from their injury.
- The New Normal, when the character’s final level of disability becomes apparent. They can have No Disability, a Partial Disability, or be Totally Disabled (for the affected body part).
Certainly, there can be failures in each of these phases, but by far the most maligned is the Rocky Road to Recovery.
The Rocky Road is essential to the injury plot because it’s where we watch our heroes struggle with their injuries and how that affects their goals. It’s where we see the ways our heroes overcome adversity. Can the plucky hero take out the evil overlord even though she’s wounded? How will our hero overcome?
So why are so many writers seemingly afraid of lingering injuries in their heroes?
Time after time, we see the recovery part of the plot cut short. Especially in sci-fi and fantasy stories, Magical Healing gets heroes back on their feet – and missing the point.
Luke Skywalker is a perfect example. In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke and Darth Vader throw down – and Luke’s hand gets amputated! It and his lightsaber go sailing over the catwalk and into oblivion.
But a few short scenes later, Luke has a brand-new prosthetic hand just like his real one! He has no disability whatsoever from his ordeal.
And because his ability doesn’t change, he doesn’t change, and we don’t care.
Magical Healing runs the real risk of cheapening injuries that should be devastating and interesting. It cuts off the effect portion of the story, leaving us with a cause.
Mistake #3: Wandering Wound Syndrome
Wandering Wound Syndrome is a writing mistake that, unfortunately, does exactly what it says on the tin: the writer elects to wound a character – and then forgets the details. Maybe what was a gash on the eyebrow on Page 23 translocates to the lip on 45 and the shoulder by 64.
This is a failure in two places: the writer’s memory (and note-taking), and the editor’s continuity check.
But there’s a variant of Wandering Wound Syndrome that’s simply unforgivable.
It goes like this: our Intrepid Hero™ was just in the fight of his life. He’s faced certain death – and, battered and bruised and limping and bleeding, he’s escaped.
It seems, to a certain kind of writer, like injuries and battle wounds are the exact human equivalent of catnip. And so the Big Bad Bruised Hero and his Special Someone… “Make Woohoo,” as The Sims™ would call it. (For whatever reason, this seems to happen most often with “cracked,” i.e. broken, ribs.) The injuries – and their pain – magically vanish in his lover’s arms.
Is the hero hurt, or isn’t he?
Look, I’m married. I enjoy Making Woohoo. But if anyone tries to Make Woohoo with me on cracked ribs, they are going to be sorely disappointed, because my thoughts are going to be holy hells it hurts to breathe please stop, not come here, baby. Perhaps I’m a wimp – or perhaps this trope needs to go.
Mistake #2: Failure to Research
Look, perfect accuracy in fiction is hard, and it isn’t even always desirable. It’s painful and time-consuming to do research on everything you COULD do to a character, then sift through the list, select a wound, and write about it.
That’s okay! But at least do a little research on what you’re intending to write about. Often times it seems like writers regurgitate what we think we know about a topic – which really translates into what we’ve absorbed through other people’s stories. We write what “must be true” because we’ve seen it on TV.
So here’s a list of absolutely realistic consequences and eventualities that you can take and insert into your stories. Ready? Here we go…
- Bullets are left in more often than you think. There is no Bullet Imperative – “the bullet must come out” is a false mindset – and lead poisoning is only a factor if the bullet lodges itself in bone. Generally, they’re more likely to die taking it out than leaving it in.
- Any bullet or stab to the gut is, in a modern setting, going to end with a surgeon opening up the belly for exploratory surgery to see what the damage is. (Yes, if they happen to find the bullet, they’ll take it out.) Your character will be out of commission for at least a week or two while the sutures heal, even if nothing important got damaged.
- Head injuries resulting in more than a couple minutes’ worth of unconsciousness are classified as Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBIs) and result in massive, life-altering neurological changes. These effects can range from aphasia (difficulty speaking or finding words) to memory loss (not of identity, but short and long-term memory damage is possible), motor and coordination problems, and significant personality changes. In short: they can’t just wake up in the trunk and punch their captors out!
- Even a concussion can cause these kinds of changes. In fact, the character doesn’t even have to lose consciousness to suffer life-changing brain injuries.
- No character is “going into” shock. Either they are dying (i.e. they’re in shock), or they’re not. Shock also doesn’t mean what you think it means. It’s a medical state of low blood flow, not a psychological state of surprise.
- A broken bone will take six weeks to heal, on average, but will feel better before it is better. That means characters will be at risk for doing something they shouldn’t – and re-breaking the bone.
- Dislocations, especially first-time dislocations, can’t simply be “popped back in.” They need X-rays to look for fractures, and even once they’re reduced – put back – the joint still needs time to heal and stabilize, or the risk of redislocation runs high.
Mistake #1: Writing a Plot, Not A Story
Look, do me a favor. Throw out every single thing you’ve learned in this article so far if you have to. If you walk away with just one lesson from this long-winded post, let it be this one.
A Plot is a series of things that happen. I use the Lemony Snicket definition: a plot is A Series Of Unfortunate Events.
A Story is how that series of events changes a character.
Let’s take Mary. If Mary goes to the store, then the bank, then goes home, that’s a plot. It’s a sequence of events. And it’s boring.
But if we write this as a story… Mary goes to the store because she’s going to spend what little she has on Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, her little nephew Ricky’s favorite cereal. At the register she swipes her debit card six times, only to discover that the account is empty – how embarrassing! Her cheeks burn with shame. She storms across the parking lot to the bank to find out what happened. The kindly manager gently informs her that not only is her meager savings gone, the house she shared with her late husband – the house he carried her over the threshold in, the house they rebuilt from nothing – has been foreclosed on. And, with tears streaming down her cheeks and the weight of the world upon her heart, Mary walks home, with not even a box of cereal to show for it.
I admit it’s not a good story, but it’s got reasons and motivations. Things matter to Mary this time around. The obstacles get in the way of a goal.
And with sub plots like injury arcs, I’ll let you in on a secret. We don’t care, not truly, about the oozing blood or the tender bruise, or even about the snap of bones as they break. What we care about – what will keep us flipping pages – is why it matters. What does this mean for your character – and for the bigger overall story?
In short: why do we care?
I think this is the real reason behind Wandering Wound Syndrome and Magical Healing. The writer knows that we expect injuries in the course of a Great Heroic Quest in order to ground the story in reality, but I think in focusing on injuring the character at all, a great many of us lose track of the larger point.
Injuries should be lenses through which we see our heroes and learn about them. We should see not just their short-lived physical pain, but the choices that pain forces them to make and the paths they must take to accomplish their goals anyway.
Don’t just maim your characters. Give their injuries meaning.
Are you guilty of making some of these mistakes when you injure your characters? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.
If you’re not careful, she’ll sneak up on you in a dark alleyway and give you a free ebook: 10 B.S. Medical Tropes that Need to Die Today. She’s also offering a free email course called Maim Your Characters about how to effectively use injuries in storytelling
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1 2 3 Next »Gee, now you've taken all the fun out of writing injuries into our stories. Maybe we should make all of our heroes someone like Deadpool, who magically heals after every injury, including chopping off his own hand.
Actually, I can forgive the macho man that never lets a silly little gunshot wound slow him down. It's the writers that put together scenes that just seem completely ridiculous in violence, but no one gets hurt. Remember the TV show The A-Team. Millions of bullets were fired, bombs went off, vehicles were crashed in end-over-end collisions and no one ever got more than a minor scratch on them. Especially the guys in the crashes. You know they never took the time to buckle up when the chase was on, but they always crawled out of the wreckage unscathed.
I'm glad I write fantasy. Plenty of deaths and destruction, but when I need a character to continue on in the story after an injury, that what my healers are for.
Having a healer on call is always a good idea :) I'm watching Preacher on Amazon Video and one of the characters is a vampire - he gets injured or shot or loses an arm and just has some blood and he's all good again. I guess as long as it is true to the world of the story, it's OK :)
There are also ways to shift the consequences of the injury (and the magical healing) in a story, especially in fantasy where magic ALWAYS has a price.
Perhaps your healers now hold power over your heroes. Perhaps the universe must balance the forces and take someone the hero loves. Perhaps they simply owe a debt they must repay, a dire favor that will be called in at the worst possible time.
I have no issues with magical healing in and of itself. Where it gets troublesome -- where you lose suspension of disbelief -- is when a character gets out of a major situation without any consequences whatsoever. As long as there is SOME form of consequence that fits your world and has a logical chain of progression, you'll be fine.
xoxo, Samantha Keel
Mm. That's a writer talking. I think in any universe we expect some sort of "moral consequences" for benefits accepted or wrong done. What is writing about, really, if the hero is teflon coated and just runs around biffing people or being biffed and there is no long-term accounting for any of it? Or no growth or change and everything is collateral damage without cost? That's a 1950s comic book, not a story.
The flip side of knocking characters out, or choking them out – you know, like that scene in a lot of action movies/TV shows where the character goes around eliminating henchmen through a big facility, but not killing because they want a PG13 rating, so they choke them from behind (look up "hadaka jime" if you don't see the choke I'm talking about; it's always the same one, and always poorly executed) – is that if they don't have a TBI or die because the hero hit too hard or held the choke too long, they wake up in seconds, and sound the alarm. ^^
Hey there! This is absolutely true, though there are two different types of chokes -- blood chokes and air chokes. The first produces unconsciousness rapidly, but can have a recovery time in a normal person of as little as 9-11 seconds; witness a demonstration here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7n_SHrK408
But the thing is, even that's not safe! The man was dropped and is bleeding from the head, and later sued Hulk Hogan over the incident.
Air chokes can crush tracheas and kill people, and it takes a good long while for them to produce unconsciousness. In either case, brain damage can be the result.
An unconscious brain is a brain in GRAVE danger!
xoxo, Samantha Keel
This was a fantastic article, thank you.
Thanks so much! I'm quite proud of it.
xoxo, Samantha Keel
Yes, you should be. Not just a medic but a writer, too, and willing to share what you know to help others, in a very readable style. I flinched at some of the examples of what writers do to characters (and readers!)
Thank you so much, Julia!
"I wouldn’t use Hulk Hogan as an exemple of real martial arts, though. That’s like baking with “I can’t believe it’s not butter!”
First: He genuinely knocked the guy out. Regardless of whether it was ELEGANT "martial arts" or not, it's a mostly-successful attempt at a martial arts technique, which did exactly (knocking the person unconscious) what it was supposed to do. Yes, quite a few black belts in various schools could have done it "better", but doing it gracefully or not is kind of beside the point.
Ms Keel can and has used this video for discussion on her blog previously, wherein she points out that not only is this still dangerous (as in, potentially lethal or potentially leading to lethal things - such as heads cracking on the floor!), it's also STILL unrealistic to expect it to last more than a few seconds UNLESS you've given them brain damage!
I believe it was part of a larger point that there's several ways to reduce consciousness in humans, but absolutely none of them are the perfect, quick SAFE longish-term in-field knockout fiction wants us to have for convenience's sake, and that trying to pretend you can have that with literally no risk at all is a dangerous trope to propagate because it can and HAS had real-life consequences (at least one group of idiots has "pranked" their buddy by knocking him out with a shovel, only to leave him with brain damage or you know, dead. I'm pretty sure the one I'm thinking of wound up just dead, actually).
Frankly, even the Chloroform Works Every Time trope is a tad less dangerous than the chokes/head whacks trope - which says something - because Chloroform is actually notoriously unreliable in real life, and nobody has in real life successfully used it to knock someone out without their, ahem, consent (at least without killing them).
Head injuries and chokes are much more likely to knock a person out, but the hero should be prepared for the very strong possibility that it will kill or permanently injure the victim, and to ignore this is to allow our heroes an easy pass! Which is, you know, her entire darn point here: we do this to make it easy on our heroes, but really we're just...being lazy. And that laziness can be dangerous, HAS been dangerous, for real human beings because people like to assume way more in fiction is realistic than we'd like to think they would.
(Fun fact for those looking for a more viable alternative for their non-lethal heroes: Samantha "Aunt Scripty" Keel has more than once I think proposed the closest realistic equivalent to "quick safe in-field knockout that lasts more than a few seconds" to be an injection of ketamine to the thigh muscle or possibly both thighs' muscle to be sure. Even then, she has pointed out it would take a good 30-60 seconds or so do to anything, during which of course the person you just stabbed in the thigh(s) is going to fight back, right up until they can't. Even ketamine though comes with a slight risk of the person stopping breathing if I'm not mistaken - I advise anyone considering this option for their plot to check out the ScriptMedic blog and poke around for info on the drug to see for sure!)
Second: Somebody doesn't know how baking chemistry works!
"I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!" (TM) is a form of margarine.
Which means you CAN freaking bake with it, you goof; it's a form of vegetable-oil-based butter substitute that will bond just fine in the ways baking chemistry requires "butter" to do. It won't be the same delicious quality that most things made with real dairy-based butter will be, but most of that is literally flavor/color-related and not "effectiveness" related. (In fact, cool baking tip: your average cake mix will taste SO much better if you replace the Vegetable Oil with the equivalent amount of softened or melted real Butter instead. While I'm at it, since this is already a non-vegan recipe switchout, try swapping the water for milk and adding a little extra egg - up to one whole extra egg in the case of mixes that take only one or two - for a super moist, fluffy, freaking delicious cake, works especially well for Yellow Cake and Chocolate Cake recipes I might add. But back to the subject at hand)
In other words, while the comparison is actually perfectly apt, it undermines your point: you CAN bake with the stuff...just like I wouldn't want to actually go against Hulk Hogan if he came up behind me in a dark alley with ill intent! It doesn't matter that the martial arts equivalent of butter could KO or kill me even better, he still gets the job done well enough to do what he set out to! :P
An excellent overview, in the usual fantastically witty delivery I've come to expect from "Aunt Scripty", thank you so much for hosting this Joanna! :) And thank you, Samantha, for writing this; I follow your blog over on tumblr, but something about this article has made some things click for me in new ways.
It does have me looking at some of my current or recent Plots and considering whether they serve the Story in the way I need or want them to, for instance (or whether I have whole new cool options on that front that I've been completely overlooking) - and on that note, that is a clever and useful way of looking at it, thank you for that! :)
There was a great article in a recent issue of Clarkesworld that covered similar ground - not the same, but similar - and between that and this, I have a much better understanding and appreciation of how to properly torture my characters.
Thanks ;)
Daniel
What a great article! Thanks so much sharing what you've learned and experienced.
One author who does a really good job of injuring his hero and is realistic about it is Jim Butcher in the Dresden Files. I always appreciated it when Harry is still dealing with bruises but he gets into a fight and it hinders him.
All the best!
Tambra
Huh! I've been hunting down examples of injuries in fiction -- I put nine of them in a book that's coming out next month called Maim Your Characters, in fact -- but I didn't know about the Jim Butcher / Dresden Files injury arcs. I'll have to look those up! Thanks Tambra!
xoxo, Samantha Keel
Well, in my Young Adult story the protagonist was in a car accident aged 6 which knocked him out. He was not allowed to play soccer ever again because heading the ball after such a serious concussion would be bad for him. So I got that right (effect) and the further effect was playing soccer was big in his family and his school so he got bullied and disrespected . He got beaten up at school and worried about what it was doing to his brain (more effect). He got lost in the wilderness aged 15 and got injured and the effects of that went on and on. I did do a lot of research (thank you, medical sites on internet) and didn't copy what I'd seen in fiction or movies. I also had a bullet left in another character because getting it out "would do more harm than good, and it's deep in a muscle where it won't do much harm". There are mistakes no doubt, but reading this most helpful article which I will keep for life, I think I did avoid some of the worst mistakes. So encouraging!
A great article and I completely agree.
Whenever I'm writing, I always have to question if there is any point to injuring a character and what sort of problems that is going to cause. In my first book, I had the character injured long before the start of the story, so she had largely gotten over the physical aspects of the injury and was now dealing with the psychological, which formed a large basis of the story. In the the second book, she receives a minor (but rather debilitating in the short term) injury, and that forms a part of her story as it gave me a perfect way to slow her down and give her a barrier to overcome.
I always feel like injuring someone for the sake of injuring them is a bit of a lazy way to resolve something within the plot of a story - but if it feeds into a theme later down the line, then fair enough.
Hey Nick! I definitely agree that injuries without purpose can be difficult. I'm not sure they're "lazy," at least not categorically, but often times they're not well-thought-out.
I agree with you that an injury should be a cause, not an effect; it's a much more useful approach.
In some stories there IS something to be said for "textural" injuries -- injuries which help establish the feeling of the world. War stories in particular require a regular heaping dose of death and screaming to keep them going, but often these injuries are to the "extras" -- characters who have been put in specifically to garner our sympathies and then die, to show us the horrors of war.
But the second that this happens to a protagonist character or a close ally, it needs to have an effect on the characters and the story itself. "Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World" does this well, actually; there are textural injuries alongside meaningful ones. (Same in Band of Brothers, if that's your thing.)
xoxo, Samantha Keel
Thank goodness you've covered this! I used to write thrillers and I have a half-written post knocking around with my thoughts on the 'harmless and manfully endurable shoulder gunshot wound', and other fallacies. And the nooky-with-broken-ribs scenario!
And actually, in prose stories, injuries in themselves are not very interesting. Exactly as you've said. The interest is in the consequences, or the choices characters will make. An injury to solve a plot problem can look like the writer playing God. But an injury to create a plot problem can work very well because the consequences will become the focus and entertainment.
V entertaining as well as valuable - thanks Samantha and Joanna. x
So glad you've enjoyed it! The topics you were planning to cover are definitely a pair of my pet peeves.
xoxo, Samantha Keel