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The Structure of an Injury Plot
An injury plot works on one very simple three-part platform:
A character gets hurt. (The Beginning)
That character gets treatment and begins to feel better, but must navigate the world in a state of partial disability. (The Middle)
Finally, the character settles into their new normal, whether that’s back to a healthy baseline, living with some partial disability, or suffering a total disability of one body part or another. (The End)
Congratulations! This book is done. Go forth and maim your characters!
If only…
The good news is that sticking to this simple structure will give you a perfectly reasonable injury tale. Observe:
While daydreaming about smashing a homer at the company softball game, Mary trips over the ottoman, falls, and breaks her wrist. She tries icing her wrist, but the pain just keeps getting worse. (The Beginning)
She goes to the ER and gets X-rays and a cast. Thoughts of the game are replaced with daily challenges: how to button her shirts, how to drive her stick shift, how to type her TPS reports at work. She solves these challenges by asking her wife for help with her shirt, swapping cars for a couple of weeks with a coworker who has an automatic, and using dictation software. (The Middle)
Eventually, Mary’s cast comes off. Her wrist still hurts when the weather changes, but mostly she can ignore it. The softball game is all but forgotten. (The End)
This progression certainly works, although it’s a little dull and, most importantly, it lacks meaning. At present, it’s a plot, but not really a story. Remember, Mary needs to change in some fundamental way for it to be a story with meaning (rather than a series of things that happen).
One way we could add some meaning is defining why the softball game is so important to her. Does she need to redeem herself for a mistake? Does she miss the glory days of her youth? Is she trying to impress her boss – or a potential side lover? (Scandal Alert! Or, a perfectly healthy polyamorous relationship.)
In short: this plot is good, or at least makes sense, but now let’s elevate this plot to the level of story.
In my experience, this is where most injury plots fall apart. There’s a very clear cause – a character is injured, usually shot – but there’s no effect on the person or on the story. It becomes simply a piece of texture, an element of “grit” that carries no weight of meaning behind it.
(If texture is something you’re interested in for your story – if you want the injury for the sake of having an injury, not as a mirror to hold up to your character – that’s okay too, as long as the injury is fairly minor. We’ll get to this in Part 8: Sweating the Small Stuff.)
So we’ve taken a look at the Beginning, Middle, andEnd of Mary’s broken wrist plot, and touched on why this might matter to her. All of which is great! But let’s break down those three components into smaller pieces that will help us understand the particular quirks of an injury plot.
There are six distinct phases of the injury portion of the injury plot.
Broken down by plot section, these are:
The Beginning
TheInciting Injury: the moment and manner in which the character gets hurt.
TheImmediate Treatment: what the character does in the moment to feel better and avoid further injury.
The Middle
TheDefinitive Treatment: when the character receives care which ultimately begins their healing process.
TheRocky Road to Recovery: when the character faces challenges relating to their new disability and how they cope with those problems during healing.
The End
TheBig Test: the moment when a character must overcome a greater challenge related to the global plot – while still recovering from their injury.
TheNew Normal: when your character’s final degree of disability becomes apparent. They can have No Disability, a Partial Disability, or be Totally Disabled (for the affected body part).
You can see places where the five fundamental elements of storytelling mesh into the injury plot. The Inciting Injury is the Inciting Incident, the Progressive Complications are in the Treatment stages and the Rocky Road to Recovery, the CrisisandClimax parallel nicely with the Big Test, and the Resolution is one and the same as the New Normal.
So why the relabeling? Because it’s easy to get distracted by vague terms. The labels that are injury-specific will help you remember the pieces you need to have in place in order to make sure your audiences find your arc believable.
Let’s take another look at Mary’s wrist fracture, through the lens of the Six Phases:
Inciting Injury: Mary trips over the ottoman and breaks her wrist.
Immediate Treatment: Mary tries to ice her wrist and hopes it gets better, but it doesn’t.
Definitive Treatment: Mary goes to the ER, gets X-rays and a cast.
The Rocky Road to Recovery: Mary’s everyday life becomes more challenging with her broken wrist! Driving a stick shift is out, she can’t even button her own shirt, and she can’t effectively type one-handed. She solves each of these problems.
Big Test: Mary doesn’t have one… yet.
New Normal: Eventually Mary’s cast comes off, and she has a very minor Partial Disability: some lingering wrist stiffness and some aching when the weather changes.
Hopefully the first three phases are pretty clear and straightforward. But I want to talk about the Rocky Road to Recovery for a little bit, because, at least at the moment, it’s the easiest way to touch on the third rail of the story: why the injury actually matters.
Why is it, exactly, that these three tasks are so important to Mary? Essentially, what parts of herself does this injury force her to face?
Buttoning Her Shirt: As it stands, this is just an inconvenience, one that will go away in a few weeks. But what if Mary is very independent, and hates anyone – even her wife – seeing her vulnerable and weak? Why would she feel this way? Maybe when she was younger, Mary had to take care of her aging grandmother, and she always hated buttoning her grandmother’s blouse. She always vowed that she would never get to that stage in her life – and yet here she is. Maybe she’s coming up on a birthday and fearing her older age.
(Note that these concepts are both very natural and very ablist. On the one hand, change is extremely hard, especially where it concerns things we take for granted, such as our ability to do anything we choose. On the other hand, the mindset that becoming disabled is an awful thing implies that the lives of disabled people are awful, which doesn’t necessarily follow. Be aware of what you’re writing as you write it!)
Swapping Cars: Again, this is an inconvenience – until we know why it’s a big deal for Mary. Is she super proud of her ability to drive a stick shift? Is she super proud of her car as a status symbol – and now she’s swapping her this-year’s Lexus for her coworker’s twelve-year-old Civic? What if she’s a neat freak, and the person she’s switching cars with is a total slob? Or, what if she just got her car – by inheritance, and she has conversations with her car as though it’s her lost parent?
In any of these cases, why does it matter?
Typing and Work: Why does it matter so much that Mary has difficulty typing? Is she on the verge of losing her job – hence her burning desire to impress at the softball game? Is it her dream job she’s at risk of losing, one she’s fought to get? Does she feel like an imposter, like she’s gotten someplace she doesn’t actually deserve, and maybe losing the job is some cosmic retribution for her masquerade? Or maybe she’s self-conscious about her voice (why? An utterly embarrassing failure at a school talent show when she was a teen?), and doesn’t want to use dictation software where other people can hear – but it’s the only way to keep doing her work?
As you can see, this is the single best place where an injury plot can teach us about Mary. With just three relatively small challenges, we learn about her grandmother’s illness, her connection with her lost parent, and her sense of being an imposter at a job she doesn’t deserve (even if she does). All of a sudden, Mary isn’t just a woman who tripped over an ottoman – she’s a person, with a story. Maybe we even feel like we know her. Maybe we identify with these pieces of her we’ve discovered through her struggle.
The magic of storytelling is that if what happens to the character matters to the character, and we know why that is, then what happens will matter to your audience as well.
In the next few sections, we’re going to break down each part of the injury plot more thoroughly, including the way some stories, great and small, have approached them. I’m also going to give you a rough sketch of a story made especially for this book that will illustrate the way each portion of the injury plot might work.
This post is an excerpt from the forthcoming Maim Your Characters, out September 4th, 2017 from Even Keel Press. If you’d like to read a 100-page sample of the book, click here. If you’d like to preorder signed print or digital copies of the book before 9/4/2017, or claim Executive Producer status of the upcoming Blood on the Page, click here.
xoxo, Samantha Keel
The Structure of an Injury Plot was originally published on ScriptMedicBlog.com
The Structure of an Injury Plot
An injury plot works on one very simple three-part platform:
A character gets hurt. (The Beginning)
That character gets treatment and begins to feel better, but must navigate the world in a state of partial disability. (The Middle)
Finally, the character settles into their new normal, whether that’s back to a healthy baseline, living with some partial disability, or suffering a total disability of one body part or another. (The End)
Congratulations! This book is done. Go forth and maim your characters!
If only…
The good news is that sticking to this simple structure will give you a perfectly reasonable injury tale. Observe:
While daydreaming about smashing a homer at the company softball game, Mary trips over the ottoman, falls, and breaks her wrist. She tries icing her wrist, but the pain just keeps getting worse. (The Beginning)She goes to the ER and gets X-rays and a cast. Thoughts of the game are replaced with daily challenges: how to button her shirts, how to drive her stick shift, how to type her TPS reports at work. She solves these challenges by asking her wife for help with her shirt, swapping cars for a couple of weeks with a coworker who has an automatic, and using dictation software. (The Middle)
Eventually, Mary’s cast comes off. Her wrist still hurts when the weather changes, but mostly she can ignore it. The softball game is all but forgotten. (The End)
This progression certainly works, although it’s a little dull and, most importantly, it lacks meaning. At present, it’s a plot, but not really a story. Remember, Mary needs to change in some fundamental way for it to be a story with meaning (rather than a series of things that happen).
One way we could add some meaning is defining why the softball game is so important to her. Does she need to redeem herself for a mistake? Does she miss the glory days of her youth? Is she trying to impress her boss – or a potential side lover? (Scandal Alert! Or, a perfectly healthy polyamorous relationship.)
In short: this plot is good, or at least makes sense, but now let’s elevate this plot to the level of story.
In my experience, this is where most injury plots fall apart. There’s a very clear cause – a character is injured, usually shot – but there’s no effect on the person or on the story. It becomes simply a piece of texture, an element of “grit” that carries no weight of meaning behind it.
(If texture is something you’re interested in for your story – if you want the injury for the sake of having an injury, not as a mirror to hold up to your character – that’s okay too, as long as the injury is fairly minor. We’ll get to this in Part 8: Sweating the Small Stuff.)
So we’ve taken a look at the Beginning, Middle, andEnd of Mary’s broken wrist plot, and touched on why this might matter to her. All of which is great! But let’s break down those three components into smaller pieces that will help us understand the particular quirks of an injury plot.
There are six distinct phases of the injury portion of the injury plot.
Broken down by plot section, these are:
The Beginning
TheInciting Injury: the moment and manner in which the character gets hurt.
TheImmediate Treatment: what the character does in the moment to feel better and avoid further injury.
The Middle
TheDefinitive Treatment: when the character receives care which ultimately begins their healing process.
TheRocky Road to Recovery: when the character faces challenges relating to their new disability and how they cope with those problems during healing.
The End
TheBig Test: the moment when a character must overcome a greater challenge related to the global plot – while still recovering from their injury.
TheNew Normal: when your character’s final degree of disability becomes apparent. They can have No Disability, a Partial Disability, or be Totally Disabled (for the affected body part).
You can see places where the five fundamental elements of storytelling mesh into the injury plot. The Inciting Injury is the Inciting Incident, the Progressive Complications are in the Treatment stages and the Rocky Road to Recovery, the CrisisandClimax parallel nicely with the Big Test, and the Resolution is one and the same as the New Normal.
So why the relabeling? Because it’s easy to get distracted by vague terms. The labels that are injury-specific will help you remember the pieces you need to have in place in order to make sure your audiences find your arc believable.
Let’s take another look at Mary’s wrist fracture, through the lens of the Six Phases:
Inciting Injury: Mary trips over the ottoman and breaks her wrist.
Immediate Treatment: Mary tries to ice her wrist and hopes it gets better, but it doesn’t.
Definitive Treatment: Mary goes to the ER, gets X-rays and a cast.
The Rocky Road to Recovery: Mary’s everyday life becomes more challenging with her broken wrist! Driving a stick shift is out, she can’t even button her own shirt, and she can’t effectively type one-handed. She solves each of these problems.
Big Test: Mary doesn’t have one… yet.
New Normal: Eventually Mary’s cast comes off, and she has a very minor Partial Disability: some lingering wrist stiffness and some aching when the weather changes.
Hopefully the first three phases are pretty clear and straightforward. But I want to talk about the Rocky Road to Recovery for a little bit, because, at least at the moment, it’s the easiest way to touch on the third rail of the story: why the injury actually matters.
Why is it, exactly, that these three tasks are so important to Mary? Essentially, what parts of herself does this injury force her to face?
Buttoning Her Shirt: As it stands, this is just an inconvenience, one that will go away in a few weeks. But what if Mary is very independent, and hates anyone – even her wife – seeing her vulnerable and weak? Why would she feel this way? Maybe when she was younger, Mary had to take care of her aging grandmother, and she always hated buttoning her grandmother’s blouse. She always vowed that she would never get to that stage in her life – and yet here she is. Maybe she’s coming up on a birthday and fearing her older age.
(Note that these concepts are both very natural and very ablist. On the one hand, change is extremely hard, especially where it concerns things we take for granted, such as our ability to do anything we choose. On the other hand, the mindset that becoming disabled is an awful thing implies that the lives of disabled people are awful, which doesn’t necessarily follow. Be aware of what you’re writing as you write it!)
Swapping Cars: Again, this is an inconvenience – until we know why it’s a big deal for Mary. Is she super proud of her ability to drive a stick shift? Is she super proud of her car as a status symbol – and now she’s swapping her this-year’s Lexus for her coworker’s twelve-year-old Civic? What if she’s a neat freak, and the person she’s switching cars with is a total slob? Or, what if she just got her car – by inheritance, and she has conversations with her car as though it’s her lost parent?
In any of these cases, why does it matter?
Typing and Work: Why does it matter so much that Mary has difficulty typing? Is she on the verge of losing her job – hence her burning desire to impress at the softball game? Is it her dream job she’s at risk of losing, one she’s fought to get? Does she feel like an imposter, like she’s gotten someplace she doesn’t actually deserve, and maybe losing the job is some cosmic retribution for her masquerade? Or maybe she’s self-conscious about her voice (why? An utterly embarrassing failure at a school talent show when she was a teen?), and doesn’t want to use dictation software where other people can hear – but it’s the only way to keep doing her work?
As you can see, this is the single best place where an injury plot can teach us about Mary. With just three relatively small challenges, we learn about her grandmother’s illness, her connection with her lost parent, and her sense of being an imposter at a job she doesn’t deserve (even if she does). All of a sudden, Mary isn’t just a woman who tripped over an ottoman – she’s a person, with a story. Maybe we even feel like we know her. Maybe we identify with these pieces of her we’ve discovered through her struggle.
The magic of storytelling is that if what happens to the character matters to the character, and we know why that is, then what happens will matter to your audience as well.
In the next few sections, we’re going to break down each part of the injury plot more thoroughly, including the way some stories, great and small, have approached them. I’m also going to give you a rough sketch of a story made especially for this book that will illustrate the way each portion of the injury plot might work.
This post is an excerpt from the forthcoming Maim Your Characters, out September 4th, 2017 from Even Keel Press. If you’d like to read a 100-page sample of the book, click here. If you’d like to preorder signed print or digital copies of the book before 9/4/2017, or claim Executive Producer status of the upcoming Blood on the Page, click here.
xoxo, Samantha Keel
The Structure of an Injury Plot was originally published on ScriptMedicBlog.com
(Excerpted from the forthcoming Maim Your Characters)
Before we even start to look at injury plots specifically, it’s worth taking a good strong look at what stories are overall. This definition applies not only to an injury story, but to all stories.
Ready? Here goes:
A plot is what happens – the outside events of the tale.
A story is the change a character undergoes when faced with mounting obstacles and the consequences of their own choices.
Shawn Coyne (The Story Grid) understands that there are always two tales, woven together to form a truly compelling story. There’s the External Plot, the events of the story. Then there’s the Internal Plot, the changes that the character undergoes. His chief example is the novel Silence of the Lambs, where the External Plot is a thriller – but the Internal Plot is about Clarice Starling’s disillusionment with her budding career at the FBI.
Lisa Cron (Story Genius) calls this second part the “third rail,” the part that our readers glom onto instantly, the emotional fire that gives your story oomph. This is the crux of storytelling.
In the end, we don’t care what happens.
In the end, we care how people behave and change.
Without the internal aspect of story construction, no one is going to care about your story. You can have the biggest, most epic battle in the history of storytelling. But unless we see how individual people are affected, it’s just cool words on a page – words that may dazzle us with their brilliant prose or wondrous events, but which fail to give us the emotional satisfaction we crave.
So whenever you construct a story – any part, any scene – you need to focus not on the events, but on how those events affect the characters. Ultimately the furniture can be as cool as can be, but we want to read about people (or people-like robots, aliens, sentient tacos, etc.).
Kurt Vonnegut taught that there are only six emotional arcs available in all of storytelling. Wikipedia describes a total of 36 plots available to storytellers. Yet from these simple and repetitive arcs can come the entire range of human emotion.
This post is an excerpt from the forthcoming Maim Your Characters, out September 4th, 2017 from Even Keel Press. If you’d like to read a 100-page sample of the book, click here. If you’d like to preorder signed print or digital copies of the book before 9/4/2017, or claim Executive Producer status of the upcoming Blood on the Page, click here.
xoxo, Samantha Keel
How Plot Differs from Story was originally published on ScriptMedicBlog.com
Content Warning: This post contains numerous references to needles and blood.
Sometimes in our stories, our characters are going to need to give blood. Whether it’s to help an injured family member or a wounded comrade, one of the ways your characters can show their heroism is by giving of themselves, their literal lifeblood, to help another.
Blood donation can also be a way to “save the cat,” a positive act that demonstrates that our character is a kind, compassionate person that the reader should like.
There are two types of blood donation that I’m going to talk about. This post will discuss a typical blood donation, where the character’s blood is tested, a set quantity is drawn off, and the blood is banked. This can be a directed donation for a specific person, typically done in a hospital, or an undirected donation in which a character donates blood for a bank to use later, which is likely to be done at a blood drive.
The second post, which we’ll talk about in the near future, is a person-to-person transfusion, in which one character’s vein is linked to another’s. This is a far more dangerous scenario which is only done in emergencies in an austere environment where hospitals, and blood banks, are not an option.
What Are the Minimum Standards for Donation?
To donate blood, a character must….
- Weigh at least 110 lbs (50kg)
- Be at least 17 years of age
- Have not donated whole blood in the last 56 days (8 weeks)
- Be feeling well and healthy
- Not be taking antibiotics, aspirin related products, or blood thinners
- Not be a male who has had sex with another male in the last year. (The American Red Cross and FDA advocate that gender is self-identified; the ARC has a whole page about LGBT donors located here.)
Full eligibility requirements for the American Red Cross are found here.
What’s the Process Like?
The process for a typical blood donation looks like this:
- The character registers with an intake person. Often they’re offered a “gimme” as an incentive to sign up and donate, such as lip balm or a small book. They’re given a ticket (or have a donor card), which is scanned by a barcode reader.
- They answer a very, very detailed questionnaire, which asks everything from their height and weight, whether a male character has had sex with other men ever, which countries they’ve visited in what timeframe, or whether they’ve ever had a graft of their meninges. These days this is done on a tablet.
- The donor will then wait to see an intake nurse, who performs a few checks. They get their blood pressure taken, their pulse taken, and a fingerstick is performed to check the blood’s concentration (hematocrit).
- The donor will then wait to actually go and donate. When they go in, the nurse taking the blood will ask which arm the donor prefers; usually donors prefer their non-dominant arm.
- The donor will lie down on a cot. The nurse will prepare the supplies, affix pre-printed labels to the bags, and check the character’s name and date of birth.
- The nurse will place a blood pressure cuff on the arm above the selected donation site, which is usually the bend of the elbow, and partially inflate the cuff. The character will be given something to squeeze; a rubber or foam stress ball or a roll wrapped in paper is typical.
- The nurse will insert the needle into the vein, hopefully on the first attempt and hopefully without “fishing.” The needle is fairly large, a 16ga (the smallest IV needle in common use is a 24ga, the largest is a 14ga). and is taped into position. The entry site will be covered with a small piece of gauze and taped down.
- The blood is first sent into a series of tubes for testing. After the vials are drawn, the blood goes down one tube into a small pouch, which is where it’s available to draw from in the blood bank to test for compatibility with recipient blood. After that, blood begins to fill the actual donation bag, which is 500mL in size (or about a pint). During this process the character will be encouraged to squeeze their fist every 5-10 seconds to help improve blood flow.
- Blood donation is timed, for reasons I’m not quite sure of. A healthy donor with good vasculature might complete their donation in about 5-6 minutes, while someone with worse veins might complete theirs in 8-10 minutes.
- Once the donation is complete, the nurse will clamp off the line, retract the needle, and ask the donor to put pressure on the gauze over their insertion site. The nurse will then get a piece of stretchy, self-stick material known in the biz by its original trade name Vetrap, and roll it around the insertion site. The bandage sticks to itself, theoretically not to skin, and can come in a number of colors; on my last donation, it was teal.
- The character will be instructed not to bend over or lift heavy objects for at least 2 hours, to not remove the Vetrap for at least 6 hours, and to increase fluid intake over the next 2 days to compensate for the lost blood volume. They’ll be allowed to lie still if the character feels faint, or sent to sit for a few minutes and recover if they feel well enough to walk. Most donation sites offer juice, water, and snacks — especially cookies — to help restore fluid volume and sugar to the bloodstream.
How Does Blood Donation Feel?
This will vary from donor to donor. Genetic males, and those with larger bodies, typically have a slightly higher blood volume than genetic females, and thus tend to tolerate significant blood loss (such as donation) better, but the effects of donation can be felt by anyone.
It’s very common for donor characters to feel dizzy, lightheaded, or nauseous after a donation. Headaches are quite frequent, and the donor might feel a need to sit down for a prolonged period after the fact. The character might simply feel fine after donation.
Remember that this is fiction, so the effects you choose are up to you. Sometimes the effects are felt more severely the next day than the day of the donation.
It’s common for the needle site to bruise significantly, particularly if the vein was small or the nurse was inexperienced and had to “fish” for a vein. This will start almost immediately after donation and will continue to worsen for an hour or two, then will fade over several days to a week.
So that’s a pretty standard blood donation! Next time in Part 2 we’ll discuss how donor-to-recipient, or direct transfusion works, and how your characters can make it work in dire circumstances!
xoxo, Aunt Scripty
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The Writer’s Guide to Blood Donation Part 1: Typical Donation was originally published on ScriptMedicBlog.com
