#injury analysis

This post is an excerpt from Maim Your Characters: How Injuries Work in Fiction. It’s one of nine injury analyses that appear in the book, but this one is near and dear to my heart, especially because you all helped pick it. I asked a couple of months ago for injuries to analyze in fiction, and this one was suggested above all others. I hope it doesn’t disappoint! 

(Image courtesy of Dreamworks) 

Format:Feature Film (animated)
Genre: Action-Adventure / Kids
ealism: Fantasy (high fantasy)

It’s funny. When I put out a call to my readers asking what injuries I should take a look at for this book, I got this kid’s movie as an overwhelmingly popular arc to take a look at. It’s a great representation of disability!

It’s just that everyone suggested specifically the back half of the movie, where a human gets injured.

But I say let’s start from the front and look at both of the arcs in this movie, shall we?

I think everyone forgot the first injury because it happened to a dragon.

How To Train Your Dragon is a Dreamworks movie about a Viking named Hiccup, a chief’s son who’s very… “un-Viking.” As in, he doesn’t want to kill dragons.

Dragons are initially presented as “pests,” but it turns out they’re more than that, they’re a menace: the town of Brunk gets raided, set on fire, all the time.

So here’s an interesting start: the beginning of the movie finds Hiccup working for a disabled blacksmith, who has interchangeable prostheses for his left hand and a peg leg for his right leg. His hand can become anything: a hammer, tongs, even a saw or a battle-axe. Yet his prosthetic leg is just that: a leg, something for him to stand on.

As the blacksmith’s protégé, Hiccup is shown to be a very handy inventor. He makes a mean catapult, and the opening of the movie has him trying to take out a special kind of dragon called a Night Fury. Scary!

To the excitement of all, Hiccup shoots one down! His homemade catapult launches a set of stone balls on a cord, which brings down a Night Fury — a feat no one’s ever accomplished before.

Of course, no one sees him do it, so no one believes him.

But when he goes over to check on the dragon he shot down, it turns out the Night Fury isn’t so tough after all. The beast is tied up in the cords from the weapon Hiccup launched.

In a moment Blake Snyder’s kickass book on storytelling (Save the Cat!) would approve of… Hiccup sets him free!

…and almost gets eaten for his troubles.

But the dragon doesn’tkill him, which is perplexing to Hiccup. After his relief washes away, the ever-curious Hiccup keeps coming back to find out why the dragon hasn’t killed him.

It turns out the dragon — who’s later dubbed Toothless — has an Inciting Injury: one of his tail fins has been ripped off by the accident.

Hiccup has already given him his only Immediate Treatment: he’s cut the ropes that are holding him captive.

But that doesn’t solve Toothless’s flying problems. Toothless is pretty miserable. He has fallen into a ravine he can’t get out of, because his flight trajectories are all messed up by his damaged tail.

The two form a friendship, over fish, over drawings, and Hiccup decides to build him a prosthesis to fix his tail.

This is the first analysis we’ve looked at where the protagonist gives the Definitive Treatment to another character. It’s unconventional, and it’s a risky move on Hiccup’s part, but it gets Toothless back in the air.

Cue the training montage! Hiccup builds a saddle to ride Toothless, and their training forms a Rocky Road to Recovery as they learn to fly together. They train, and Hiccup works through various incarnations of the dragon tail and harness system. They crash, they fly, they crash again, until they get it right.

TheirNew Normal is a great partnership! With Hiccup at the controls of Toothless’s prosthesis, they can fly together. The lessons Toothless teaches Hiccup about the way dragons work make Hiccup a celebrity in his town.

So Toothless’s arc is pretty straightforward…

Toothless’s Injury Arc

 Inciting Injury: Tail fin amputated when he’s shot down by Hiccup.

Immediate Treatment: Freed from the projectile, which had tied him down. (A few days later, but hey, he’s a dragon.)

Definitive Treatment: Prosthetic tail fin made by his human handler.

Rocks on the Rocky Road: Toothless and Hiccup almost fall from the sky a few times during the acclimation process, but the wound itself isn’t the issue that needs discussing.

The Big Test: None. By the time we need Toothless to fight, they’ve already reached the last stage.

And the New Normal? A lasting friendship and partnership, where the two can fly — but only together.

This isn’t the only injury arc the movie has in store for us, however. Later in the plot it’s Hiccup’s turn to be maimed.

In the story’s global climax, Toothless and Hiccup are taking out the mother dragon that’s made all the other dragons behave so badly. Their plan has worked — the other dragon’s gone down and exploded!

But up shoots a wall of fire, Toothless’s prosthesis has been burnt away, and Hiccup falls—

And Toothless, ever the faithful dragon, follows him down.

When they hit the ground, there’s a horrifying moment when we think Toothless has been horribly hurt and Hiccup has been consumed by the flames, until Toothless reveals he’s had Hiccup nested inside his wings.

Hiccup has had an Inciting Injury, though we don’t know what it is until the next scene.

He wakes up at home to Toothless’s cheery face snuffling him like a puppy, and we discover when he tries to stand that his injury has been twofold: a head injury (which explains the time lapse) and a lower leg amputation. He’s got a steel prosthetic foot, a Definitive Treatment for an injury we didn’t know he had. (His Immediate Treatment for the burns and concussion was injury prevention: Toothless wrapped him in his wings so he wouldn’t burn to a crisp on the way down.)

Hiccup gets an absurdly short Rocky Road to Recovery as he tries to walk outside and stumbles — but Toothless lets himself be used as a crutch, and helps his friend learn to walk on his new leg.

However, the two get back to their New Normal pretty quickly. Turns out Hiccup’s blacksmith boss — owner of the peg leg and the prosthetic multitool hand — has built a special harness that will allow Hiccup’s new metal foot to lock in to Toothless’s saddle. They can fly again!

(All of this happens in the span of about two minutes of screen time, which is pretty impressive for a fully-told injury arc! However, this arc is abrupt even for a fantasy movie; the character goes from unconscious and unable to walk to flying a dragon in less time than it takes to brew coffee.)

Hiccup’s injury mirrors Toothless’s…

Hiccup’s Injury Arc

Inciting Injury: Falls through some fire. It’s never explained how, exactly, he comes by his leg amputation or his significant head injury which causes him to wake up at home probably weeks later.

Immediate Treatment: Injury prevention, by Toothless swaddling him as the two plummeted together.

Definitive Treatment: While he was unconscious, his blacksmith boss built him a prosthetic leg. His head injury is completely ignored here; it’s implied that he’s been allowed to rest.

Rocky Road to Recovery: Hiccup has some difficulty walking, but it quickly goes away — the magic of filmmaking! He literally stumbles twice.

(To be fair, we’re talking about a movie with Vikings riding dragons and talking with Scottish accents. Realism isn’t exactly their forte.)

The Big Test:None.

New Normal: Hiccup is back to total functional ability. Because his needs have been fully met, he can continue to walk, fly his dragon, and has no apparent significant changes to his life. This can technically be regarded as Total Disability for the foot, since the foot itself was lost, but as he shows no signs of problems walking or performing his activities, it’s almost a meaningless amputation. Functionally, this is No Disability.

What Can We Learn?

Well, first of all, the injury arc doesn’t have to be about the hero to be a meaningful arc for the audience.

The injured character doesn’t even have to be human.

Second of all… notice a theme?

The blacksmith (the only one in the village who truly believes that Hiccup can become a great Viking, by the way) is disabled. His disability is played almost for laughs; he’s got an interchangeable hand (sometimes tongs, sometimes an axe), but his leg prosthesis is just a piece of wood.

Then Toothless gets hurt — by Hiccup’s hand, an emotional element that’s never fully explored. Should Hiccup feel guilty about shooting down what turns out to be a gentle, playful, kind creature?

But Toothless has an injury that’s a parallel to a leg amputation: one of his tail fins is missing, making his usual form of locomotion impossible.

While Toothless is canonically a dragon, he’s modeled very much like a dog in his actions and behaviors: his loyalty, his curiosity, his initial standoffishness that becomes a fierce friendship. Hiccup, seeing this metaphorical dog metaphorically limping, helps.

It’s through his kindness to his companion that Hiccup learns how to save his people — and does just that in the end. Seeing Hiccup’s example of kindness and understanding toward


the once-feared creatures causes a realization in his people: that humans and dragons can coexist peacefully, that each can benefit the other. Hiccup and the Vikings help rid the dragons of an evil overlord, and the dragons stop raiding the village and stealing the sheep.

Hiccup is himself injured near the end as a parallel injury. Thus, the blacksmith, Toothless, and Hiccup all find themselves depending on their prosthetics to move through the world as they once did. The parallelism is phenomenal!

There’s even a moment of kindness repaid: It’s Hiccup who’s taught Toothless to fly again, and it’s Toothless who helps Hiccup walk again.

Now, how can we all learn to incorporate that kind of parallelism into our stories?

It’s also a great example of the Big Battle having consequences — Hiccup’s wound isn’t timed so that his Big Event will coincide with the climax, but so that the climax will be his Inciting Injury.

My one criticism of the film (from an injury arc perspective) is the way in which Hiccup’s arc is shortened.

He remains unconscious for what must have been weeks of sailing home and fitting him for his prosthesis — his smithy mentor has even designed and built a wholly new flight apparatus for Toothless so they can fly again right away.

In terms of time, it takes weeks for a stump to heal enough to accept a prosthetic, and weeks again for the amputee to learn to walk, instead of literally seconds of film time. However, since this is in the denoument of the film, it’s much less irritating than it would be if, say, it had happened before the Big Battle and Hiccup had been on his feet again for the fight.

This post is an excerpt from Maim Your Characters, out THIS WEEK from Even Keel Press. If you’d like to read a 100-page sample of the book, [click here]. If you’d like to order a print copy, it’s available [via Amazon.com], and digital copies are available from [a slew of retailers].

It’s not too late to receive the bonus content for Maim Your Characters!

With three extra injury analyses like this and the official ScriptMedic Character Injury Worksheet, plus a copy to keep of the 5 Biggest Mistakes Writers Make Approaching Injuries. Just email a copy of your receipt for the book to AuntScripty{at}gmail{dot}com and I’ll be happy to send your bonus content right along! 

xoxo, Aunt Scripty

Today’s post is an excerpt from my upcoming book Maim Your Characters: How Injuries Work in Fiction. What follows is one of the nine injury analyses which appear in the book. 

Those who preorder the book, or who email me their receipt for a copy purchased from any retailer between 9/4/2017 and 9/11/2017 ( AuntScripty {at} gmail {dot} com ), will receive a package of bonus materials including three additional injury analyses and the official ScriptMedic injury worksheet.

The additional analyses are: John Silver’s amputation in Black Sails, Root’s transcendence into a demigod in Person of Interest, and the injury that changes the course of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

Misery, by Stephen King

Format: Novel (Also a feature film)
Genre:Horror
Reality:Realism

We’ve been citing Misery as an example throughout this book, and now is the time to bring it all together.

 TheInciting Injury happens off-page and before the opening scene of the novel. Writer Paul Sheldon finishes his latest novel, a work he hopes will take him from being a Genre Hack to a Respected Author. Having finished his book, Paul drives off to take his manuscript to his publisher… and gets caught in a blizzard. He crashes his car into a ditch and is severely injured.

Paul’s legs are both broken, and he suffers a significant concussion and probable traumatic brain injury, though there’s little evidence of this other than his lapsed memory of the first days of his recovery.

The brilliance of Stephen King is in his slow exposition of the arc. We learn this story in bits and pieces as the story goes on.

We learn later, for example, about the Immediate Treatment Annie Wilkes offered Paul when she “rescued” him from his car crash: she pulled him from his car in the middle of the blizzard, threw him on the backseat of her pickup like a gunnysack, and drove him to her house for care. (Annie is a once-upon-a-time nurse, who we later learn was barred from practicing after her patients kept dying suspiciously.)

As for her so-called Definitive Treatment for Paul Sheldon’s mangled legs… well, she splints his legs (badly), ignoring the most severe injuries (his broken hips). She also allows him time to rest, letting him sleep through the worst of the pain and the recovery.

Crucially for the addiction plot of the novel, she also force-feeds him Novril, a fictional painkiller that is supposed to be the allegory of codeine.

In fact, when we meet Paul, he is already deep in the throes of the Novril addiction, and numerous times we see his agony multiply without his medication. We see him force his way out of his room — risking his life, given that he’s held hostage — to get Novril. His addiction sets in deep, and it doesn’t let go.

The entire book’s present tense is set in the Rocky Road to Recovery, where Paul is recuperating from his injuries, and the stumbling blocks on that road to recovery are staggeringly huge. In fact, those stumbling blocks are the plot points of the novel; the injury plot and the global plot are one and the same.

For one, he’s not getting proper physical therapy, so Paul never recovers to the point of being able to walk.

For another, he’s got the nasty Novril addiction to fight.

For a third, his captor is demanding he write her a novel all her own — meaning that he must be moved to a wheelchair well before he’s ready, and endure the pain of sitting with broken hips and legs. He must endure this for hours while he fights to write a novel she won’t kill him over.

Of course, the villain adds new injuries to the mix…

Annie Wilkes amputates his left foot with an axe, in a fit of rage over something Paul’s done. (In the movie, Annie, played by the brilliant Kathy Bates, hobbles Paul with a sledgehammer.)

Later, she cuts off his thumb, again for disobedience.

(While it’s tempting to see these as separate injury events, they function more as stumbling blocks in his global injury/recovery arc; although they’re mentioned, and the psychological impacts are profound, Sheldon’s story is more about his overall disability and the pickle it puts him in than the individual pieces that go wrong.)

To make matters worse, Paul develops an infection in his kidneys toward the end of the book.

But come the Big Test, the big break where Sheldon escapes Annie’s wrath… well, that’s a trial, isn’t it? The woman has already killed a state trooper and outsmarted a half-dozen others.

Paul Sheldon has to take her down — mangled legs and all.

The image of Paul force-feeding Annie Wilkes burning pages of the manuscript she made him write is forever seared in the consciousness of anyone who reads the book (or watches the brilliant movie adaptation). Moreover, in spite of it all, Paul overcomes a formidable opponent with the tools he’s managed to wheedle from her: a typewriter, a stack of pages, a stolen can of lighter fluid, and a single match.

From an injury arc perspective? Well, in the struggle, Paul is forced to crawl on the floor. Annie grabs his still-healing stump and squeezes. He also gets glass in his arm from a broken champagne bottle.

He spends the end of the climax crawling to a closet looking for Novril, taking a small fistful before passing out. Later, when he wakes up, he’s rescued by cops coming to interview Annie Wilkes.

In the New Normal, set nine months after his experience in Annie Wilkes’ hell house, Paul has had to undergo a reinjury (the rebreaking of his legs to allow them to heal properly this time), but now he’s at least walking; King graces us with the Clack… clack… clack… of his two walking sticks.

In fact, it becomes a horror refrain, as Paul is thinking about Annie even now. In his moments of terror in the hell house, he saw Annie everywhere: behind couches and doors… (His fear is unfounded; he’s really seeing a cross-eyed Siamese named Dumpster.)

So his New Normal is, despite everything, one of only partial disability: he can walk, on crutches, with the hope for better ability through further rehabilitation.

Now, as to Sheldon’s psychology…

Sheldon is an interesting case study for recovery because he has only one person to help him, and she’s the villain of the story, plain as day. While his (partial) recovery is in her interest — he has to be healthy enough to write for her, after all — it’s certainly not in her interest to have him recover fully.

So Paul spends the book in the space between absolutely brokenandcompletely well, and will spend the rest of his life in that space — remember his amputations.

His addiction to Novril is his addiction to a few things: not only painless existence, but sleep and retreat.

The Injury Arc

 Inciting Injury: Paul breaks his legs and hips in a nasty car crash.

Immediate Treatment: He’s rescued from the snowbank by his Number One Fan, Annie Wilkes.

Definitive Treatment: Annie has splinted Paul’s legs (badly), and he’s given time to recover in bed.

Rockson the Rocky Road to Recovery: Paul must contend with a painkiller addiction, an evil captor (who is also an Angel of Death), he endures two new amputations, he’s got terrible pain, UTIs, and he must write through the pain and against
the clock.

The Big Test: Paul must kill Annie Wilkes before she kills him. He succeeds!

The New Normal: Paul has Some Disability later on. (He actually lives through a medical reInjury, briefly summed up in the last chapter: his doctors have to rebreak his legs to let them set correctly.)

What Can We Learn?

First of all, let’s just say it: none of us are ever going to write a novel as absolutely brilliant as Misery. I’m pretty sure it can’t be done. King is a bona fide genius, and that’s all there is on the topic.

What can we take away? How can we write a story likeMisery?

Well…

For starters, look at how King used disability, not only by itself, but as a way to entrap his character. Annie Wilkes needs no chains to keep Paul Sheldon trapped in her house. She’s got his broken legs — and she can keep taking pieces of him any time she wants.

In fact, that’s one of the terrifying things about the story: there is alwaysanother level to sink to, whether it’s psychological or physical, always some fresh horror that can be visited upon Paul. Even when he leaves her custody he’s terrified.

But this can be seen from an opposite and empowering perspective: don’t discount the disabled hero! Paul still manages to kill Annie with what she’s given him (and what he’s stolen): a manuscript, a match, a typewriter, and some lighter fluid, in spite of all the crash and her wrath inflict upon his body. Go Paul!

Also, especially if it’s a one-off book, don’t be afraid to let your character be disabled in the end! Sheldon might be walking, but he’s walking on crutches. That’s okay — in fact, it’s perfectly appropriate. 

This post is an excerpt from the forthcomingMaim 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 and get your free bonus content, or claim Executive Producer status of the upcoming Blood on the Page, click here.

xoxo, Aunt Scripty