Here’s something that’s fast to learn, easy to remember, and that will help your writing immensely.
Keep descriptor words (adjectives and their ilk) close to the things they’re describing. This improves the clarity of your writing and helps to keep your writing concise.
Examples:
What not to do: “Angelina groped for the edge of the door dazedly.”
What to do: “Angelina dazedly groped for the edge of the door.”
Remember - you know what’s going on as you write. The reader doesn’t. So simply keeping descriptors close to what they’re describing makes for much clearer writing.
let your character fuck up. please.let them fuck up on a scale so massive that this particular thing cannot be salvaged. let their fuck up have permanent consequences. and stoooooooooooooooop having them being the smartest person in the room who always has a sharp comeback to put their enemies down, and who always handles their enemies with grace or at least an air of superiority that s justified because they’re so cool and smart and clever™
let them bleed for their mistakes, let them MAKE those mistakes, and let that bleeding be ugly and disgraceful. let them suffer for their own mistakes, and let them suffer in knowing that they cannot fix. and let other people hate them for the shit they’ve done, and for once let the haters not be ‘petty bad people’.
THAT FIRST SITE IS EVERY WRITER’S DREAM DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY TIMES I’VE TRIED WRITING SOMETHING AND THOUGHT GOD DAMN IS THERE A SPECIFIC WORD FOR WHAT I’M USING TWO SENTENCES TO DESCRIBE AND JUST GETTING A BUNCH OF SHIT GOOGLE RESULTS
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.
[Image Description: Four color blocks in a vertical row in alternating orange and black with white text that reads “It’s okay if your labels change / it’s okay if they stay the same / labels were made to make you feel more comfortable about yourself / use whatever labels fit you best or use none at all, it’s your choice”]
I’m afraid I’ll do it wrong. You probably will. That’s what research and sensitivity readers are for. Asking me, a white person, if you, a white person, will write POC wrong is actually the least helpful thing you can do. Look up what people in whatever specific group (race, religion, ethnic group, gender identity, sexuality, disability, etc.) have said about what they want to see more and less of. Look up what they’ve said about how they want people to write about them. Write what they’ve said they don’t want people outside of their community to write about. Find a sensitivity reader. Fix what you wrote. Find a different sensitivity reader. Get multiple inputs.
I’m afraid people will accuse me of doing it wrong. They will. Not everyone will like your writing. It happens. Write it as best you can, as respectfully as you can, and be prepared for not everyone to like it.
I don’t know if I’m allowed to. You’re allowed to do anything. Nobody can stop you from writing whatever you want. There are some things that people in a group want people not in the group not to write (certain tragedy narratives, about specifically holding that identity, etc.), and you should look into and be respectful of that, but there is no “allowed” or “not allowed” when it comes to writing.
I feel like I have to put in diversity for diversity’s sake. If you feel like you’re putting certain characters in just so you can claim that your story is diverse, you’re probably doing it wrong. Your characters will probably not be good examples of representation, they will feel forced, and it will look like bad writing.
I feel like I have too much diversity. You don’t. Life is diverse. The world is diverse. People with certain identities flock together. Gay people hang out with bisexual people and trans people and pansexual people and asexual people because they all have the shared identity of being not cis/straight. People make friends inside of their race and outside of it. Mentally ill people often make friends with other mentally ill people because they find it easier to connect with and understand each other. A cis straight white Christian man from New Jersey is no more or less diverse than a black asexual trans Muslim woman from Nigeria. People are not inherently diverse. Groups can be diverse. Communities can be diverse. But straight is just as much of an identity as gay is, so don’t feel like you’re giving a character “too many identities”.
I am not the arbiter of what you can or can’t write. In the end, I’m not the one who decides what you can or should write, and I shouldn’t be the one you go to when it comes to deciding what is okay for you to write. Check out @writingwithcolor. Look at blogs about certain specific identities. If they accept questions, ask them. Respectfully. Someone has probably had a similar question to yours before, and they’ve probably gotten an answer. And if they haven’t, find someone who holds the identity you’re wondering about.
But first, do your own research. See what might be the toxic places, the bruised spots that you shouldn’t poke at. Figure out your own biases, don’t ask other people to figure them out for you. Learn your own limitations. If you don’t think you can do a story justice, consider why you want to write it.
“Do you have any advice for writing dual timelines?”
As a matter of fact, I do.
1. Stay Organized. It is so easy to get lost in when things happen chronologically when you’re skipping around so it’s often a good idea to make a chart, like my example below. This is pretty basic, but you get the idea. Then you can see what order things are happening in both in your story and in the timeline. You can modify this format to fit other situations.
2. Be clear what is happening when. You don’t have to say, “In the spring of 1812,” every time you’re going back to that timeline, but try to make it clear which timeline you’re on. The easiest way I’ve seen this done is when the author starts pretty quickly talking about the unique issue, or key words, of the time it’s flipped back to and marked it with either the start of new chapter or a break in the chapter.
3. Use flipping back and forth to your advantage! If you’re switching between two timelines and the last scene was super suspenseful, that tension can carry over to the next scene set on the other timeline. It can make a scene that is very subtle stand out. You can also use the two timelines to work on pacing and when important information might be given to the reader, like in the example I gave with the made-up murder mystery above. Something in the past might not seem like a clue until it’s told in the right way at the right moment in the story and it can make all the difference for the reader.
Please, if you’ve ever needed editing or just have a spare $5 to donate, I need to see my psychiatrist desperately and maybe start seeing a therapist again.
I don’t know
I’m sorry I’m this way and I have to ask for help. But I’m not doing well right now and I have nobody else I can ask. My roommate is probably about to kick me out too. So maybe I shouldn’t even ask for help, maybe I should just go straight to the nearest homeless shelter and give up.
Whatever, I’m just ranting now. The short of it is I’m not okay so. Here’s the link if you have like a dollar you want to blow on someone like me.
paypal.me/legitwritingtips
Still need to try and get to my doc, but I just wanted to be sure you guys know I’m feeling better now after talking to some close friends. Thanks for your support.
[Image Description: Four color blocks in a vertical row in alternating orange and black with white text that reads “It’s okay if your labels change / it’s okay if they stay the same / labels were made to make you feel more comfortable about yourself / use whatever labels fit you best or use none at all, it’s your choice”]
This is true. Please learn this, writers. Or unlearn the two spaces thing I guess?
I wanted to elucidate this topic a little more since there were a lot of responses and a bit of confusion.
The only Style Guide that still recommends the use of two spaces is APA (the American Psychological Association). Those interested in book publishing are typically meant to follow the CMS (Chicago Manual of Style), which has done away with the two spaces after a period rule.
So this goes beyond personal preference. If you intend to publish or send a manuscript off to an agent, publisher, etc., do not include two spaces after a period.
Those who want to know why this is a rule in the first place - I’ll just leave this link here.
First off, let me be clear about what I mean when I say the word scars. I’m not talking about the medical definition: rough tissue that overlies a wound as it heals over time.
I’m using a broader definition of any physical evidence of a previous injury.
That can be the amputated hand, the limp from a spinal cord injury.
It can also include tattoos. (Maui’s moving tattoos in Moana are a perfect example of this: his tattoos are a physical embodiment of where he’s been.)
Scars, by this broad definition, are an interesting shorthand for a story, whether we actually see that tale or not. We use them as a way to say there’s a story here. Sometimes our global story gives us the chance to tell it, sometimes not; either way, scars can be an interesting way to add depth to a character.
In fact, sometimes a scar is integral to explaining and understanding who that character is.
For example, we know that Peter Pan’s Captain Hook has been involved in some fierce battles, because he lost his hand – and had it replaced with his legendary pirate hook. That hook is a symbol of the cold cruelty he now gives off.
The eponymous Harry Potter wouldn’t truly be Harry without his lightning-bolt forehead scar. For Harry, it’s not just about his past, it’s about his future: his fate and the fate of the scar-giver are intertwined, a battle that will determine the fate of the world. Worse, it’s all inscribed on his forehead, for everyone to see.
Darth Vader’s scars in Star Wars are extensive, so much so that they shroud his identity completely. While we see the faces of the heroes, and even of Emperor Palpatine himself, Vader’s wounds require a respirator mask that obscures his face and makes him the terrifying villain he is. He’s actually turned the support system he needs to stay alive – a depersonalizing suit and respirator – into something useful, a mask to terrify his enemies. Vader’s life is, in some ways, enhancedby his disability, and he’s certainly comfortable moving in his world with the scars he’s got.
InMoana, the demigod Maui’s scars are branded on him as tattoos. These are the stories of who he’s been and where he goes. When hero-protagonist Moana asks him where they come from, he tells her, “They show up when I earn them.”
This isn’t dissimilar to the battle scars on an old soldier, sailor, or mercenary: their wounds are manifested on their flesh.
But if scars are shorthand for a story, if they’re someone’s past writ large, we need to honor that character in the way we represent them. If we elect to give a character scars, they should represent not a plot but a story, something that not only wounds the character but drives them to change internally.
As an example, I’m going to tell you the story of two of my personal scars. At the end we’ll discuss which one would go into a story about me, and why.
Scar #1: The Knife Point. When I was six or seven, I was trying to get some corn off the cob — I wanted to eat it in kernel form for some reason, and I was using a kitchen knife. I got the corn off all right — and drove the point of the knife straight into the webbing between my thumb and forefinger on my left hand. Ouch!
(Actually, it didn’t hurt, it was the sheer volume of blood that was terrifying).
I changed in that I learned not to do that specific task (cutting corn off the cob) that specific way (driving the knife toward my hand).
But it’s not a marker of who I am.
Scar #2: The Bite Mark. Let’s consider another scar, also on my left hand. There’s an old bite mark by the heel of my hand, at the base of my left thumb.
It happened like this: I was fifteen or so, and my neighbor’s dog, Clancy, wasn’t doing well. He was old and he was sick. That day he had become too sick to get up. It was time for my neighbor to take him to the vet and say goodbye.
She had him on a blanket. But he was a big dog, and the vet was far, and she didn’t have a car, and so our neighbor came to ask me and my mom to help get him to the vet. Of course we said yes. We liked her, but more importantly, we loved animals. (Both my mother and I had worked at the vet at one point or another.)
When we went to move him by picking up the blanket and moving him to the car, Clancy reached out and bit me. Not because he was a bad dog, not because he was out to hurt me. He bit me because he was scared and sick and hurt and he didn’t know what to do.
I didn’t feel anger at Clancy, and I didn’t turn afraid of him. I felt sympathy. His act hurt my skin. His pain broke my heart.
So when we got him to the vet, while they were easing his pain and saying goodbye, I calmly and quietly washed my wound in the sink with an antiseptic.
I learned something about myself in that moment.
I learned that healing really is a calling for me. That I was glad we had cared for him and that I was able to help him on his final journey. I was glad to know Clancy. I wasn’t mad, or hurt, even though my hand stung from the antiseptic.
That scar helped me find my internal true north.
Now, which of those scars has meaning? Which of them would you want to include if you were writing me as a character? Which do you think would make it into a memoir, if I wrote one? It’s most certainly the second, the one that helped me figure out who I am, the one that drove me to learn about myself. The first is something that happened; the second is something that changed me.
It’s stories like these that you should use in order to figure out who your characters are – and how to honor them.
Let’s Talk Tattoos.
Tattoos are interesting in that they canbe another, more interesting set of shorthand. Unless your character has a Maui-like situation going on, her tattoos won’t simply appear. She’ll not only have to choose what story she wants to represent on her flesh, but she’ll have to choose how to express that story in an image. Then comes the pain of the ritual scarification: the injection of ink under the skin, a microbaptism in pain and blood and pigment.
Tattoos are absolutely fascinating. Because they don’t typically connect to physical wounds so much as to emotional ones, they’re a really great piece of shorthand for getting into the depths of who someone truly is.
My own tattoos are direct messages to myself about how I should live in the world. They’re an easily visible piece of guidance that explores what my role is and should be in the world.
Of course, not all tattoos have this deeper meaning. People choose to tattoo things on themselves for a hundred different reasons, the aesthetics of the design being one of them. Some tattoos are simply trendy. I’m not here to judge anyone’s ink!
But if you’re going to cover a character in tattoos, consider having each of them explore a deeper facet of that character’s personality and the journey they’ve been on.
How to Use Scars Effectively
As we said above, scars are a shorthand for a story. Prominent scars, particular facial or obvious hand scars, are a constant source of tension and questions. When someone has a big scar on their face, we find our eyes drawn to it, a question forming on our tongue: What happened?
But the What happened? isn’t as important as How did it change you? And so my general recommendation with scars is twofold and contradictory:
One: only introduce scars if it’s an incredibly important part of a character’s past.
Two: only introduce scars if it’s an incredibly important part of a character’s future.
So why the two recommendations? Why the contradiction?
Characters are constantly moving, if not in space, then through time. Their scars shape their past, which shapes where they are now and where they’re going.
If a scar is germane to a character’s past, it helps establish where they’re coming from and what their experiences have been.
But those experiences are only important if that scar-causing event is relevant to their future.
The scar a sea captain got fending off pirates once upon a time doesn’t have much to add if his current quest is finding new plumbing for his house. His scar isn’t relevant, unless it intimidates the shady plumber into giving him a better price. Even then, it’s a shallow connection.
Consider the old injury (and its scar) to be a cause.
Ask: what was the effect? If your character got a scar on their eyebrow from a bike accident when she was seven, that scar doesn’t mean anything… unless that was the bike accident where she failed to protect and save her kid brother, which makes her overprotective and hypercautious now.
If she crashed her bike as a kid and merely went on with her life… what was the point? Why tell that story with a scar so visible?
Remember that the point of a story is that people change. If a scar doesn’t fundamentally shape a character, consider simply leaving it out. Window dressing is just that: window dressing.
What we want is to give more insight into who your character is.
Avoiding Wandering Scar Syndrome
Wandering Scar Syndrome is when a character’s scar is on their left eye on Page 3 and their right cheek on Page 12. It’s simply a symptom of not taking good notes.
There are two techniques I’m going to suggest here.
The first is, keep character sheets. Many writers choose to do this, many do not. But especially if you’re going to wallpaper your character with scars and tattoos, it’s worth writing down where they are and what they look like. In fact, copy/pasting the way they were originally described into a separate document is particularly helpful in being sure your descriptions stay consistent throughout the story. It’s a pain in the butt for a moment, but it helps so much with consistency down the line!
Another option is to use [brackets] as an aside.
What do I mean?
Let’s say you talk about a minor character in two different places in the story, chapters — even acts apart.
Kitty Scarborough was the best fighter in town, and she bore the scars to prove it. [Kitty Scar Description — line on her face?] Or,[scarTK]
TK is the editor’s mark for To Come, a placeholder of sorts, and it’s useful for all kinds of things: Name TK, Dog Breed TK, Red sports car [make/model TK], etc. (Once upon a time, this book was litteredwithTKs .)
Later, we can pull it back up: A tall redhead walked through the door. Kitty Scarborough was easy to recognize, especially by her [Kitty Scar Description].
Why does this work? Why is this helpful?
Because it allows us to maintain flow as a writer. If we know Kitty’s got scars from fighting, we can come up with what exactly those look like later. (We’re using them as evidence of her toughness and battle prowess, not for a particular meaning behind each individual scar she’s got.) So when we describe Kitty, we don’t need to spend ten minutes racking our brain for a cool scar to give her — we can do that later. All we need to drop into our first draft is [Kitty scar] and we can move on!
This works for all sorts of details, from car models to hair colors to background characters’ names, so don’t think it’s just a scar locater!
Later on we can come back, look through our manuscript with the magical Find tool, and simply search for that left bracket, [ . Anything that comes up can be filled in with your text!
This post is an excerpt from Maim Your Characters, out TODAY 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].
acespecs and arospecs are allowed to want and be in sexual or romantic relationships
acespecs and arospecs are also allowed to be completely, totally unavailable for sexual or romantic stuff with anyone, and are allowed to consider their orientation sufficient reason for why not
both of these statements still apply whether or not we’re “attractive” by conventional beauty standards or “unattractive” by said flawed standards
