Know that you are special and you are loved, not only today but every day! I hope y'all are spending this day with those closest to your heart, and if not, spend this day pampering yourself and doing what you love, you deserve it for being awesome!
july 2nd 2019 - hello, i finished a discovery of witches last night and gave it a 4.5/5 stars i really enjoyed it, the reason why i didn’t give it a full 5/5 stars is because of its problematic aspects and the sometimes stilted dialogues —but that maybe the french translation. otherwise i had a lot of fun reading it, and i’m so glad i gave it a shot. now i’m reading shadow of night and red sister. i’m going to try to focus on red sister a little bit more today because i bought the all souls trilogy on ibooks so i can read them at night which isn’t the case of red sister (yet, lol) anyway, i hope y’all have a lovely day, and happy reading!!! .
It started off in a cafe. I managed to win J over to try a place instead of the usual dingy Costa where the staff knew us by name and is often full, poorly lit, and in the middle of town. I’m not really a middle of town type of girl.
I bought my favourite drink and conversed about God before heading to see the Matisse.
I’m going to start a ‘journal’ for my bachelor thesis process to see how I’m going to do over a longer period of time. Another post about it is going to be uploaded soon. Let me just say that I finally feel ready for doing this. My student exchange has given me tools to work on such a long paper and completely in English, plus some research papers have been published this year which turn out to be very useful. Cheers to graduating before the end of this year!
my physics test went suprisingly good. i am not happy with my result but it was higher than i expected. i expected to be real bad. i think i am still going to retake it.
I must admit, I am somewhat nervous to go back to uni after about 3 years. But I do believe I am well organised, and prepared - not only mentally. So… I also must admit, I am looking forward to this semester. It’s not easy to type these words. But I am good, my life is going well, I will do well, it will be good. It won’t be easy, and I don’t have false expectations.
I can look forward to another first semester, and to next summer which I will hopefully get to spend in Japan again. And if I won’t, I will be spending a few of its late weeks doing my exciting dream job for the first time! No matter the path ahead of me - in the end, it will be good. ☀️
“Today wasn’t the best but I made the best out of today” - @phoebe-does
the quote I picked to motivate me for this week turned out to really fit. i got sick last night and I’m all gross and tired. although i wasn’t able to study i was able to take care of myself.
Woke up a 6:45 to go my spinning class at 7:30. Then I did some reading for my American contract law class and I studied a bit for the bar exam. I went to class in the afternoon and then went textbook shopping for my bar exam oral which is in three weeks. I’ll show you what I got.
I’m trying really hard to stay healthy right now because I have been working so hard for so long now, I feel like I need to stick to a healthy lifestyle for my body to be able to handle it you know ? That means sleep & fruits & home cooked meals & green tea & exercise.
Don’t forget to take care of yourself! We’re all studying a lot and we’re under so much stress and pressure… Remember you’re on the very long long road of success and you need to breathe and stay healthy!
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.
