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    10 B.S. Medical Tropes that Need to Die Today: The ScriptMedic Guides, #0
    10 B.S. Medical Tropes that Need to Die Today: The ScriptMedic Guides, #0
    10 B.S. Medical Tropes that Need to Die Today: The ScriptMedic Guides, #0
    Ebook66 pages52 minutes

    10 B.S. Medical Tropes that Need to Die Today: The ScriptMedic Guides, #0

    By Samantha Keel

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    About this ebook

    These Tropes Must Die.

    Written by a paramedic and writer with a decade of experience, 10 BS Medical Tropes covers exactly that: cliched and inaccurate tropes that not only ruin books, they have the potential to hurt real people in the real world.

    In this book, you’ll discover why these ten clichés make readers throw their books across the room and their remotes at their TVs, from the ever-present “gunshot to the shoulder” to the ubiquitous “knocking out the henchmen.” You’ll learn why they’re so incorrect, with easy-to-read medical explanations that may just spark your creativity. But more importantly, you’ll be inspired about what to write instead, to solve the same plot point challenges in more believable—and interesting—ways!

    Download 10 BS Medical Tropes that Need to Die… TODAY!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEven Keel Press
    Release dateMay 30, 2017
    ISBN9781386566335
    10 B.S. Medical Tropes that Need to Die Today: The ScriptMedic Guides, #0

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      Book preview

      10 B.S. Medical Tropes that Need to Die Today - Samantha Keel

      Introduction

      You know, writers make make a lot of miskates. We all do! My fiction is littered with them.

      Some are about characterizations. Some are continuity errors — the scar on Page 3 moves from the shoulder to the eyebrow by Page 24, or the sidekick’s name changes abruptly in Chapter 7. And occasionally there’s a plot hole big enough to drive an ambulance through.

      But some of them go deeper. Some mistakes break the fragile relationship between fiction and reality. Readers suspend their disbelief because we tether our stories to the real world enough to keep it feeling real. When that tether is broken – especially when something should have consequences and doesn’t – it destroys that precious contract you’ve made with the reader.

      And we’ve become so used to some of those mistakes that we’ve become culturally inured to them.

      To give you a rough example, let’s take James Bond.

      According to a count by The Guardian, James Bond has killed over 360 people in his movie career — oftentimes in a silly, downright cartoonish manner. By anyone’s count he’s a mass murderer — even a serial killer — but because the relationship between cause (homicide) and effect (guilt, prosecution, shame, self-doubt, PTSD,…) has been broken, we don’t get to see that side of him. The audience gets cheated out of understanding that story. Bond doesn’t change because of his kills.

      If you’re looking for books, look at Jack Reacher. Jack Reacher’s MO is that he walks into a town, finds something atrocious, kills almost everyone, and leaves town.

      No manhunt. No chase. No FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. Just murder after murder.

      (If you want to see this done right, take a look at a Dashiell Hammett story called The Red Harvest in his anthology The Big Knockover, where hard-boiled detective The Continental Op confesses that he thinks he’s going blood simple from juggling death and destruction all the time – and killing lots of bad guys.)

      Ultimately, 10 Tropes is about cause and effect.

      Cause: A character takes an action.

      Effect: That action must have consequences in order to mean anything.

      Because Bond’s kills don’t change him, don’t change the world, ultimately they’re meaningless.

      And because a major act, like killing, has become meaningless, the story holds little emotional weight.

      We suspend our disbelief in Bond because it’s a cool story.

      We ignore what should happen to Jack Reacher because it’s a gore-fest of murder.

      But what of the gravitas? What if you want your story to have consequences? What if you want your audience totally immersed in the world and story you’ve built?

      What if you want your readers to say, This is how it really works?

      Then this book is for you.

      What It Is

      This book is a collection of tropes and cliches about injuries, illnesses, hospitals, or medical events that I’ve come across over the last thirty-odd years I’ve been on this earth. Specifically, it’s a list of tropes that are BS: fake, madeup, overfictionalized, or just plain wrong.

      But don’t worry! I’m here to help, by giving you alternatives. I want to tell you what to do instead.

      Who am I to tell you ANYTHING?

      My name is Samantha Keel.

      I’ve been running the ScriptMedic blog since 2016. The blog has helped almost 10,000 writers improve their craft and their accuracy when writing about injuries, illnesses, medical staff, and medical settings.

      On the Internet, I’m affectionately known as Aunt Scripty.

      In the real world, I’m a paramedic and critical care paramedic, and board-certified as a flight medic. When someone calls 911 for chest pain or a car crash or a stabbing, I go out into the field, treat and stabilize the damaged and dying, and bring them to the ER alive. When a patient needs to be transferred to an ICU across town stat and stabilized on the way, I’m on the job.

      I’ve been doing this for over a decade, and I’ve got the knowledge and the resources to help you get the medical parts of your stories right.

      So I urge you:

      Before your main character hits another henchman over the head.

      Before you resort to Amnesia! to fix your plot.

      Before one more character utters the words He’s going into shock! or We have to get the bullet out!

      Read this

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