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Maim Your Characters: The ScriptMedic Guides, #1
Maim Your Characters: The ScriptMedic Guides, #1
Maim Your Characters: The ScriptMedic Guides, #1
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Maim Your Characters: The ScriptMedic Guides, #1

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Increase Realism.
Raise the Stakes.
Tell Better Stories.

Maim Your Characters is the definitive guide to using wounds and injuries to their greatest effect in your story. Learn not only the six critical parts of an injury plot, but more importantly, how to make sure that the injury you’re inflicting matters.

With in-depth analysis of nine different injury plots in popular fiction and a walkthrough of how to build your own, this book is the guide to using injuries in your story. Written by a paramedic with a decade of experience, Maim Your Characters will teach you what to do — and what not to.

This book also includes a sneak preview of the upcoming Blood on the Page, a book of injuries to incorporate into your tales. If Maim Your Characters is the how and why of injuring characters, then Blood on the Page is the what

Are you ready.... to Maim Your Characters?

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 4, 2017
ISBN9781386796718
Maim Your Characters: The ScriptMedic Guides, #1

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    Maim Your Characters - Samantha Keel

    Maim Your Characters

    How Injuries Work in Stories

    Increase Realism.

    Raise the Stakes.

    Tell Better Stories.

    A ScriptMedic Guide

    by

    Samantha Keel

    Even Keel Press logo

    Even Keel Press

    Disclaimer

    This book and all information contained within it ARE NOT intended to diagnose or treat any medical condition. This information is not to be construed as medical advice.

    This book’s purpose is to give writers a more realistic glimpse into the way bodies, injuries, and healthcare providers actually work, and the treatment that theoretical, fictional characters may or may not receive. Much of the information is my best guess and what I can learn from (necessarily) brief research. Do not do this shit at home.

    If you choose to ignore the fact that this book is intended to discuss fictional, not-real, hypothetical medical situations, by reading it, you agree to hold me completely blameless in any consequences that should occur.

    Do not read this and think that you can save a life in the street, or that you can avoid seeing your doctor because I said so, or that you can treat anything whatsoever. I will laugh at you. If you have a medical emergency, call 911 (or the emergency services number in your area). If you are sick, go see a doctor. Do not try to treat yourself or anyone else based on anything in this book.

    This eBook expresses my views alone and does not reflect the views of any employer, agency, hospital, or training organization where I have worked or trained.

    Seriously, folks. Please don’t sue me. That would suck.

    Part 1: Welcome to Maim Your Characters

    1.1: Introduction

    June, 2017. Location Undisclosed.

    My name is Samantha Keel, and I want to help you write better stories.

    This book was born in the parking lot of my old EMS station on a rainy day in October of 2016. I was staring down the throat of another long, difficult day at work and thinking about my life.

    The truth is that I’m a paramedic because I got lost on my way to medical school.

    The truth is I absolutely loved where I ended up.

    But sitting in that parking lot, I was thinking back further. Deeper. Thinking about who I am and what I love. Buried among all the things that I love, I kept coming back to two fundamental truths: I love to help patients. I also love to tell stories.

    (I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was tiny.)

    The one pebble rattled around my skull, and so did the other. Then they touched, and they sparked, and I had an idea: I could teach writers how to get the medical aspects of their stories right, from injuries and illnesses to medical staff and facilities.

    In less than an hour the ScriptMedic blog was born.

    The idea, as far as I can tell, is a fairly novel one, and it caught on like wildfire.

    If this were a movie, this is where we’d see the training montage: the blogger building her page, reaching out. Finding hope from a mentor (in my blog’s first week, Neil Gaiman was kind enough to tell me that it was a good idea and to have fun with it. It is, and I am, and I’m eternally grateful.)

    There were posts that echoed around Tumblr (one over 15,000 times). Within 8 months I had over 10,000 rabid readers consuming my posts.

    There was a terrifying blitz when 30 bloggers decided, independently and within 72 hours of each other, to mimic my blog for their own area of expertise.

    That deluge of bloggers were soon forged by the fire of organization (and a little drama) into an actual bound-for-goodness family, with bloggers I’ve never met as some of my closest friends.

    This book was born as a part of that glorious happy mess in that dismal parking lot in ██████, ██. Because in a way, this book is one facet of the soul of ScriptMedic.

    The general mission of ScriptMedic is to give writers a better understanding of the way medicine works.

    The specific mission of ScriptMedic is to help writers tell better stories.

    This book is, to date, the best way I can think of to accomplish that second mission.

    So sit back, grab a warm beverage (or a cold one, if that’s your speed), and buckle up. Let’s turn on the lights, set the sirens to Stun, and maim some characters!

    1.2 How This Book Works

    This book is going to teach you how to use injuries effectively in your stories.

    We’re going to start by deconstructing what a story is, starting by breaking down the five pieces that make a story work.

    Then we’re going to look at how that structure works for injury plots.

    We’re going to look at a Beginning, a Middle and an End, and break those down into six easy-to-consider sections. One of them is even optional!

    We’re going to talk about some ancillary issues, like minor injuries, scars, and injury psychology. We’re going to talk about pain, and how to write about it, too.

    We’re going to talk about the relationship between injuries and genre.

    We’re going to break down some famous (and less-famous) examples of fictional injury plots to see what works and what doesn’t.

    We’re going to walk through how to build your own injury plot in a way that’s accurate and respectful to those who may be living with the injuries you seek to give your characters. I even provide a smorgasbord of ideas to get your brain brewing, and a follow-along guide to injury creation.

    Before we begin, though, I want to set some expectations.

    This book won’t fix a story that’s broken overall. (If you need that kind of advice, pick up a copy of On Writing (Stephen King), The Story Grid (Shawn Coyne), or Story Genius (Lisa Cron). All three are brilliant in their own way, and all of them can help you tell better stories.)

    There’s one other point to consider: even the best-constructed injury plot isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on or the pixels it occupies if we don’t care about the characters.

    1.3 Why Should You Maim Your Characters?

    There are a great many reasons to injure a character in your story, and a near-infinite variety of ways to do it.

    In fact, there are probably as many whys as there are hows. Heroes are constantly facing obstacles: psychological, emotional, social, political. Mountains to cross and dragons to slay, lovers to woo and wrongs to correct. So why should you use an injury plot? What does an injury story do for your overall understanding of a character and the story as a whole?

    Injuries tell us who we really are.

    A significant injury can cause a disproportionate amount of despair. People mourn the loss of their abilities, even temporarily, the way they might mourn a loved one.

    Pain is an awful thing, and the first thing it does is make us afraid of more pain.

    And so we see characters who manage to transcend their pain and discomfort, who overcome the extra obstacles and challenges, as heroic.

    It’s one thing to climb a mountain.

    It’s another thing entirely to climb that mountain battling a broken wrist, or with pins and plates holding together your ankle.

    Injuries can be a lens that allows us to peer into who we are, what we’re really made of. When the chips are down, can we confront our fear of pain and pull through? Can we look beyond the disability and see a bigger future? Do we allow our fears and anxieties and our grief to overcome us? Or do we find a middle road, some compromise or change, that allows us to accomplish the same goals in different ways?

    Audiences love comeback stories.

    Consider the movie Men of Honor, with Cuba Gooding Jr. and Robert DeNiro.

    We don’t just love Carl Brashear, Cuba’s character, for overcoming the odds and becoming the first black US Navy diver.

    We also love him because he broke his leg, asked for it to be amputated, overcame incredible odds, and performed a mighty feat on an unhealed stump to continue doing what he loved — what he was born to do.

    We love underdogs. We love to see the little guy win —that’s why our heroes must always be weaker than our villains. What better way to stack the odds than by physically disabling your hero?

    By injuring your protagonist, you decrease their strength relative to the villain — and increase the fear factor.

    An absolutely classic example of this is Stephen King’s Misery, in which writer Paul Sheldon is disabled by a car accident and rescued by an off-duty (and off-kilter) nurse who means to keep him as her very own pet writer. Annie Wilkes isn’t much of a villain, in the grand scheme of things. Sure, she’s evil — an Angel of Death, a nurse who kills her patients — but she’s not exactly scary.

    Until you’re lying, broken and mangled, in her spare bedroom — trapped and alone, with no chance of help, completely at her mercy.

    Annie Wilkes isn’t looking so un-terrifying now, is she? Now she’s a genuine threat, someone to be feared.

    A significant injury, given by another character, is an excellent motivator for revenge — even if the character getting revenge isn’t the character who was injured.

    What could be more natural than going after someone who’s hurt your loved one?

    I’ll give you a personal example here.

    Once upon a time a coworker hurt a friend of mine, semi-intentionally. She’s got a broken back because of the way he chose to react to a lesson she was trying to teach him. If it had happened to me I would have been angry, but because it happened to someone I consider a close friend, it makes me absolutely livid. If someone hurt me, I would be as emotionally wounded as I would be mad. But if someone hurt my sister, my rage would be the stuff of legends.

    Your characters’ motivations can be linked to an injury that happened to someone else.

    It’s an easy way to sideline your hero’s allies.

    Storytelling is a constant cycle of setting heroes up for success, then pulling the rug out from underneath them.

    An injury is a great way to remove a secondary character from a plot — when the hero needs them most! Have your hero’s plan revolve around the wizard’s ability to unlock the door to the evil overlord’s castle — and sideline the wizard before she can get there!

    Injuries add realism and grit.

    Let’s face it: how many action movies have we watched where the heroes walk into a haze of bullets and come out on the other side completely unscathed?

    How many times have we looked at that and rolled our eyes?

    It’s even a joke among Star Wars fans that stormtroopers can’t hit anything at all, ever, because we’ve seen their inaccuracy too many times. The odds against a stormtrooper successfully hitting his target are approximately 3,720 to 1!

    There is definitely a place in storytelling for the injury whose sole purpose is to add texture, so long as that injury is a minor one. A gunshot to the chest shouldn’t be treated this way, but a gunshot to the meat of the arm certainly can be!

    However, I’d like to offer a word of caution with these injuries. First, understand that you’re essentially making window dressing of something that a significant number of people will live through in their lives. I’ll give you some tips on how to do it in [Part X], but be careful about what you choose to represent.

    Also understand that ultimately the difference between things that happen and an actual story is that in a story, things matter. People change. A plot is a sequence of things that happen, a series of events; a story is a series of people’s reactions. Make sure you’re telling stories, not just plots! (Check out Chapter 2.1 for more on the way this works.)

    Ultimately, injuries are story catalysts.

    They inspire change, though that change is almost universally unwelcome and painful on both physical and psychological levels.

    Moreover, injuries and pain show us what characters are truly made of. Does the protagonist give up on her goals in the face of pain and suffering? Does she muscle up, buttercup, and make progress toward her goal? To step away from the inspiration porn that disability stories can so often become, how do characters cope when, despite their effort and grit, they are simply incapable of changing the fact that they’re disabled, either temporarily or permanently?

    1.4 On Sensitivity and Disability

    Throughout this book, I’ve attempted to be as sensitive as possible to the disabled community. Multiple sensitivity readers have examined early drafts and pointed out where I needed to do better. To them I’m eternally grateful, and hope that this final version lives up to what I intended.

    There are a great number of things to be careful about when illustrating an injury severe enough to affect a character’s capabilities. I’ll keep touching on this point throughout the book, but the key elements to sensitivity seem to be this:

    Do your research. Consider how people in the real world live with and adapt to all kinds of disabilities. People born without arms or hands take to using their feet in ways that those born with hands would consider absolutely extraordinary, but within that community, it’s not particularly special. There are one-handed paramedics, guitarists with two fingers.

    Be careful not to hold up disabled characters as shining examples of human grit, either. Injuries may change the way a character behaves, and characters may change significantly, but showing a character doing day-to-day tasks as inspirational falls well into the damaging trope known as disability porn or inspiration porn. This concept is exemplified by the Scott Hamilton quote, The only disability in life is a bad attitude.

    It’s also important to have not just positive, but actually human representation of the disabled community. People with disabilities get frustrated and happy, have love lives and dry spells, have complicated lives outside of their disability. Don’t paint them as Tiny Tim, to be pitied or lauded for the use of their crutch.

    A Note on Language

    The disabled community definitely has preferences for how people refer to them. Specific communities may prefer language that emphasizes the person (person with epilepsy is preferred over epileptic, as is person with an amputation over amputee). Also, use of the word crippled or crippling should be restricted to things that affect someone’s physical capabilities, not their emotional state.

    Finally, various people take offense to various terms surrounding injury. The generally acceptable term is disabled. Some people are comfortable with other terms such as crippled or handicapped, but a great many are not, and invalid is very offensive.

    1.5 Meet Stethy

    Stethy is the adorable ScriptMedic mascot, designed by the blogger known as ScriptShrink (thanks, Shrinky!). Stethy’s been the face of ScriptMedic for quite some time, and she’s going to help us out with summarizing each Part of this book.

    Stethy? Come out and meet the peoples!

    This book is awesome. You should keep reading.

    Injuries help us examine what our characters are made of.

    They help raise the stakes by making obstacles more challenging and villains scarier.

    Injuries can add grit to stories when needed.

    Ultimately, unless they’re a lens to see how someone changes, injury plots (and every other kind of plot) are meaningless.

    Part 2: How (Injury) Stories Work

    2.1 How Plot Differs from Story

    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. 

    2.2 The Five Fundamental Pieces of Storytelling

    There are five key components to a story, the fundamental pieces that make it tick.

    It needs an Inciting Incident, something that happens that begins our hero’s journey from who they were to who they will become.

    It needs Progressive Complications. If nothing gets

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