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Skylar Nonbinary | 27 | Ace He/Him or They/Them My Art Blog

[expressions-of-nature]

by Hoko

[skittyminecraft]

x

[arabella-ardor]

[faggotjonesss]

[luna-azzurra]

Tips for Writing Injuries! (AGAIN)

Your action hero just got shot in the shoulder, stitched it up in a motel bathroom, and is now running through a forest. I need you to know that a shoulder wound severs muscle, nerves, and sometimes bone, and the human body's response to that is not "mild wincing followed by full range of motion." here is what injuries actually do to peoplee...

⊹ Adrenaline is REAL and it does allow people to do extraordinary things immediately after injury, BUT it is a loan, not a gift. you borrow the function and you pay it back later with interest. Your character might genuinely be able to run for twenty minutes after being stabbed. and then the adrenaline drops and everything the body was delaying arrives all at once. the collapse is NOT weakness. it's biology collecting its debt. write the debt collection. it's more interesting than the heroic sprint anyway.

⊹ Blood loss changes cognition before it drops you. you don't go from "fine" to "unconscious." you go through a whole middle stage of confusion, poor decision-making, emotional dysregulation, a strange calm, tunnel vision, difficulty forming sentences. Your injured character making a bad call, saying something they normally wouldn't, becoming suddenly and inexplicably gentle--that's blood loss. use the middle stage. it's dramatically rich and almost nobody writes it.

⊹ Recovery has a timeline and the timeline is long and boring and inconvenient to plot. a broken rib takes six weeks and during those six weeks sneezing is a genuine emergency. a concussion means no screens, no reading, no bright lights, and symptoms can persist for months. a stab wound to the abdomen means weeks of infection risk, limited mobility, and a specific kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with sleep. Your character being sidelined and frustrated and useless for a long time is not a narrative problem. it's the story.

⊹ Pain also affects personality in ways writers skip. chronic pain makes people short-tempered and then guilty about being short-tempered. it makes concentration difficult. it makes intimacy complicated, both emotional and physical. a character who was patient and warm before their injury and is now snappy and withdrawn is not a character regression. they're in pain. pain is exhausting in ways that don't show on the outside. the people around them noticing and not knowing how to help is a whole story in itself.

[cpericardium]

[animentality]

[catchymemes]

[banchie]

i've been phasing the phrase 'google it' out of my vocabulary and going back to 'look it up'. fuck you youve lost your generic trademark privileges

[inkwhelp]

people who are gay: yeah i’m gay

people who are straight: yeah i’m straight

people who are aroace: have you seen project hail mary

[golongbyjoannanewsom]

obsessed w this person in the replies

[nolaplantdaddy]

I love when people ask "how did you learn this skill?" I just started, there's no secret. that's it. a vast majority of the time the only thing holding you back is your trepidation to start.

[noegrets]

[natnormalatall]

roald dahl was antisemitic and misogynistic. george orwell was openly homophobic. edgar allan poe married his 13 year old cousin. dr seuss cheated on his wife (and was racist as well as antisemitic!). hp lovecraft was racist as fuck. anyways they’re fucking dead it’s not like you’re enabling their behaviors in the afterlife or something. then again I think they bleed into the books so uh keep an eye out for that

the difference between these old white guys and jk rowling is that the former group is all dead. jk rowling is alive and using your money to oppress trans people

[sickdogs]

being a kid and hearing adults say stuff like "woah 2011 was 4 years ago haha" didn't really convey the fucking horror of a youtube video crossing my recommended labelled "9 years ago" and it's from 2017. that's not true. 9 years ago is 2010 or something. don't lie.

[rafry]

the journey is ironic and you have to keep it cool

[kateammann]

Happy Pride Month to all of my fellow aces!! 🖤🩶🤍💜

[roswellsoup]

bonus/proof:

we tipped her well dw. best waitress ever 🍒

[mintaii]

oh miss ivy 🥀

[viaalterego]

[trishacollins]

Actually, my therapist has told me this is a healthy way of processing things. Because you can get the trauma out of your head And you can write the ending you wish it had. The trusted person rescue, the catharsis of getting to kill the one who hurt you.

It's good for your brain. It's healthier than bottling it up. Fiction is where we go for emotional release. That can be true with trauma too.

[erelierraceala]

so what you're saying is

character: NO

therapist: YES

[vmures]

Adding @dear-massacre's tags because they are so true:

#this is why it's important to remember that fictional characters are fake #they have no agency. they're made up #it hurts no one to make any character go through the horrors #it is healthy and cathartic

[yeahokayillreblogthat]

yeah okay ill reblog that