10 Non-Lethal Injuries to Add Pain to Your Writing
New Part: 10 Lethal Injury Ideas
If you need a simple way to make your characters feel pain, here are some ideas:
1. Sprained Ankle
A common injury that can severely limit mobility. This is useful because your characters will have to experience a mild struggle and adapt their plans to their new lack of mobiliy. Perfect to add tension to a chase scene.
2. Rib Contusion
A painful bruise on the ribs can make breathing difficult, helping you sneak in those ragged wheezes during a fight scene. Could also be used for something sport-related! It's impactful enough to leave a lingering pain but not enough to hinder their overall movement.
3. Concussions
This common brain injury can lead to confusion, dizziness, and mood swings, affecting a character’s judgment heavily. It can also cause mild amnesia.
I enjoy using concussions when you need another character to subtly take over the fight/scene, it's an easy way to switch POVs. You could also use it if you need a 'cute' recovery moment with A and B.
4. Fractured Finger
A broken finger can complicate tasks that require fine motor skills. This would be perfect for characters like artists, writers, etc. Or, a fighter who brushes it off as nothing till they try to throw a punch and are hit with pain.
5. Road Rash
Road rash is an abrasion caused by friction. Aka scraping skin. The raw, painful sting resulting from a fall can be a quick but effective way to add pain to your writing. Tip: it's great if you need a mild injury for a child.
6. Shoulder Dislocation
This injury can be excruciating and often leads to an inability to use one arm, forcing characters to confront their limitations while adding urgency to their situation. Good for torture scenes.
7. Deep Laceration
A deep laceration is a cut that requires stitches. As someone who got stitches as a kid, they really aren't that bad! A 2-3 inch wound (in length) provides just enough pain and blood to add that dramatic flair to your writing while not severely deterring your character.
This is also a great wound to look back on since it often scars. Note: the deeper and wider the cut the worse your character's condition. Don't give them a 5 inch deep gash and call that mild.
8. Burns
Whether from fire, chemicals, or hot surfaces, burns can cause intense suffering and lingering trauma. Like the previous injury, the lasting physical and emotional trauma of a burn is a great wound for characters to look back on.
If you want to explore writing burns, read here.
9. Pulled Muscle
This can create ongoing pain and restrict movement, offering a window to force your character to lean on another. Note: I personally use muscle related injuries when I want to focus more on the pain and sprains to focus on a lack of mobility.
10. Tendonitis
Inflammation of a tendon can cause chronic pain and limit a character's ability to perform tasks they usually take for granted. When exploring tendonitis make sure you research well as this can easily turn into a more severe injury.
This is a quick, brief list of ideas to provide writers inspiration. Since it is a shorter blog, I have not covered the injuries in detail. This is inspiration, not a thorough guide. Happy writing! :)
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aaaaannd here’s my full (admittedly a little rushed-) Spider-flight design!! I tried making her design a little more simplified version of my current design for her more faithful to classic Squirrelflight designs :3
I’m still coming up with her timeline n stuff so I’ll try and rb with info later on but as here she is I’m so happy with her rn
my crossover lore you ask?? how is knh palace in warrior cats?? WELL
our girl maomao, beloved, still does her posions and medicines! cant deprive her of her quirk! iirc there is a limited bit of medicine in wc and they have their shortages, but lets just say the knh location is abundant with herbs for an apothecary's usage!
and yes, she calls herself an apothecary bc her papa heard it when he used to be a loner and he just calls himself that now (so does everyone else, but healer / doctor are the main terms)
beloved maomao cant truthfully expierment with snakes and the likes the way she does in knh, but she finds her work arounds. for that reason she is an excellent hunter, being delightfully exceptional at hunting snakes and extracting their venom (how? who cares) to make unordinary cures and remedies :0 she keeps dead snakes and bugs around for harvesting when she needs them, and eats whatever is left over/expired (whether this is realistic doesnt matter at all)
She has like a million scars under her pelt bc she aggravates a lot of cats and loses plenty of fights, but they never hurt her too badly. simple scuffles and cuffs on the ear can get our meow meow to back off and watch her mouth (most of the time)
the scars on her foreleg though are from her experiments :) ointments and such and whenever white/green/yellowcough breaks out, she's at the ready with tried and true methods, or something outrageous that only brave souls would try
(she willingly gets sick to test these remedies, but has since been banned from coming into contact with diseased cats alongside dead ones) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
now where does knh wc take place??? somewhere! that's for sure! no replacing any canon territories, there is no riverclan, there is no queen of england!
instead of a clan (bc it means something else in knh) the colony is called a palace, and it is like 4 times as large as a single wc clan would be! (imagine the lake / forest territories but they all belong to the emperor)
most terminology, laws, and roles are basically the same, still have our emperor, his younger brother, the consorts and the likes
im thinking splitting the locations within the palace by direction like in canon, so one clan would equal one court, but all 4 clans are the palace and the area is usually referred to as such. there arent as many disputes bc the whole thing belongs to the emperor
as for the rear palace? canonically it exists beside the actual palace, so idk! we'll figure that out later (or never)
starclan exists but its not a monolithic colony, so there are quite a bit nonbelievers but no one is splitting hairs over the fact
i think the only things that would have to change is some story elements and locations obv. like verdigris is a twolegplace colony that resides in the town near the palace, with the madam (grans) being only one of many leader types within it
verdigris is overrun with cats. there are people but not many, and the cats live in abandoned houses, sewers, old buildings, farms, etc!
maomao was born in verdigris, but as we know, her father isn't from there. Lakan is from the palace, specifically the eastern court! maomao has never been and as far as she knows, she has no father.
Grans told her the cat that helped birth her disappeared and probably got eaten by dogs :) maomao has no reason or drive to question this information, but she is well aware of the shadow that seems to follow her whenever she's on the outskirts of verdigris...
her kidnapping?? uhhhhhh who knows! LOL!
working in the rear palace? same as usual! i see no reason to change the poison taster factor when... like lets be so real... there is poison in warrior cats :) if shadowsight can live, maomao can live! but the types of poisons would have to shrink or expand dramatically bc they are cats
[sidebar: i had wanted to make a knh au where literally everything, and i mean everything, is the same, except the people are cats :) why didnt i? well... maybe im silly... and it's too easy...]
☆*: .。. back to our program ᓚᘏᗢ .。.:*☆
I will not be changing anything but the basic points of the story and it might as well end around e12 for this au
for my sanity <3
ill mostly be focusing on character designs, general locations, and arcs that are easy to translate IF i ever care enough to crossover anything other than the fengming arc :D
all fun and games (and finally peace of mind since ive been in art guilt paralysis for half a year)
biggest challenge??? cat jinshi... he's supposed to be puppy... and lakan is also supposed to be foxpuppy but i can translate fox into cat... AND LIHAKU IS PUPPY ARRRGHHH ill figure it out!!
my crossover lore you ask?? how is knh palace in warrior cats?? WELL
our girl maomao, beloved, still does her posions and medicines! cant deprive her of her quirk! iirc there is a limited bit of medicine in wc and they have their shortages, but lets just say the knh location is abundant with herbs for an apothecary's usage!
and yes, she calls herself an apothecary bc her papa heard it when he used to be a loner and he just calls himself that now (so does everyone else, but healer / doctor are the main terms)
beloved maomao cant truthfully expierment with snakes and the likes the way she does in knh, but she finds her work arounds. for that reason she is an excellent hunter, being delightfully exceptional at hunting snakes and extracting their venom (how? who cares) to make unordinary cures and remedies :0 she keeps dead snakes and bugs around for harvesting when she needs them, and eats whatever is left over/expired (whether this is realistic doesnt matter at all)
She has like a million scars under her pelt bc she aggravates a lot of cats and loses plenty of fights, but they never hurt her too badly. simple scuffles and cuffs on the ear can get our meow meow to back off and watch her mouth (most of the time)
the scars on her foreleg though are from her experiments :) ointments and such and whenever white/green/yellowcough breaks out, she's at the ready with tried and true methods, or something outrageous that only brave souls would try
(she willingly gets sick to test these remedies, but has since been banned from coming into contact with diseased cats alongside dead ones) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
now where does knh wc take place??? somewhere! that's for sure! no replacing any canon territories, there is no riverclan, there is no queen of england!
instead of a clan (bc it means something else in knh) the colony is called a palace, and it is like 4 times as large as a single wc clan would be! (imagine the lake / forest territories but they all belong to the emperor)
most terminology, laws, and roles are basically the same, still have our emperor, his younger brother, the consorts and the likes
im thinking splitting the locations within the palace by direction like in canon, so one clan would equal one court, but all 4 clans are the palace and the area is usually referred to as such. there arent as many disputes bc the whole thing belongs to the emperor
as for the rear palace? canonically it exists beside the actual palace, so idk! we'll figure that out later (or never)
starclan exists but its not a monolithic colony, so there are quite a bit nonbelievers but no one is splitting hairs over the fact
i think the only things that would have to change is some story elements and locations obv. like verdigris is a twolegplace colony that resides in the town near the palace, with the madam (grans) being only one of many leader types within it
verdigris is overrun with cats. there are people but not many, and the cats live in abandoned houses, sewers, old buildings, farms, etc!
maomao was born in verdigris, but as we know, her father isn't from there. Lakan is from the palace, specifically the eastern court! maomao has never been and as far as she knows, she has no father.
Grans told her the cat that helped birth her disappeared and probably got eaten by dogs :) maomao has no reason or drive to question this information, but she is well aware of the shadow that seems to follow her whenever she's on the outskirts of verdigris...
her kidnapping?? uhhhhhh who knows! LOL!
working in the rear palace? same as usual! i see no reason to change the poison taster factor when... like lets be so real... there is poison in warrior cats :) if shadowsight can live, maomao can live! but the types of poisons would have to shrink or expand dramatically bc they are cats
[sidebar: i had wanted to make a knh au where literally everything, and i mean everything, is the same, except the people are cats :) why didnt i? well... maybe im silly... and it's too easy...]
☆*: .。. back to our program ᓚᘏᗢ .。.:*☆
I will not be changing anything but the basic points of the story and it might as well end around e12 for this au
for my sanity <3
ill mostly be focusing on character designs, general locations, and arcs that are easy to translate IF i ever care enough to crossover anything other than the fengming arc :D
all fun and games (and finally peace of mind since ive been in art guilt paralysis for half a year)
biggest challenge??? cat jinshi... he's supposed to be puppy... and lakan is also supposed to be foxpuppy but i can translate fox into cat... AND LIHAKU IS PUPPY ARRRGHHH ill figure it out!!