1. DemonKing

    DemonKing Member

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    Character Injury

    Discussion in 'Plot Development' started by DemonKing, Oct 4, 2017.

    ok so I'm at the end of my book and the main already has a spinal injury and slight heart damage from medication he took to assist his power medical systems. And in book two he will get a few implants to currect these. What I want to know is in the final battle should he also lose a eye? Or is that too much?
     
  2. MythMachine

    MythMachine Active Member

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    Do you want him to lose an eye for any particular reason, or is it simply for some cosmic punishment or aesthetics? While real injuries often have impact on our lives and affect major and minor decisions alike, fictional injuries, especially permanent and debilitating ones, should always have some purpose to the character or story. If I'm going to have my MC's leg devoured by a rabid zombie dolphin, there'd better be a damn good reason, because he's going to be hobbling around on his one good leg for the rest of the story because of it.

    EDIT: Cosmic punishment, which is essentially the suffering of a character through their environment or circumstance that has no bearing on their growth or the story, is not a writing mechanic I'm usually fond of. I see it as a cheap way to invoke reader sympathy with a character while avoiding good characterization and growth. "Everything bad happens to this character, you should pity him/her. Go on, cry about it. Do it now!" If I were injured and/or crippled in real life, I wouldn't want attention drawn to that fact, and to my understanding, most other people wouldn't either. An injury is an embarrassing and shameful thing. You don't often see people bragging when they shatter their arm in 3 places, or are bleeding out from a knife wound. Now, imagine this happening to you every day for your entire life, when you've done nothing to deserve it. That's cosmic punishment.
     
    Last edited: Oct 4, 2017
  3. Teresa Mendes

    Teresa Mendes Member

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    I prefer injuries that have a lot of meaning for the character. If you just want him to be injured choose something you know will impact his life and the readers emotions.
    If your character relies heavily on vision, then losing an eye will have a strong impact on the reader.
    Make him lose both eyes if he'll never be able to see the one he loves after promising "I'll see you again".
    Make him lose a hand if he needs both to fire his favorite gun or if he’s a pianist.
    You can also give him a smaller and totally recoverable injury x) Just make it have some sort of meaning for him and the readers' experience.
     
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  4. rktho

    rktho Contributor Contributor

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    In fantasy, I've heard of disabling injuries that are healed by magic in the next book or so but while the character has them the injuries limit them severely. The healing usually has some type of symbolism of overcoming adversity. Or, to put it another way, if they've lived well with their injury, their reward is that it is taken away. In Speaker for the Dead, Miro, a healthy 20 year old, becomes paralyzed after an accident with an electric fence; he recovers from it, but now he has the body of a hundred year-old man (except he still looks young.) After he learns to work through his disabilities, he and a few other characters are taken to an alternate dimension where anything they can conceive of becomes real. Miro imagines himself young and healthy again, and his soul enters a new body exactly like his old one, while the crippled husk dissolves into dust. In Eragon, Eragon receives wounds from a Shade on his back that cause him severe issues. In the second book, he meets his mentor, who is also a cripple (though more crippled than Eragon, I believe; it's been a while since I've read the book) and calls himself The Cripple Who Is Whole. During an elvish festival, there is a great amount of magic in the air and it heals many wounds, including Eragon's (though not his mentor's, although Oromis (that's his name) doesn't let it trouble him. These wounds have defined Eragon for so long-- they are the final remnant, so to speak, of Durza, the Shade he slew, and they are healed after he has completed his journey in escaping Durza's psychological influence on him.

    Of course, the OP hasn't really said they're working with a fantasy setting, so magic may not be an option here. (Although in Speaker for the Dead, it's not magic, it's speculative metaphysics or something. Speaker for the Dead is philosophical science fiction rather than fantasy.)
     
  5. DemonKing

    DemonKing Member

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    Ok I'm going to add some long term effects, like maybe pain from the implants
     
  6. ExpiredAspiration

    ExpiredAspiration Member

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    Physical pain is an okay place to start, but you could go much further with the mental ramifications of said pain. Maybe these implants completely change the character's appearance, and the pain which pulsates from them reflect a loss of self identity... But that's just a random example, just remember that injury for the sake of injury is nothing without the insult (intent/context).
     

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