Taking a Look at Injuries

I feel like most fantasy writers have never gotten hurt in their lives. You can't convince me that if you break a toe that you can sit there and run away from a band of rabid elves two hours later. Or if someone gets choked for a good few seconds, they're not gonna have issues breathing for a little bit. Nope, instead the warriors can go on fighting as if they were in the prime of their lives, injured or not. And I'm sure a few of you are thinking: "Luka, clearly they used magic to heal themselves."

If that was the case then it should have been mentioned! No, all of these characters are just super human/elf/orc/dust bunnies and when they get injured it never actually counts. That, dear friends, is called lazy writing, and missed opportunities, but mostly lazy writing. You should never just forget something that happens to your characters, because most times those things will show up later on. This is especially true with injuries. If your character snaps his dominant wrist, there's no way he's gonna pick up his sword and slash at the ravenous dog that's trying to eat his kitty. If he put that much weight on his wrist then it would damage it even more, maybe even making it completely useless after awhile.

These are things you have to put into consideration when you decide to injure your characters. How will it effect the story later on? Now if the guy who snapped his wrist wasn't able to save his kitty, maybe it'll give him some character development. Maybe he'll realize you shouldn't take a tiny cat with him on his adventures. Or maybe you could introduce a completely different character who fights off the dog with magic, giving our adventurer a new companion.

Another thing you've gotta think about when you beat on your characters, is how long it takes to heal. Being a person who breaks their toes about twice a year on the vacuum cleaner, I can tell you it takes about a month for me to put my full weight on the other foot. But just because I can walk on it doesn't mean anything, more than likely it takes a week or more to actually be completely healed. So if it takes a month for a toe to get in shape, how much longer do you think it'll be for a freaking rib, or an arm, or leg? Of course healing times gets skewed when magic is involved, but if you have no intention of saying "Charmy the hobbit got a healing potion from Happy the wizard cat." Then I'm just gonna shake my head and assume that your character became god at some point.

You know, a lot of the injuries in fantasy comes from epic battles. And most of the epic battles happen in muddy, nasty, and absolutely dirty places. So if you're planning to have some guy stabbed in the abdomen, his wound needs to get cleaned. I mean, that should be a higher priority than saving blonde princess #33,333,758,558. Because if that thing isn't disinfected with something, then he's likely to get an infection and die. And don't even pull that 'rips a piece of his shirt to wipe the blood away'. That shirt is probably just as disgusting as the rest of him, especially if it was splattered with other people's blood, mud, and sweat.

God, this post makes me want to check into a freaking hospital. But I assume you all get the point of this blog post. Pay some attention to your characters, pay attention to the time in your story, and for insert some deity here's sake don't go for romanticism over realism. Unless that princess happens to have healing kisses, you're gonna bleed out from that wound.

Now I'm gonna go make breakfast....