Walk It Off - Dealing with Injured Characters

This is Stepdad Dave - after he rolled down a cliff on our first day in St. Thomas and cracked his shoulder blade. For a while there, from the moment I saw him vanish over the edge before I could reach him, and during those long hours in the hospital, I was sure we'd be putting him on a plane home. But he was a serious trooper and kept going. No snorkeling for him, but he got to do a lot of fun things. We ended up renting a glass-bottom boat, so he could see some of the underwater scenery.

The upshot was, we did a lot of adjusting of plans on that vacation, to accommodate his injury. It was at the forefront of our minds at pretty much every moment - what he could and couldn't do, his energy levels, the pain medication, etc.

All of this is by way of saying that, when characters get injured in our books - which, in SFF books, they pretty much inevitably do - then that is a thread that must be carefully tracked. It's far too easy to forget that a person is hurt and needs time to recover. At the same time, long recoveries can bog down a story's pace.

In the second novel I ever wrote - which remains unpublished - my heroine got terribly injured. As it was set in the modern world, there was no magical healing available to get her on her feet. Being a newbie novelist, I tried to stick to reality, which meant my heroine spent pretty much the entire middle third of the book laid up in the hospital.

OMG, Past-Jeffe. No, no, no!

The pacing went totally through the floor. Effectively disabling your primary POV protagonist does exactly the same to the story. I don't recommend it. I could maybe do a better job of it now, as I have better skills and might be able to find ways to up the tension because of her bedridden state. That's what it takes. Either that or skipping time.

If you manage to keep your character out in the action, the injury and recovery time must still be a constant thread. They get tired faster and have to rest. They're in pain. Minor stage directions can go awry.

For example, in THE TALON OF THE HAWK, Ursula gets hurt right at the Act I climax. (I don't think this spoilery, but fair warning!) She gets abroken nose and skull fracture at the back of her head along with a concussion. Being who she is (including a semi-magical nature), she's able to keep going. But in a scene that occurs less than 24-hours later, I had the hero cupping the back of her head during a kiss. My editor (the fantastic Peter Senftleben at Kensington) commented it out, saying "Um, wouldn't that hurt?"

Well, yes. Yes, it would! And this right there, my friends, is why we need editors. In that very scene, I had him being careful of her broken nose, but I somehow - probably in the course of the several days that elapsed while I wrote all the stuff that happens in between those moments - forgot about the skull fracture.

The take-home message for dealing with injured characters, is careful attention during edits. Susan Elizabeth Phillips talks about doing a complete revision pass for each story element and arc. If an injury occurs, I think it's worth doing a complete pass just for that arc. The injury becomes part of the conflict, waxing and waning depending on other events, and should be resolved with similar attention as any other conflict.

Yeah, and don't stick your protagonist in a hospital bed for a third of the book unless you have a *brilliant plan*. Like Rio Youers pulled off in WESTLAKE SOUL - where the single POV protagonist is in a vegetative state. If you want to learn how it can be done, study that book. 

A Dearth of Disabled Protagonists

The only disabled protagonists I can offer for consideration (who hasn't already been mentioned this week) are Helva from Anne McCaffrey's book The Ship Who Sang and Miles Vorkosigan from the series of the same name by Lois McMaster Bujold.

McCaffrey wrote several books in her Ship Who series, all with different protagonists. In these books, science has come up with options for severe physical disability - one of which is becoming the 'brain' of a space ship. From that respect, I don't know if the heroines of these stories qualify as disabled protagonists. It isn't as if their physical limitations are magically removed - but if you've given up a body entirely and had your brain installed as the nerve center of a space ship - what is that exactly?

Miles Vorkosigan (from Amazon): ". . .Washed out of the Barrayaran Military Academy for being overly fragile (he had been biochemically damaged during an assassination attempt while still in his mother's womb), Miles' natural (if unorthodox) leadership qualities quickly led to his off-handedly acquiring a fleet of nineteen ships and three thousand troops, all unswervingly loyal to him. . ." Because of the biochemical attack, Miles' growth was stunted. His bones are brittle and his spine malformed. His disability is not remedied in the course of the stories. In fact, as the conflict and the pressure on him rises, the worse his pain becomes. He's an utterly charismatic character. If fiction characters came to life, he'd be one of the first I'd want to hang with. We'd be up to our necks in trouble within an hour and grinning while we fought our way back out, although there's a good chance I'd die.

This is the long way of admitting that, in my reading, there has been a dearth of protagonists with more than a few surface scars.  Is it my choice of reading material? Romance novels, until the past decade, had an interesting tendency to shy away from 'issues'. "It's an issues book." in your reviews was kind of a sales killer for awhile. Romance got over that in a big way from a psychological standpoint, but not from a physical standpoint. So far. Science fiction, too, tends to deal with physical disability by 'fixing' it with technology. Cyborgs, anyone?

While the heroine of my third (still in the works) SFR is deaf, I cheat and give her technology so she can compensate a little bit. I also give her an addiction to that compensation, but that's another story. This heroine's deafness does not define her. It's a single, minor aspect that makes her who she is. She starts the story hearing impaired, she finishes the story the same way, and her deafness has no impact on whether the conflict of her story is resolved or not. Why is she deaf, then, you ask? Because when she walked up and informed me I'd be writing her story, she eventually told me so.

Still. This heroine can hide her disability for a long time. You can't look at her and see that she's hearing-impaired. I guess the closest to physical disability I've written so far has been a cyborg hero (yeah, his story is still in progress, too, sorry). His cyborg implants are obvious, but they, too are compensating for lost limbs. He suffers no loss of motor skill or function, so that's hardly physically disabled, is it? Am I afraid to deal with a protagonist in a wheel chair? Or a heroine who came back from a warzone missing a leg? Maybe so. Writing either character sure feels scary to me, which means I'll have to try.

Discovering the Power of the Disabled Protagonist

Isabel was in this spot before the sun sank low enough to hit her. Excellent strategy.

This week's topic in Ye Olde Bordello is The Physically Disabled Protagonist. At first I thought KAK, our calendar whiz kid, had double-booked topics. Then I realized that it was just me. I wrote "Discovering the Power of the Disabled Protagonist" back in August on the Here Be Magic group blog. So, I'm totally taking the bye and reproducing it here.

Hope you all don't mind!

On the advice of fellow Whore James Moore, I read Westlake Soul by Rio Youers. It was a bit of a departure for me in my recent reading, because it's by a male author about a male protagonist. I don't think I was deliberately reading female authors and female POV, but I'd definitely gotten into a nearly exclusive pattern. The other interesting thing about this book is the protagonist is completely disabled. He was paralyzed in a surfing accident and is unable to move or communicate - except through the power of his mind.

I enjoyed the book and its fascinating premise. It also dovetailed with conversations I'd been having online, most notably with my friend, Sassy Outwater. For those who don't know Sassy, she's blind and has a guide dog companion named Kodak. You might have seen them at the RT Convention in spring of 2013, for example.

Sassy is on a quest for recommendations particularly of disabled heroines in romance novels. She's planning to do a full rant and review, so if you have suggestions, she's looking for any and all. Her site is being developed here. I'll be interested to see what kind of list she gets. After all, the romance tropes usually call for the feisty, nubile and always perfectly lovely heroine. That's been changing up in recent years, which is all to the good in my mind.

Speculative fiction, it seems, better lends itself to the disabled protagonist or otherwise "handicapped" hero. I'm using that word in the traditional sense - that some sort of weight is added to make the hero's journey that much more difficult. One famous example is Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant, who suffers from - of all the horrible diseases - leprosy. Superhero stories are notable for the crippling burdens - usually emotional - that the hero carries. Think Batman with his haunted, traumatic past.

However, because I read primarily female-driven stories, it seems I rarely encounter the truly disabled heroine. Even if she's emotionally troubled, she's still physically attractive. And her psychic scars don't get in the way of relationships, like Batman's do - or they are temporary obstacles that increase sexual tension, but are easily overcome in the end.

I'm looking at my spec fic bookshelf, racking my brain for exceptions - much as I've been looking at my romance shelves (and yes, the twain do meet and mix it up) for ideas for Sassy's project. It could be my filter bias for the Happily Ever After, but I'm not coming up with much.

So, I'm throwing this out to you all. Examples of heroines in speculative fiction (I'm deliberately using that umbrella term to cover all genres of paranormal, urban fantasy, science fiction, fantasy, sword & sorcery, etc.) that are "handicapped" in some way.

Bonus points for disfiguring disabilities.