Guide to Destroying Your Characters Without Necessarily Killing Them'

When it comes to damaging our heroes and heroines, we tend to go with physical injury. And after talking about all those weapons last week, it makes sense that being shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, shot with bits of sparkly bits of molten plasma, or whatever, would be the first thing we think of. But there are so many delicious options available. I'd like to offer up the start of a list for your consideration. A sort of 'Guide to Destroying Your Characters Without Necessarily Killing Them'

Protagonists have goals. Any goal worth pursuing requires that choices be made, which leads us to:

1. Choices have consequences, up to and including injury and death.
2. The bigger the goal, the bigger the consequences of a protagonist's choices must be.
3. Physical injuries heal, but they do so at a knowable rate. Don't let your reader Google that for you.
4. Physical injuries have possible lasting impact - closed head injuries are some of the most mysterious and unpredictable injuries around, but the medical info on *likely* recovery and permanent deficits are out there on the interwebs. Again, you do not want your reader doing that search for you. (Also, amnesia is not a yes or no thing - it's a complex condition with windows of memory that open and close as the brain injury heals - fascinating stuff, but as a literary device, no longer as simple a device as once it was.)
5. Psychological injuries are far harder to treat effectively and often have lifelong impact. Witness the lasting damage PTSD can do. Try not to think of your most horrifying memory. That shit still haunts you, doesn't it? How long ago did that happen? And it's still with you. Mental/emotional trauma LASTS.
6. Injury, whether mental, emotional, physical or all of the above, is a rock dropped in the pond of a story - it ripples through the entire community of the story. How does this injury affect everyone else in the story? Secondaries. Antagonist.
7. How does a protagonist's injury change the direction of the story? Does it?
8. If a protagonist makes a choice and gets hurt, that's one kind of injury. What happens when a protagonist makes a choice and someone else gets hurt? What does that scar look like? What's the guilt load? (Though please, leave the 'kill all the parents' to Disney, and all of the 'kill the poor hero's beautiful, loving wife who's only in the story so we can kill her off and motivate him to become the 14yo fantasy badass' to every Hollywood script ever.)
9. Pair high emotion with injury and you have a recipe for lasting trauma. Careful how you sprinkle that around - too many of your fellow human beings are suffering for real. If it serves the story and is integral to it, go for it.
10. Careful with miraculous cures - just like injury, most treatments follow known protocols - all of which can be found on line (if you follow some of the medical science blogs there are cutting edge experiments out there that are making some strides with mental/emotional injuries) - which is not to say 'go become an MD'. You aren't writing a procedural...unless...you know, you ARE.

That's the start of the list of - not so much rules - as suggestions. What else belongs here? Are there injuries that can't be recovered from? (I've read some romances that have made the hero's past so horrifying it's a wonder he's remotely sane, much less capable of emotional attachment - and I've had to call bullshit on a few of those.) Bring me more list items! This can't be all there is when it comes to torturing characters.

The Disorganized Word Whore's List

How to managing multiple projects? Anyway you can. I don't say this to be cavalier. I say this because I'm the organizational polar opposite to Word Whore Jeffe. Spreadsheets are instruments of the devil. But like Jeffe, I dislike crunch time - those last minute pushes to complete something. The curse is that I'm good at crunch time. The problem? It comes with a price and not just one that impacts me. My family pays, too. And that's not fair. So while I'm pathologically allergic to spreadsheets and a particular type of organization, I do my damnedest to be the tortoise, NOT the hare.

The Less Organized Word Whore's List for How To Manage Multiple Partne. . .Projects:
1. Ritual - create a place where all you do is work on writing. I admit I get a little anal about it. Same begin time, same end time, same place, same chair, same tea. It's a great big hand reaching into my brain to flip the switch from 'the rest of my life' to 'creating now'.

2. Goals - Know what you want and when you want it by. Here's the big thing I struggle with - I'm good for a promise I make to other people. I am not quite as good with promises I make to myself. Why is that? What message have I absorbed that makes me less worthy of keeping a promise to? If you're not keeping the deadlines you set for yourself, this may be your issue, too. Examine it. Figure it out. Fix it. Recruit professional help if need be to work through that. This is the one place where those evil spreadsheets seem to help. My CPs set up a shared spreadsheet where we all input our daily word count goals and then what we achieved. Something that simple has made it easier for me to keep track of when and where I'm failing to keep my promises to myself. I can subsequently get back on track.

3. Lists - Usually, when there are multiple projects to be managed, the bulk of them are in my non-writer life. There are cats to get to the vet. Parents in hospitals (two this past week - it's been a messed up week - both are fine, thanks.) Groceries to get, gas to put in cars, doctor appointments, bills to pay, clients to call. But occasionally, I'm trying to get word count on one book while an editor is awaiting rewrites on another book. My lists go by the week - Monday to Sunday. So as a list of deliverables grows for the week, I can see at a glance whether I have the bandwidth to ADD extra hours at the computer for the rewrite, or if I have to set my word count goals aside. Something I can easily do because while Jeffe's 'Half Again' rule is excellent, I liked the Star Trek model - you know - Captain Kirk asking Scotty if he always inflated his work estimates by a factor of four. Scotty answered that of course he did - how else could he preserve his reputation as a miracle worker?)

So far, this system has worked well, even as I work to increase my productivity on a slow, steady basis. Granted, I have a prioritization system, too, one that resembles KAK's but it's much shorter. 1. Keeping life in the living 2. My sanity 3. Everyone else's sanity 4. Everything else in the world is gravy.

The prioritization system gets applied to everything on my list. Amusingly, vacuuming on a regular basis is a P1. Cause if the floor crunches beneath my feet? Someone's gonna die. But look. Writing isn't a priority 1 in my system. It's a P2.

I *treat* it like a P1 as long as I can, but when the phone calls about the parental medical emergencies came in, I could drop my writing schedule back to P2 and deal with the family issues. By treating writing as a P1 when I can, I develop a habit. Something that's easy to get back to so I can pick up where I left off in a story. Or a rewrite.

In the end, I think back to acting school and something my teachers all said. "If you can do anything else besides acting, you should." It turns out, I *could* do something besides act. Lots of things, as it happens. But the one thing I can't NOT do? Write. Even if I never published again. Even if no one ever read another word of what I wrote. The stories have to escape the confines of me. If they don't, I'm only half living.

If the stories start to drown you, too, when you aren't writing, then it won't matter how many projects you have going concurrently. You will find a way to juggle them all. Your sanity and your life may depend on it. I hope you'll tell us how you do it. Coping skills enrich us all.