Writing permanent injuries/disabilities

I'm a Troper who is disabled to start with (half-blind, cerebral palsy, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, ADHD, Sensory Integration Disorder, very high tolerance of/obliviousness to pain, effects of extremely premature birth, extreme chronic pain, early-onset arthritis, etc., etc.). I, however, inflict upon my characters permanent and far more crippling conditions/injuries than I have myself. My main character loses her dominant (right) arm and left eye (which would cause her to see things as I do - through my right eye alone). Since I can't see out of my left eye anyway, writing that's no problem at all (I actually have no idea of what normal binocular vision is, aside from perhaps not running into things so much and the like). For writing the loss of her dominant arm, I've done some...experiments. Including holding my arm imobile behind me until my brain stopped sensing it, and then using only my left for the rest of the day. It gave me a very good (if thankfully brief) idea of what having to cope with the loss of a limb would be like. Later, my character loses her other eye. I've also tried walking around with my eyes closed and blindfolded with thick black cloth. (Not a good idea when you can't sense where you are in relation to your environment...) I can't say that either was an enjoyable experience, but it was helpful and eye-opening (and made me really appreciate how little I have to deal with, relative to other people with more severe condiitions).

What crippling injuries/disabilities have you inflicted on your characters, and what measures have you gone to (even if it's just research and asking questions) to find out what they would be like?

I actually started a topic like this a while back. But yeah, my lead character loses her hand and foot and needs to get prosthetic replacements. granted the person who made them added such features as grappling gun, laser pointer, and even a tazer.

I can't say [feigning losing an eye] either was an enjoyable experience, but it was helpful and eye-opening

Anyway, limyaael has a relevant rant.

My work does have "disabled" characters, like a paraplegic protagonist, but doesn't really go into the effects that much. That's mostly because tech marched on, and all the issues got mitigated into near-non-existence.

edited 17th Feb '11 11:56:55 AM by Yej

One of my characters loses her arm from the elbow down, but since she's not a viewpoint character, I didn't do much reseach other than finding out how long she could survive without treatment.

My main character, on the other hand, goes blind on one eye, so I've been walking around a bit with one eye closed and I'm going to do some reading in regards of loss of depth perception and such.

I also have a roleplaying character who got her knee crushed, but I haven't done any reseach as of yet. I probably should.

Come to think of it, the one character who probably has the most disabled body in my stories is Tank. All that's left of his original body is his brain...the rest of his body is in a tank.

I stick to the ~write about what you understand~ sentiment as much as possible. Even when I write about something I don't understand like war, I focus on what I do understand about it like the heartbreak one feels when seeing, well, what you'd also see at a hospital or funeral.

In my works I've included these permanent injuries/disabilities:

being widowed

being orphaned

characters who had their sibling/childhood friend die when they were still children

being chronicly and perhaps terminally ill (symtpoms between different characters have varied)

being possessed (one of the rare times I used something supernatural in a story)

I'd do more with physical disabilities if my works weren't configured for video games (where combat/adventure must be present, basically).

edited 17th Feb '11 12:06:27 PM by colbertimposter

I currently have two characters planned who each lose an eye (the one also suffers severe burns to the face), but they're both fairly minor characters so I never gave it that much consideration.

It's hard, that's for sure.

I have one character who has never had eyes. She does, however, have extremely acute hearing and isn't human; she's essentially a magical robot, a golem of sorts (though that gives a bit of the wrong mental image to most; she's not some huge hulking slow-moving automaton). The superhuman hearing gives me a lot of "out", here, and it's possible she can get more detail by deliberately creating sounds and tracking echoes, like a bat.

I've deliberately been doing things with my eyes closed to give me more of a feel of how it is. How other senses can compensate. I can now leave my seat at work and find my way across the floor, down the fire-escape stairs, and outside without opening my eyes, for instance, and spending that much time moving without looking is making me realize that even an unaided human can be a lot more functional than most sighted people would realize.

She also has the ability to sense heat, though I'm a little undecided how closely that approaches infrared sight; I'd rather it didn't.

Another character is undead. This is not the "Easy Undead" trope that a lot of writers use — hey, now you're a (generally, vampire) — you're super-strong, super-quick, super-tough, and you live forever. No, it's work. Your body is reanimated, but it's not a great replacement for life. Your body is less good at repairing itself. It needs constant care, from moisturizers to keep the skin supple to regular shots of the replacement for blood, preserving agents, nutrients, and all kinds of things. One might not feel pain as well, so one has to check one's extremities to ensure they don't get damaged and untreated. One has to eat some nasty stuff to give what limited self-repair capacity is possible.

It also makes her cold-blooded, and this is important, because she's thus entirely dependent on external sources of heat to stay functional. If she gets too cold, she gets sluggish, physically and mentally — and too cold, and she slips into a state of catatonic hibernation. She can be revived by heating, and this does mean she can survive conditions of severe cold, but not in a functional way.

Also, she's a psychic vampire, in terms of life energy. She doesn't generally drain from individuals; rather, she absorbs without conscious thought from anyone in about a half-mile radius. This means that the more people are around, the less she takes from each. She does well in cities. Small towns are harder, and being isolated with only a few companions will mean their rapid draining and possibly even death. This makes travel hard. It's generally managed only by inducing catatonic hibernation and shipping her that way, inside a coffin-like chamber. If she awakes onboard ship, for instance, things are going to get very bad, very quickly. (Of course, this happens).

She also looks absolutely frightful to normal human eyes; the skin gets thin, translucent, and she looks deathly, with veins and blotchiness and stuff like that. This in turn means that at age 32 she's having to learn to wear full makeup if she doesn't want to scare passers-by.

In general, I try to work through the implications of a choice and make them as real as I can. Sure, they get Disability Superpowers from these things, but they get all kinds of weaknesses that normal people don't have.

My protagonist, Matthias went blind after seeing an Eldritch Abomination in an abandoned temple, then was given Aura Vision by a kindly old priest, leaving him slightly better off than some other examples. He was also born with a severe heart defect- Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome, which required three surgeries before he turned five to make his heart somewhat usable. As he grew older, his heart weakened too much to handle the walk to school, so he ended up needing a heart transplant anyways. So now he's good.

Research that I've done on blindness and HLHS has come from the internet and various books that I have around the house, and various little scraps of life blinded with Aura Vision have come from random bouts of Fridge moments. For instance, in the narrative, Matt only mentions how things feel, smell, sound, or taste to him and never really mentions what other characters look like because the Aura Vision lets him see a person's soul, which looks featureless except for the energy colors.

I've also played around with this. Since ghosts are just souls, he can see ghosts when almost nobody else can, but he can't hear them. This leads to bizarre, reputation-damaging situations where he sees a ghost in his friend's house (the friend's daughter) and tries to introduce himself, but outsiders just think he's talking to thin air and assume he's mad.

One of my side characters Dawson lost below the knee of both legs due to a plane crash and then got fake legs and resumed being a fighter pilot. It was inspired by two pilots during WWII who didn't have legs. Some people say having less leg could help with dealing with G-force since your blood will go slightly less far with the end of extremities being slightly closer, but I'm not sure. @_@ I hadn't thought too hard about it since Dawson is a side character and is the stubborn sort of person who just does things to prove he can.

Sounds very Douglas Bader to me, who I presume was one of the real-life inspirations?

I'm high functioning autistic and have hypermobility and asthma. My best friend has cerebral palsy and is in a wheelchair.

I often put disabilities into my stories. Several times, without even realizing it, I've made the protagonist mildly autistic. I have a teenager with muscular dystrophy who becomes a vampire (he's one of the ones I accidentally made autistic, though that's probably undiagnosed). I'm currently starting work on a story where one of the two protagonists has locked in syndrome, and I've tried to write several stories from the perspective of nonverbal autistics.

I also have several supernaturally disabled characters. An elf who has no magic and gets sick if she goes too long without someone casting a spell on her, a guy who was turned into a vampire/ghost hybrid that can never leave a certain park, an Emotion Eater who was badly wounded by an attempt to turn her back into a normal human and as a result her powers randomly cut out for days at a time (while her need to feed remains, so she starves until they cut back in), a MindControlled vampire who acts like a person with various brain injuries while the person controlling him learns to use that power, etc. I also had one story that conked out shortly after it started, about a necrophiliac who discovers he's really a 'vampire-filiac' after one of the corpses he was considering playing with comes to life.

Thoughts:

Going by this thread, and the scar thread, when do you think injury is too much?

That's... a good question.

Hmmm... I...suppose...when the character is completely incapacitated by their injuries, or when they are no longer able to stay alive without the aid of medical support? Then again, I'm planning on going into medicine, so after several serious injuries, by the end, my protagonist has reached this point. Point in case: she tries to drive a knife through her heart. Because of nerve damage caused by blunt force trauma and a head injury (the same one that cost her her second eye), her hand shakes so badly that she drives it full-force, metal hilt in, through her shoulder. Getting it out takes a hell of a lot of work, and she almost bleeds to death in the process - infection is also worrisome, but because of not being quite human, infections don't occur unless the wound is left exposed and without treatment for over a week (and doesn't heal on its own).

When is injury too much? Depends on the plot.

If your plot requires that your character be capable of certain things after receiving the injury, don't give them injuries that make doing so impossible. Or, if they must survive, don't give them anything fatal.

If it fits with your plot, go ahead and severely injure a character.

@Morven yeah, Douglas Bader and Alexey Maresyev.

(This is AHR. Just using Cakman's computer)

Well, not even from a plot standpoint, more of a characterization standpoint. When does the amount of injuries become almost unrelatable or overkill, the same way that too many tragedies might make a story seem like overkill?

I hesitate when deciding whether to have permanent injuries take place in characters of my stories who don't die, mostly because my Author Avatar character quite frequently hogs my writing with hir panoply of socially stunting emotional issues, almost chief among them the chronic inability to trust people (I've had many a Creator Breakdown and my main characters have gone from mostly hopeful to mostly pessimistic and depressive).

I can't say I've had characters lose an eye (permanently) or limbs, or have syndromes or disorders with names, but my generally pessimistic outlook on my own life makes me NOT want to have characters (especially protagonists) suffer more than a story calls for. Though I did have one of my protagonists rip off the villain's entire penis, testicles and scrotal sac (in one pull—super-strength plus super rage do not a happy villain make) in one of my stories. That's pretty permanent considering the medics aren't going to reattach (the ripped genitals get crushed). That's about as far as I've gone in terms of "permanent injury" (of the non-fatal kind, anyways).

edited 19th Feb '11 12:35:08 AM by Metalitia