The 960 Writers

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Wow… you’re at the Exciting Part. :)  …No, seriously: this is the point from which everything flows, from the novelist’s point of view. It’s an exciting place to be, and at the same time SO intimidating, because GOD can anything happen from here onward.

(I’m assuming that we’re talking about fiction, BTW.)

Anyway. After 50+ books I know what I do at this point – pretty much – but that’s not going to do you a lot of good, since many of the opening moves in the game for me are now accordioned together into something that happens very fast and in which the individual movements and sequences can be kind of difficult to tease out for an observer. Let me instead describe to you how I would work this kind of situation out when I first got started selling books to editors.

Not epic or climactic. Just... alive.

• A character almost admits they were wrong and then pivots • Two people sitting in a car after an argument, engine off, neither leaving • Someone practicing a speech in the mirror and hating how it sounds • A character lying for someone they resent • An inside joke that no longer feels funny • A public setting where private tension is simmering • Someone seeing their ex unexpectedly and performing indifference • A character giving advice they absolutely do not follow • A confession interrupted by something mundane • A person rereading old messages they shouldn’t • A gift that misses the mark completely • A character realizing they’ve outgrown someone mid-conversation • Someone saying “It’s fine” and meaning “I will remember this forever” • A moment where a character notices they are no longer the favorite • Two people who used to be close struggling to find a topic

Please imagine me gently holding your hands, I am not reprimanding you, I say this with nothing but love and respect, but

If you give a character with no access to antibiotics a wound infection, they are going to die.

If a character is delirious with fever, they are going to die.

Make them lose a substantial amount of blood. For reference: For an adult human, about 8% of their body weight is blood. They can lose around 10% of that without much trouble, 20% will cause serious symptoms, more than 50-60% is generally incompatible with life. These numbers are estimations. The slower this blood loss, the better the body can compensate for it. Losing a significant amount of blood will affect the character's consciousness and take days or weeks to recover from.

Fever and malaise. Injuries are stressful. Inflammation is a natural response to that. Destroyed cells release proteins which can cause moderate fever (too much of that can cause kidney failure which is why excessive beatings can kill people, even when they don't initially sustain any life-threatening injuries). The character will be in pain, they'll feel like shit, they'll need plenty of rest and tender caretaking without their limb rotting off.

If you have to infect them, give them an abscess. That way, the pus and bacteria are walled off and can be drained out (by cutting the abscess open), with lower risk of it getting into the blood stream. It's also risky but much more survivable than phlegmone (diffuse infection of soft tissue).

Drugs. Just drug 'em. Ye Olde Opium/Laudanum will put them in a scarily deep sleep while Love Interest can sit there and hold vigil. Now this might also kill them so use with caution.

Keep. It. Clean. Carefully and gently clean out gross stuff and things that do not belong in there, do not introduce foreign matter, and keep that wound covered.

The body will support Caretaker in this. Exudation is a natural defense mechanism to flush out germs and other dirt. Normal exudate is clear, with a slight yellow tinge, and almost odorless (wounds do have a characteristic smell, but they don't stink). Excessive exudate can form crusts around the wound, those should be cleaned away. Boiled water or saline solution is probably the safest bet for wound irrigation. Gentle mechanical cleaning (wiping with wet cloth) is appropriate.

Wounds want to be kept moist. Ointment can help with that, and also prevent the bandage from sticking to the wound. For a premodern setting, lard (rendered pig fat) is probably not a terrible option. It contains almost no water or sugar, so doesn't grow mold, and the grease prevents the tissue from drying out. Still, Caretaker will probably want to soak that bandage before they remove it.

The bandage should be clean linen. Not wool. If Caretaker has to rip up their clothes for bandages, at least use the undergarment, and the parts of it that are less dirty (sleeves).

A cavernous wound (ie from a drained abscess) might need to be tamponaded, that is, lined with a strip of wet cloth, to keep it open and help with drainage.

Various herbs, honey, spices, etc, have historically all been used to promote healing, some more successfully than others. However, everything is potentially contaminated with germs and fungal spores. Putting mashed plant matter that hasn't been otherwise treated into wounds is always a gamble.

Disinfection is a possibility, but an effective disinfectant will also damage healthy tissue. If Character has their wound bathed with wine or spirits every time the bandage is changed, that wound will become necrotic.

Stitches are likewise a double-edged sword. Pulling the edges of a deep wound together will make it heal quicker and more smoothly, but it also retains exudate in a warm, anaerobic environment, which makes an ideal growing environment for nasty bacteria. Balance risk and reward appropriately.

Some additional thoughts:

Medicine has taken unimaginable leaps during the last ~150 years. Things that would have been a death sentence to our ancestors are barely more than a nuisance to us. As a result, we have a fundamentally different attitude towards treatments, especially invasive treatments. We do surgeries as precaution or to restore optimal function, where in the past, surgery was often a last resort. It was very risky, and ran a good chance of killing the patient, so it would only be done if they would die anyway.

That doesn't mean doctors and surgeons of the past were helpless, there are a lot of amazing and very sophisticated treatments, that are older than you'd think. For as long as we have been human we have tried to heal each other, and were often successful.

Just because we know humoral pathology is wrong doesn't mean it's stupid. It's based on very solid observations of health and the human body. It was the accepted theory for a long time. It makes no sense for a doctor in that setting to reject it.

The human body is at once more resilient and more fragile than most people think. Humans can walk off devastating injuries, a lot of things will sort themselves out. However, once a tipping point is reached and the body can no longer compensate for whatever is going wrong, there's no turning that process around. This is why systemic infections are so dangerous: Bacteria/toxins overwhelm the immune system, everything is poisoned, multiple organ failure, death. It's very difficult to come back from that, even today.

Prior to the 19th century, the Western world had no reliable anesthesia. Alcohol was used & was far from great. If I remember correctly, Abigail Adams underwent one surgery & died rather than going through a second.

If you want some historical medicine texts, look for the following historical authors:

Galen (3rd Century Greek) who wrote on humoral theory.

Hildegard of Bingjn — high medieval German nun who wrote about medicine and other things

Trotula — a collection of three 12th century texts on women’s health

For non-European ideas, consider Tan Yunxian’s “Sayings of a Female Doctor” from the Ming Dynasty for Chinese practices. For India, Ayurveda is still practiced though I would encourage spending time diving into how it may have changed over time.

I don’t have a lot of time tonight, but I have copies of Hildegard’s medical text, as well as Trotula if anyone is looking for something particular.

The interesting thing about Humoral theory, Chinese traditional medicine, and Ayurveda is that they all looked at disease as being caused by a bodily imbalance. All three believed that foods could cause or relieve these imbalances. I don’t wish to overly conflate them — they all are distinct. However if you’re creating a low-science fantasy world, food should be part of how health & healing is approached.

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

if you think no one will like what you make, this is your sign to get to work on that project. No one is telling you you can’t publish that book, write that story, draw that art, animate that animation. Sure, life will complicate things, but you shouldn’t feel forced to do or create what others want. They can create what they want. You create what you want and post what you want.

I’ve finished Gail Carriger’s writing-craft-book “The Heroine’s Journey” today and what a revelation it has been. This book gave me so much insight in what kind of stories I write and why I’m currently so terribly stuck on that one WIP.

In short: The Hero’s Journey is about the solo hero, it’s a story of loneliness and revenge. The Heroine’s Journey is a story about connection, about building a network, a family succeeding by helping each other. (The terms Hero/Heroine have nothing to do with the gender of the protagonist by the way.)

Now in the fanfic I’m currently writing, the source story calls for a heroic moment of self sacrifice (which isn’t really one because the player character survives of course) and I have been struggling so much with the build-up to this moment. (Why oh why do I put so much writing energy in a retelling? Who asked for this?)

As I read Gail’s book, I finally realized why I had so much trouble. I was trying to cram a Hero story into a Heroine’s Journey and it just didn’t fit. My guy has been smacking people over the head for 28 chapters to get everyone together and overcome prejudice and religious bs to save the world, and here I am, trying to get him to abandon everything for some stupid hero moment. No wonder it didn’t work.

Yes, I bought the book again, this time in paper version because if there ever was a book where I needed to stick colourful little thingys on the margins, it’s this one.