Or, “Anything that happens to, or near, a writer becomes part of the soup from which stories are dipped.”<\/p>\n
In the category of “You’re never too old to get hurt in a new way,” I now have an injury I haven’t had before, and would retroactively inflict on a character if I could, just to show that I know what it’s like.\u00a0\u00a0 I screwed up a stop on my bike today and in the process of falling allowed one bike handlebar to gak me in the neck in a serious way.\u00a0 Not as serious as it could have been, but serious.\u00a0\u00a0 (Advice to would-be writers: don’t do this just to get the experience.\u00a0 I’ll be glad to help you with the details if you feel it necessary.\u00a0 If you achieve it and don’t kill yourself, you’ll wish you hadn’t.)<\/p>\n
When it happened, I didn’t know yet that it hadn’t been the much more serious and potentially fatal crushed larynx, so my immediate thought was “That was really stupid,” and “I hope I don’t die right this instant.”\u00a0 (I can think<\/em> really fast in emergencies, but the body doesn’t always react correctly,\u00a0 or I wouldn’t have fallen.)\u00a0\u00a0 The blow came just *above* the larynx but I have a visceral memory of the elderly woman (younger than I am now) who fell off a 4-wheeler on a ranch near here back in the early 80s when I was both younger and on the local ambulance crew.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 She crashed just as she was taken into the ER; she’d ruptured her brachial artery and bled into the mediastinum, gradually compressing her trachea.\u00a0 She’d asked to sit up in the ambulance, and had the standard neck brace on, so the gradual swelling in her neck didn’t show.\u00a0 They couldn’t get a tracheotomy in because of the swelling and blood.\u00a0\u00a0 And we had a crushed-larynx death another time.\u00a0\u00a0 So that was a pleasant thought when I realized I couldn’t talk or swallow for a bit there.<\/p>\n Luckily for me, two people (the guy driving the pickup I was avoiding with the turn and stop, and the young woman I’d passed a few seconds before, who jogs up and down a street at right angles to the one I ride on most) came to see if I was OK, and stayed with me, calling my husband, untangling the bike from my legs, etc.\u00a0\u00a0 And it’s over three hours later now,\u00a0 and it hurts quite a lot, but the vital tubes are staying open, blood pressure hasn’t dropped so significant internal bleeding isn’t happening, and the other bruises have made themselves obvious.<\/p>\n Writer Mind started making up scenarios as soon as I was sure I could breathe, cheerfully doing the writer mind thing of sticking this incident (and any variations it could think of) into different settings, with different characters, with different outcomes.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s STILL doing that.\u00a0\u00a0 The overall consciousness of a writer does things no psychologist would approve of, I’m sure, like splitting into different POVs and running them in parallel, and always having the Writer Mind Function turned on and active no matter what else it going on.\u00a0 Reminds me of the newscaster character in Tanya Huff’s Torin Kerr books, Presit.\u00a0 Whatever happens, Presit is always looking for the media advantage, taking notes, telling her cameraman to get “that” shot, etc.\u00a0\u00a0 Well, Writer Mind is like that.\u00a0\u00a0 “Remember now, *exactly which* part of you hit *exactly which* part of the bike and then the ground!\u00a0 How does this impact compare to the time Illusion bolted and you fell off in the north field?\u00a0 The time you fell off the bike on that tight turn in the woods?”\u00a0 Now, over three hours later, it’s telling me to remember the details of how it’s done since.\u00a0 Exactly what does the swollen bruised knee feel like?\u00a0 Is that a sting or an itch or a burn?\u00a0\u00a0 Does the bruised hip actually hurt, or…?\u00a0 And so on.\u00a0 Writer Mind has zero sympathy for the writer, and a great interest in collecting “material.”\u00a0 On the one hand that’s great, because someday, someone, somewhere, in some book, is going to get hit in the neck with something\u00a0 and I’ll have all those details stored away, properly labeled, and the injury will seem\u00a0 realistic to anyone who’s had the same thing, or medical personnel who have cared for that person.\u00a0 But on the other hand…if you can’t get sympathy from your own mind…?\u00a0\u00a0 (“It was your fault anyway,” says Writer Mind.\u00a0 “Why should I give you sympathy.\u00a0 The computer is right over there, and it’s on.\u00a0 You should be writing all this down.”)<\/p>\n What saves writers from stark insanity is that (most of us) know what Writer Mind is doing is creating fiction.\u00a0 Fiction is not real the same way getting hit in the neck with a bike handlebar is real.\u00a0\u00a0 We don’t “believe” what we create; we think<\/em> it.\u00a0 We know it comes from within (partly) but we also know it’s something we made up.\u00a0 t<\/p>\n The scenario has been re-run (by Writer Mind) in both fantasy and science fictional settings, as well as contemporary here-and-now-this-world ones, from multiple POVs (victim, assailant, onlooker, medical personnel, relative.)\u00a0\u00a0 Meanwhile, my neck hurts, my throat feels scratchy inside,\u00a0 and I wish Writer Mind would shut up and let me read someone else’s book to take my mind off the neck, knee, other knee, hip, and elbow.\u00a0\u00a0 (Truly, I was VERY lucky, and all the non-neck injuries are minor skin and soft-tissue and will be gone.\u00a0 As Granny Weatherwax put it in a note, “I aten’t dead yet.”)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Or, “Anything that happens to, or near, a writer becomes part of the soup from which stories are dipped.” In the category of “You’re never too old to get hurt in a new way,” I now have an injury I haven’t had before, and would retroactively inflict on a character if I could, just to Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,10],"tags":[17,7],"class_list":["post-389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","category-the-writing-life","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":390,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions\/390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}