We discuss the weirdest things on Facebook, don't we?
For instance, I belong to a Facebook group called Trauma Fiction. It's a place where writers can post questions about all the ways we want to injure our characters and how to make it believable.
Er . . . something like that. 😉
Anyway, I recently posted in this group looking for advice about how long a character might be unconscious after passing out from pain. Google had been surprisingly unhelpful, so I figured that (virtually) asking real humans with personal experience and/or medical training might work better. It did.
(If you're curious, it appears that such a patient will likely be out for only a few seconds, maybe a few minutes, while their blood pressure stabilizes, even if you factor in other complicating factors such as dehydration. The patient will probably also not be thinking or reacting normally for a few minutes before and after passing out.)
Somehow my brain jumped from this Facebook conversation about physical trauma to some of my favorite tools for dealing with characters' emotional wounds: the Writers Helping Writers series.
In several recent emails, we've talked about the "show, don't tell" principle, and these books have really helped me to do that with emotions. I highly recommend checking it out. I don't get a commission or anything from you clicking the link; I just think they're that good!
Write on,
Candice
P.S. What emotion(s) do you most struggle to show, not tell, in your writing? Click here to join the discussion on Facebook!
(Thanks to Glenn Carstens-Peters for sharing their work on Unsplash.)
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