Ever ended a rough week by killing off one of your characters? Yeah, me too. No matter what people say, it can be cathartic. Even therapeutic. But, for authors with little to no drug knowledge, plot twists involving an overdose (accidental or otherwise) can seem complicated. To maintain credibility with readers, authors should make sure to get at least a few crucial drug-related facts right.
Written well, an overdose scene is a page-turner.
But if your character instantly drops dead from an insulin
overdose, the thud you hear won’t be from the body dropping to the ground.
It will be from readers closing your book in utter disappointed.
It’s fiction. Why not just make up facts?
I hear this argument quite often. As authors, we spend an
inordinate amount of time researching historical data, geographic facts,
magical lore, and so much more, to craft well-developed stories. Drug scenes
should be no different.
Our readers may be one of the millions of healthcare workers, from paramedics to doctors. Some may be diabetics or cancer survivors. Some may be struggling with alcohol or opioid addiction. Today’s readers are savvier than ever before about drugs.
Writing blatantly inaccurate drug scenes can ruin a story for these readers, risking negative reviews. For example, the recent movie Knives Out relies on a flawed drug-related plot twist that ruins an otherwise fun, well-plotted (and mostly well-acted) story. Numerous online reviews were quick with grievances.
How to write drug-related scenes well (without medical knowledge)
Before writing these scenes, whether they involve smoking pot
at a frat party or spies using lethal injections, I recommend researching the
following key points:
Historic validity
Verify that the drug, and the way you depict it being given, existed in the historical time period of the story. For example, an early 1800’s historical fiction with an insulin-using diabetic character would be grossly inaccurate. Neither insulin nor injections were discovered until the 1900’s.
Societal trends
The socioeconomic circumstances of your characters will impact the drugs used and abused. A character living on the street might smoke crack cocaine, while a high-society hostess may serve an Ecstasy-laced cheese platter.
In addition, many drug use trends, and their prescribing habits, change over time. It was no accident that Agatha Christie’s pivotal scene in Murder on the Orient Express revolved around barbital, a popular sedative during the story’s time period.
Accurate Side effects
Consider these two important questions:
What are typical side effects for the drug? A character should have a few realistic side effects. Hallucinations of paint dripping down walls are obviously more likely with an LSD trip, while a heart attack might end an energy drink chugging contest.
How long do the effects take to develop? While instant effects are tempting, almost no drug works instantly. But this is actually wonderful for dramatic writing! For murder and overdose scenes, this fact gives authors a built-in real timeline to evolve the danger, creating a page-turner.
Putting it all together
Once you’ve gathered some basic clear facts, you can create a
believable three-dimensional scene the reader won’t soon forget.
That insulin scene? It’s now set in the 1990’s. A woman
measures insulin from a vial into a syringe, and gives herself a dose. The anticipation
grows, as the reader watches helplessly, knowing the woman’s husband secretly
switched the insulin concentration. As the woman sits back to watch an evening
movie, the danger slowly evolves. She starts to feel dizzy, examines the
insulin bottle, confused. The dose seemed right. Slowly, she realizes what has
happened, knows she needs to find help. But she can’t think clearly. She tries
to get up, stumbles, falls, her breathing strained. Does help arrive in time? The
reader has no choice but to turn the page to find out.
Happy Plotting!
Note: Miffie has agreed to share her pharmaceutical know-how with us as an ongoing feature! If you have questions and scenarios you'd like her to explore for future posts, please share them in the comments.
Feel like you're killing your readers with unrealistic drug scenes? I’d love to hear your comments and questions!
About Miffie
Miffie Seideman has been a pharmacist for over 30 years, with a passion for helping others. She’s a published non-fiction author, with another peer-reviewed journal article coming out this month. An avid triathlete, she spends countless hours training in the deserts of Arizona, devising drug-related plot twists. She can be found hanging around onwemerrilystumble.com and on Twitter @MiffieSeideman.
Every writer dreams of developing characters who continue
to lurk in a reader’s memory long after the story is over. Memorable characters,
well-rounded dynamic beings who grow and change over the course of a book, will
make a great story even better. Often static characters, who remain unchanged
throughout the story, can be memorable too. However, every character must show
emotions the reader can relate to if they want to achieve “memorable” status.
Emotion directs action.
Emotion,
which is a blend of energy and motion, directs action. The four basic emotions
-- happiness, sadness, anger, and fear -- can be woven into your characters’
frameworks to cement them into the reader’s mind.
How can you do this?
Using facial descriptions in your story paints a vivid portrait for your reader.
The following physical descriptions may be helpful to
use while writing your characters’ actions to indicate these four emotions:
For happiness:
Smiling with teeth exposed or not
Wrinkles near corners of the eyes
Facial cheeks raised
Crescent-shaped eyes
Showing sadness:
Inner corners of the eyebrows are squeezed in and upwards
Jaw protrusion
Lips downturned
Lower lip pushed outward
Eyes cast down
To indicate anger:
Eyebrows pressed together to make a crease
Eyelids taut
Head lowered to a minor degree
Eyes look upwards through a lowered brow
Strained facial muscles
Flaring nostrils
Lips pressed tight
A severe gaze (Disgust looks similar to anger.)
For fearful looks:
Eyebrows are raised and drawn together
Raised upper eyelid
Forehead wrinkled
Tensed lower eyelid
Whites of the eyes visible
Mouth open, and lips pressed (Surprise looks much the same as fear.)
Every character needs…
A
reason to exist
Your characters live in a world you’ve built for
them that is just as real to them as our world is real to us. Characters need a
reason for being to keep the story alive and in motion.
Balance
of strengths and flaws
Whenever I read a book or watch a movie I feel very
uncomfortable if there isn’t balance, or at least someone to have faith in. The
first time I watched The Night of the
Hunter I had the worst time until the children found a sensible adult to
help balance the pursuing murderous, grifter character, played by Robert
Mitchum. (I based the main antagonist for my WIP on this nasty fellow.)
In order to be well-rounded characters, the protagonists and antagonists require both strengths and weaknesses. A character without flaws is unnatural and irritating. Think of the fun you can have giving flaws to your antagonist! Perhaps she has an irrational fear of bunnies or a revolting personal habit. This website on Character Flaws is comprehensive.
Internal
and external conflicts
Internal and external conflicts are obstacles to the
character’s goals. Both force your characters to grow and change. These
tensions create conflict and propel the story forward. Consider how internal
and external conflicts might collide. A character may be fiercely independent
yet find himself in the middle of a disaster and need help from others to
survive.
Distinctive
mannerisms
Your characters may have unusual speech, repetitive gestures, or walking patterns. For her distinctive walk, actress Marilyn Monroe had a half inch removed from one of her shoe heels, adding to her swinging gait.
Mannerisms help the reader understand the character’s self-image. For instance: “He sat at the kitchen table, eyes glazed while he chewed his fingernails to nubs.” This sentence gives us a good understanding of the character's frame of mind. He is showing us how he feels. Mannerisms can also show how one character feels about another. For example: “The sixth-grade boy sauntered up to a girl from his class and punched her lightly on the arm, grinning a sloppy smile.” He definitely had a crush.
Backstory
Consider the physical and mental health, and how the
character has been affected by family and local environments. Was she ignored
as a child, leading to a great need for attention? Did he grow up well-to-do and then lose
everything as a preadolescent, completely changing his personality? This
background information doesn’t need to be included in the story, but truly
helps the writer understand character motivations.
Research
Homework for Your Story
One or more of your characters may have a physical
or cognitive disability, be of a culture foreign to you, or have an unusual
ailment or psychological profile. The character’s believability will stand or
fall squarely on research. Today’s readers are more diverse and discerning than
ever before.
Some tips:
Internet searches are helpful. If at all possible, find and interview professionals in the needed areas and add their names to your acknowledgment page if they’d like to be included. In my most recent book, The Hobo Code, I needed information on a psychopath and wanted to be sure I had the correct profile. I happen to know a retired forensic psychologist. We had a lovely, albeit weird, luncheon discussion all about psychopaths.
Final Thought
Layer your fictional folk with emotional reality. Finding
perfection in the imperfect will give you beautifully flawed and memorable
characters.
What do your characters need? Do you tend to favor certain emotions in your characters? What type of characters do you have the most fun writing?
******
About Ellen
Author, speaker, and former teacher Ellen L. Buikema has written non-fiction for parents and a series of chapter books for children with stories encouraging the development of empathy—sprinkling humor wherever possible. Her Work In Progress, The Hobo Code, is YA historical fiction.
Young Adult novels have come a long way from the classics we read in school. Novels like S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye were first accepted into the newly coined category, Young Adult (YA) in the 1960’s. While YA literature focuses on adolescence and coming of age stories, it can span any genre and follows the rules within those types of writing.
YA also appeals to multi-generations of readers, evolving from the single-problem stories of an after school special to the mega-blockbusters we see today. One thing is for sure: readers of all ages are gobbling up these stories.
Writers today have questions about how this multifaceted category works, and whether their novel is actually YA. Below are tips to help you answer these questions. (Plenty of examples and ways to enhance your current story are included.)
How To Know if You Are Writing YA
Do you have a story featuring a young protagonist? One topic writers ask about is how to create a YA book editors will swoon for. Although this book category is defined by the age of the protagonist (between 12 and 18 years old), writing a YA novel is way more involved than a number. Working through the following questions may reduce the confusion and help you identify whether your novel is considered Young Adult.
What is your character’s age?
The age indicates which shelf your book sells from in bookstores or Amazon accounts, but not always. Most publishers say YA stories have protagonists between the ages of 14 to 18, or the time they would be in high school. Sometimes the lower end dips to a younger age, but then it overlaps with Middle Grade. A book with an older Main Character (MC) experiencing first milestones such as an apartment, job, or serious romance tends to be in the New Adult (NA) category. The difference then becomes the content and tone of the story as to the intended audience.
Age drives how your character acts, and what they are able to do. The MC’s age has to intertwine with the purpose of the character’s age to make the difference. This can determine whether you have written a YA story or one in another category.
Some examples:
In All the Bright Places (Jennifer Niven, 2015), MC Violet Markey rides a bike for transportation. Why? Because we know that 16 is the youngest age someone can legally drive and bikes are a way to travel without your mom driving you around in the broken-down minivan. While bikes are a logical part of a YA protagonist’s world, we also find out that Violet is actually avoiding other types of travel due to a tragic loss.
Here is where the real YA juices start flowing.
Violet isn’t just rebelling from her family and seeking independence, she's flat out refusing to use her driver’s license! Teens avoid the inevitable acceptance that life as an adult is inherently different. It is natural for a teen like Violet to want to push "pause" and stop growing when life becomes overwhelming.
Using plausible but interesting plot points that relate to a teen’s life helps readers recapture that wonder. Making the reader warn the characters from behind the pages about the foreseeable pitfalls of their choices and breaking our hearts anyway, makes the YA story irresistible.
What is the time frame of your story?
Most YA storylines last a year or less. There are exceptions, but there are pragmatic reasons for keeping your story's timeline short. These kids haven’t been alive that long. A year is forever, especially in high school. A story arc for a freshman would appear very different from one with an upperclassman.
If your story is longer than that, the good news is that you may have more than one story to tell!
What is the Main Conflict in your story?
There are certain constraints for your character built into their YA story arc. Characters act differently if they're thirteen years old versus eighteen. The age of the protagonist should match the main problem they face.
Is your story about a character's first independent trip, or starting a babysitting business? These situations have more impact when your character is closer to the Middle Grade stage (12-14 or younger).
Whereas decisions about an occupation, working in a restaurant, or getting cut from a high school sports team is much more suited to the 14 years or older age range.
No topic is off-limits if handled with care.
It isn't hard to find examples of controversial but popular books and series that cover dark subject matter. The Hunger Games, 13 Reasons Why, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and The Fault in Our Stars cover sanctioned murder, suicide, mental illness, and teens with cancer. This hardly seems like material to hand to young readers.
I've read many questions from writers who wonder if their gritty story line is too dark. Teen novels thrive in the dark corners of the undeveloped mind. Their early cynicism is part of what keeps teens alive through this impulsive part of life. Dark stories can provide safe, vicarious places for readers to make their own choices about what is right and wrong.
Readers learn empathy and experience other cultures through these stories. A writer's job is to capture that worry and wonder and give readers experiences to feel of all the feels.
What is your story’s Conflict?
Identify your conflict - YA by definition is all about awkward, cringe-worthy, desperate, confused, and at times incredibly innocent, adolescence. These elements when rooted in the coming of age, problems of a teen kind of way, pave the way for a YA novel readers will crave.
If the main problem (i.e. mom’s dating my math teacher) is inherent to the teen years, your story is YA. If the story could fit in a different time, maybe it’s not.
One writer asked whether we would categorize their story about a teen who snuck into the army as YA. This writer considered the conflict and point of view of the MC with the following questions.
Do we feel as if we are alongside the teen in their situation?
Are the concerns of the protagonist consistent with what teenagers feel?
Do they pick up the weapon but worry if they said the right thing to the girl?
Is doing something for the first time in all its glory oozing from the story? Flying a plane, traveling beyond the borders of a little town, meeting a new kid with worldly tales?
Do they trip over their own feet and feel out of place, even though their dialogue shows a different tale?
Teens are faking it until they make it. (Kind of like a lot of successful people!) This dynamic of uncertainty must be present to make authentic YA that resonates from the pages.
Does your story need to be in the category of YA?
Write your best story. Should be experienced through the eyes of a teen? Find the bones of the story. The story will let you know. Listen carefully as it may be whispering something else to you.
If it isn’t inside the parameters of YA, or you don't hear any whispering, don’t be discouraged. The story may belong on another shelf, if the story isn’t suited to YA, make it shine as a MG or Adult novel.
YA is a narrow focus with many genres and is just one type of story to tell. Stay true to your tale and make it shine. Use the questions above to focus your story and enhance if it is YA, if not you will know better what to disregard.
IMPORTANT TIP: Know that part of adolescence is having a superpower to spot pandering and two-dimensional characteristics light-years away. Effective YA writing involves working out tough topics and plotting them in satisfying ways. No shortcuts in fleshing out the stereotypical characters either.
If you have seen this character before, or feel you have figured out the ending in the first pages, why would you as a reader continue?
This article by a YA editor offers great suggestions to read to continue your exploration of the craft. Writer’s Digest has an interesting article written by a teen writer asking adult writers to just… stop. We have covered guidelines here to get to the heart of what makes an effective YA story, but really listening to your protagonist helps.
What story featuring a young protagonist has stayed with you? Are there favorite stories from your youth (or a youthful story) that you've re-read recently? What other YA writing tips do you have to share? I look forward to your comments!
A recovering grammarian and hopeless wanderer, Kris enjoys reading, playing violin and piano, hiking the forest with her dog Charlie, and pondering the wisdom of Bob Ross.
The year is 2098, and Nala Nightingale is a young journalist at the media conglomerate Intercambio 7. She wants to investigate her parents untimely deaths. Instead, she’s stuck reporting on the latest makeup trends with her rival Mimi. That all changes when a catastrophic asteroid hurtles towards earth. Inspired by a wordless book and the red gems on her bracelet, Nala turns down the broadcast of a lifetime to unravel her past before the impact. However, things don’t go as planned. The world above ground is in ruins. Trapped underground with a mysterious scientist named Edison and his chess master AI, can Nala Nightingale find the will to live and to love in a dystopian future?
