This began as a guide to describing Afro/curly hair but of course, I got carried away. From look and texture of hair, colors and various styles, this guide serves as a thesaurus of sorts for hair, as well as pointers for use in your writing.
Culturally Significant Hair Coverings:
Know the meaning behind head wear and why it’s worn, when and by whom, such as a Native Nation’s headdress, before bestowing a character with it.
Appropriative Hairstyles: Keep in mind that Afro styles should be kept to those in the African Diaspora, such as dreadlocks, cornrows + certain and many braided styles.
Tread carefully describing Afro hair as “wild” “unkempt” “untamed” or any words implying it’s unclean or requires controlling.
“Nappy” and “wooly” are generally words to stay away from, the first having heavy negative connotations for many and the latter, though used in the Holy Bible, is generally not acceptable anymore and comes off as dehumanizing due to Animal connotations.
There are mixed feelings on calling Black hair “kinky.” I’m personally not opposed to the word initself and usage depends on the person’s race (I’m more comfortable with a Black person using it vs. a Non-Black person) as well as their tone and context (if it’s used in a neutral or positive tone vs. negatively/with disdain). Get feedback on your usage, or simply forgo it.
Combination Words: Try combing words to illustrate look of hair. A character with springy coils that dance across her shoulders with every movement, the man with thick silvery hair slicked back into a ponytail…
Mind Perspective: Depending on POV, a character might not know exactly what cornrows or a coiffure style is, at least in name, and it might make more sense if they described the hairdo instead. More defining terms might come from a more knowing source or the wearer themselves. One book I read described a girl’s afro puff as “thick hair pulled up into a cute, curly, poufy thing on top of her head and tied with a yellow ribbon.”
POC & Hair Colors: People of Color’s hair comes in all shades and textures. There are Black people with naturally blond and loosely-textured to straight hair, East Asian people with red hair, and so on. Keep that in mind when coding characters if you tend to rely on hair color alone to denote a character is white vs. a Person of Color.
Related Tropes: There are tropes and discussion related to People of Color, colored hair, and light-colored hair and features.
[ADMIN NOTE: “Bad Writing” is subjective. Understand that the title of this post reflects only Michael Bradley’s opinion on writing. This post is not an edict from on high; it is a resource from which to learn (or not).]
Neck breaking – If I had a dollar for every time I see a movie or read a book or watch TV and someone with their arms or legs snaps the neck of a bad guy and kills them… Sometimes they just put a hand on either side of their head and jerk and you hear a chiropractic snapping sound and the person falls limp and dead. We would all be dropping dead regularly if it were so easy to break our necks.
In reality, a broken neck is much harder to achieve as the neck can flex easily. Even crushed vertebrae would not be an instant kill. If you lift and rotate the Atlas joint you can damage the spinal cord through spiral tear or at worst sever it, very difficult the latter. Still, the victim would most likely be paralyzed but not die immediately. Even severing an artery will cause death only after a few minutes.
It is unlikely even the strongest man can snap the neck of a bad guy and kill them instantly.
Knocking Someone Out – Even people with a “glass jaw” can rarely be knocked unconscious with a single punch or blow to the head. Look at boxers. After a long fight, they often succumb to a rain of blows. A kick to the head on the other hand, may do the trick. However, the heroes punching a guy in the jaw, not likely to do the trick.
Recovery from Being Knocked Out – If you are knocked unconscious from a blow to the head, most likely you have suffered at least a concussion if not a traumatic brain injury. You do not get up, rub your head, and then act functional and remember what happened. When knocked out, you lose the last thirty seconds to few minutes of memory. If you were knocked out quickly, you would wake up not even knowing why. You would also experience headache, vision issues, and nausea. This state would continue for some time and you would need medical assistance. If you had bleeding on the brain, cerebral swelling, or organic brain injury, simply ignoring it will cause the damage to be permanent, worse, and perhaps fatal.
If your hero is good, and does not kill anyone, they simply knock them out. In reality, there is a good chance that hitting them over the head hard enough to cause loss of consciousness will not only cause severe damage but maybe death as well.
Sleeper Hold – The good hero often does the sleeper hold. This again is easy, simply holding them gently with an arm until they pass out. In reality, this can often damage the trachea and cause suffocation and heart attack, even in trained professionals. How many times have law enforcement been sued over choke hold related deaths? Also, it takes a long time to make someone pass out, in which they turn blue, eyes bulge, and they fight like hell to stop you. I get so tired of “don’t fight it” being said during a choke hold to make it easy. The truth is that when you are suffocating, you WILL fight it whether you want to or not. It is a primal instinct. These scenes would result in about four minutes of horrible struggling, blood vessels popping in the eyes, mucous forced from the nose, and not very heroic for our good hero.
Temporary Amnesia Caused by Blow to the Head – If you have physical trauma induced amnesia, it is likely permanent due to the severe damage to your brain needed to induce memory loss. Psychological trauma, such as PTSD can result in temporary suppression of memory or memory loss. Sometimes these memories can be regained. However, a physically damaged brain causing memory loss is unlikely to recover.
Regaining Memory from Another Blow to the Head – In Three Stooges tradition, you lose your memory from a head injury, then you regain it from another blow to the head. Each time you get hit, your brain will take more damage. All brain surgeons know the best way to heal damaged neurons is to smash them with a blunt instrument – NOT! And yet this mythos endures, even on famous shows.
Psychological Trauma – The hero’s base is attacked and half the people die. They fight back, overcome and end up defeating the enemies. They have a tearful funeral, talk to the family of the dead, and get drunk. Next week they are all back at work as if nothing happened. In what world does your office place have several long time members killed, you kill others, then you return to work for more. Likely that whole unit would be faced with 90% absentees due to leaves of absence, transfer requests and people quitting. Even in the military no unit in wartime withstands 50% casualties and continues to function after that. Even with ten percent casualties, the unit would have severe personality changes and replacements would be viewed as outsiders for not having shared the trauma.
Capillary Bleeding – The head bleeds like the dickens. In the military we are trained to avoid people going into shock. Scalp capillaries will cover the entire head and face with blood very quickly from even a minor scratch. The injured will often think their entire head has been blown apart. A tire iron to the head or a grazed bullet to the scalp does not produce a smudge of blood in the hair that one puts their fingers to and shrugs off. They would instead be unable to see for blood in their eyes and if they clear them to look in a reflective service they would see themselves covered in blood and usually freak out. In these situations, the brain often sends them into shock, shutting down their ability to function and possibly causing death as it shuts down thinking it must preserve blood.
I started going to the dojo when I was in sixth grade. It was a very masculine environment; there weren’t a lot of other girls there but the male senseis who ran the place were great guys and they genuinely loved having female students because we were such a rarity.
Now back in sixth grade I was tinier even than what I am now, and now I’m only 5’2. Then I was probably even under 5’0. I mean I was a squirt of a kid. But I loved to fight; I loved to be in the ring, I loved the adrenaline rush and I loved having punches hurled at me. It was fun for me. Our dojo did full-contact sparring, which was pretty brutal. These were the only rules:
you must wear a mouth guard and gloves
no hits below the belt
That’s pretty much it.
Anyway every Thursday was Fight Night, where all we did was spar each other. And on my First Night Sensei Diven—who has since passed, bless his soul—paired me up with this really cocky and assholish brown belt to show me the ropes a little. This brown belt kid was bigger than me by a lot; he must have been at least six feet and twice my weight. But man was I excited to get into the ring! I had a fight boiling in my blood.
Now, Sensei Diven was not a stupid man and he hated high-ranking kids that showed a bad attitude. This kid had a bad attitude. So he must have seen the evil gleam in my eye from a mile away and decided it was time for a little improvisation.
Anyway, Sensei yelled, “Start!” and I leapt into fight stance and the other kid didn’t even put his hands up. He was laughing at me, sneering, the whole nine yards. “I’ll give you a free one.” he joked, and he slapped his side. “You barely weigh 100 pounds and you’re a girl. So go ahead, little girl. Hit me.”
And I hit him. I cocked my leg up as high as it would go and roundhouse kicked him right in the ribs with all of my might and all of the contempt I felt for his stupid cocky face which was covered in ugly-ass freckles and his nasty-ass braces. And I heard a crack. Like a real snap! sound. And the kid has a look of surprise on his face like it was nobody’s business, and then he goes right to the floor like a sack of potatoes.
Now, Sensei Diven leisurely strolls over from the group of black belts who are laughing their asses off at me, the tiny little white belt, sending my Goliath to the floor. I mean they’re laughing so hard they look like they’re about to pee themselves. They think it’s a game. And in his great booming voice he hollers:
“Brown Belt! Why are you on the floor? Do you not see this white belt has been assigned to fight you?”
And meanwhile he is just crying. I broke one of his ribs.
And Sensei Diven just squats down next to this poor kid and whispers, “Don’t you know that women are made of pain?”
this is the kind of positivity i need. sometimes fitblrs fill my dash with unrealistically skinny/muscular/perfect women with body types i could never achieve and it can make me so depressed I can’t stand to look in the mirror
Just in case you didn’t know what This Girl Can was, here ya go.
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