writeworld:

(reblogged from lunarblue21)

by Leia Fee, with additions by Susannah Shepherd

Quick Contents

• Introduction
• General remarks
• What’s normal?
• Reactions to injury – including emotional reactions, fainting and shock. 
• Minor injuries – such as bruises, grazes and sprains
• Head injuries – from  black eyes to severe concussions
• Broken bones 
• Dislocated joints
• Cutting and Piercing – for various locations, including blood loss symptoms and figures.
• Blunt trauma – getting hit, internal injuries.
• Burns – including electrical burns
• Hostile environments – such as extreme cold and heat, oxygen deprivation and exposure to vacuum.
• References – useful websites.

Introduction

Characters climbing cliffs with broken arms or getting knocked out for an hour or so and then running around like nothing happened, bug me.  It doesn’t take much longer to get it right, and I’ve found that getting doing the research to get it right can often lead to whole new story possibilities I hadn’t thought of before.

I’m not any sort of medical expert – research for this article has come from a variety of sources from medical texts to personal experience – (I’m just a teeny bit accident prone…)  I do historical reenactment and a large part of information here comes from the ‘traumatic injury’ (or ‘the nasty things that can happen to you in combat’ information we give the public and new members to make them go ‘urggh , I’m glad this isn’t for real’.

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Writing Realistic Injuries