Today I had to take poor Markus, my corpulent cat, to the Beastmaster for treatment. I fear Markus is not well.The emanations from his body are foul and plentiful, but I trust that the Beastmaster will be able to heal him. Yet I worry: no matter how much I trust the Beastmaster; no matter how unmanly such concern is; no matter how much skill I have in my job; all I can do is wait.
To distract myself from fretting overmuch, I turned my thoughts to an exercise for our new agents.
Please write a paragraph in which a character faces a medical situation. How can you reveal her character through her illness? How can you illuminate his world? What do her reactions say about her religion, her socioeconomic status, her culture? What emotions does he convey? How might this advance the plot?
How much weight can you make a simple ailment bear? Practice loading it with value: don’t let it just do one job in your story when it can do three.
Her breathing came fast and ragged, rising with difficulty from a tightening knot in her belly. She could not bear the thought of chrysanthemums; she could not bear to think on how she could not bear the thought of chrysanthemums. But how could she tell him, when he looked at her in such confusion, his mind so far from beginning to understand what he was doing to her by having even suggested such a thing? She could see the petals forming, the inward-outward thrust of them, could feel them spreading in the pit of her stomach.
“Are you okay,” he asked, concerned, and of course he would be as she shook her head, her face flushing as brightly as the hated bloom.
“I haven’t,” and she gasped, “read it. Won’t. …Allergic.”
“To D. H. Lawrence?” He blinked. It looked like she was trying to laugh — he couldn’t be sure she wasn’t joking.
The aching has crept back into his joints. He tosses beneath the covers, trying to arrange each limb just so, to ease the hurt. If he lies still, he can hear the strong thump from his heart, counting out a beat he might’ve danced to, once. Would she still love him if he couldn’t dance with her?
He thinks about posing for artists, still connected to art, if only by gossamer threads. Would they appreciate his dramatic poses as he seeks comfort? Would they capture the way the pain paints his features, despite their jealousy–that for all their talent they could never inspire the same looks of pain, the same desperation for relief on the faces of their creations, across the maps of their painted worlds.
[...] by one of Gustav’s prompts (Gustav of the Fiction-Writing Directorate), I wrote a scene for 200 Miles (the tentative name [...]