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Harsh men hang their own kind Soothsayer flings a dull knife Send all your kingdom's gold And pray for the keeper's soul

I am your (doodoodoodoodoo) armor

[scriptmedic]

Injury Analysis: Misery

Today's post is an excerpt from my upcoming book Maim Your Characters: How Injuries Work in Fiction. What follows is one of the nine injury analyses which appear in the book. 

Those who preorder the book, or who email me their receipt for a copy purchased from any retailer between 9/4/2017 and 9/11/2017 ( AuntScripty {at} gmail {dot} com ), will receive a package of bonus materials including three additional injury analyses and the official ScriptMedic injury worksheet.

The additional analyses are: John Silver's amputation in Black Sails, Root's transcendence into a demigod in Person of Interest, and the injury that changes the course of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

Misery, by Stephen King

Format: Novel (Also a feature film) Genre: Horror Reality: Realism

 We’ve been citing Misery as an example throughout this book, and now is the time to bring it all together.

 The Inciting Injury happens off-page and before the opening scene of the novel. Writer Paul Sheldon finishes his latest novel, a work he hopes will take him from being a Genre Hack to a Respected Author. Having finished his book, Paul drives off to take his manuscript to his publisher… and gets caught in a blizzard. He crashes his car into a ditch and is severely injured.

Paul’s legs are both broken, and he suffers a significant concussion and probable traumatic brain injury, though there’s little evidence of this other than his lapsed memory of the first days of his recovery.

The brilliance of Stephen King is in his slow exposition of the arc. We learn this story in bits and pieces as the story goes on.

 We learn later, for example, about the Immediate Treatment Annie Wilkes offered Paul when she “rescued” him from his car crash: she pulled him from his car in the middle of the blizzard, threw him on the backseat of her pickup like a gunnysack, and drove him to her house for care. (Annie is a once-upon-a-time nurse, who we later learn was barred from practicing after her patients kept dying suspiciously.)

As for her so-called Definitive Treatment for Paul Sheldon’s mangled legs… well, she splints his legs (badly), ignoring the most severe injuries (his broken hips). She also allows him time to rest, letting him sleep through the worst of the pain and the recovery.

Crucially for the addiction plot of the novel, she also force-feeds him Novril, a fictional painkiller that is supposed to be the allegory of codeine.

In fact, when we meet Paul, he is already deep in the throes of the Novril addiction, and numerous times we see his agony multiply without his medication. We see him force his way out of his room — risking his life, given that he’s held hostage — to get Novril. His addiction sets in deep, and it doesn’t let go.

 The entire book’s present tense is set in the Rocky Road to Recovery, where Paul is recuperating from his injuries, and the stumbling blocks on that road to recovery are staggeringly huge. In fact, those stumbling blocks are the plot points of the novel; the injury plot and the global plot are one and the same.

For one, he’s not getting proper physical therapy, so Paul never recovers to the point of being able to walk.

For another, he’s got the nasty Novril addiction to fight.

For a third, his captor is demanding he write her a novel all her own — meaning that he must be moved to a wheelchair well before he’s ready, and endure the pain of sitting with broken hips and legs. He must endure this for hours while he fights to write a novel she won’t kill him over.

Of course, the villain adds new injuries to the mix…

Annie Wilkes amputates his left foot with an axe, in a fit of rage over something Paul’s done. (In the movie, Annie, played by the brilliant Kathy Bates, hobbles Paul with a sledgehammer.)

Later, she cuts off his thumb, again for disobedience.

(While it’s tempting to see these as separate injury events, they function more as stumbling blocks in his global injury/recovery arc; although they’re mentioned, and the psychological impacts are profound, Sheldon’s story is more about his overall disability and the pickle it puts him in than the individual pieces that go wrong.)

To make matters worse, Paul develops an infection in his kidneys toward the end of the book.

 But come the Big Test, the big break where Sheldon escapes Annie’s wrath… well, that’s a trial, isn’t it? The woman has already killed a state trooper and outsmarted a half-dozen others.

Paul Sheldon has to take her down — mangled legs and all.

The image of Paul force-feeding Annie Wilkes burning pages of the manuscript she made him write is forever seared in the consciousness of anyone who reads the book (or watches the brilliant movie adaptation). Moreover, in spite of it all, Paul overcomes a formidable opponent with the tools he’s managed to wheedle from her: a typewriter, a stack of pages, a stolen can of lighter fluid, and a single match.

From an injury arc perspective? Well, in the struggle, Paul is forced to crawl on the floor. Annie grabs his still-healing stump and squeezes. He also gets glass in his arm from a broken champagne bottle.

He spends the end of the climax crawling to a closet looking for Novril, taking a small fistful before passing out. Later, when he wakes up, he’s rescued by cops coming to interview Annie Wilkes.

 In the New Normal, set nine months after his experience in Annie Wilkes’ hell house, Paul has had to undergo a reinjury (the rebreaking of his legs to allow them to heal properly this time), but now he’s at least walking; King graces us with the Clack… clack… clack… of his two walking sticks.

In fact, it becomes a horror refrain, as Paul is thinking about Annie even now. In his moments of terror in the hell house, he saw Annie everywhere: behind couches and doors… (His fear is unfounded; he’s really seeing a cross-eyed Siamese named Dumpster.)

So his New Normal is, despite everything, one of only partial disability: he can walk, on crutches, with the hope for better ability through further rehabilitation.

Now, as to Sheldon’s psychology…

Sheldon is an interesting case study for recovery because he has only one person to help him, and she’s the villain of the story, plain as day. While his (partial) recovery is in her interest — he has to be healthy enough to write for her, after all — it’s certainly not in her interest to have him recover fully.

So Paul spends the book in the space between absolutely broken and completely well, and will spend the rest of his life in that space — remember his amputations.

His addiction to Novril is his addiction to a few things: not only painless existence, but sleep and retreat.

 The Injury Arc

 Inciting Injury: Paul breaks his legs and hips in a nasty car crash.

Immediate Treatment: He’s rescued from the snowbank by his Number One Fan, Annie Wilkes.

Definitive Treatment: Annie has splinted Paul’s legs (badly), and he’s given time to recover in bed.

Rocks on the Rocky Road to Recovery: Paul must contend with a painkiller addiction, an evil captor (who is also an Angel of Death), he endures two new amputations, he’s got terrible pain, UTIs, and he must write through the pain and against the clock.

The Big Test: Paul must kill Annie Wilkes before she kills him. He succeeds!

The New Normal: Paul has Some Disability later on. (He actually lives through a medical reInjury, briefly summed up in the last chapter: his doctors have to rebreak his legs to let them set correctly.)

 What Can We Learn?

First of all, let’s just say it: none of us are ever going to write a novel as absolutely brilliant as Misery. I’m pretty sure it can’t be done. King is a bona fide genius, and that’s all there is on the topic.

What can we take away? How can we write a story like Misery?

Well…

For starters, look at how King used disability, not only by itself, but as a way to entrap his character. Annie Wilkes needs no chains to keep Paul Sheldon trapped in her house. She’s got his broken legs — and she can keep taking pieces of him any time she wants.

In fact, that’s one of the terrifying things about the story: there is always another level to sink to, whether it’s psychological or physical, always some fresh horror that can be visited upon Paul. Even when he leaves her custody he’s terrified.

But this can be seen from an opposite and empowering perspective: don’t discount the disabled hero! Paul still manages to kill Annie with what she’s given him (and what he’s stolen): a manuscript, a match, a typewriter, and some lighter fluid, in spite of all the crash and her wrath inflict upon his body. Go Paul!

Also, especially if it’s a one-off book, don’t be afraid to let your character be disabled in the end! Sheldon might be walking, but he’s walking on crutches. That’s okay — in fact, it’s perfectly appropriate. 

This post is an excerpt from the forthcoming Maim Your Characters, out September 4th, 2017 from Even Keel Press. If you'd like to read a 100-page sample of the book, click here. If you'd like to preorder signed print or digital copies of the book before 9/4/2017 and get your free bonus content, or claim Executive Producer status of the upcoming Blood on the Page, click here.

xoxo, Aunt Scripty