Physical and Mental Health

This post is all about the physical problems that characters have that make them interesting.  As I’ve mentioned previously, conflict is what drives a story, and there are times when the conflict can arise directly from the character.  Ace’s PTSD, for example.  

Ace was unique, because she’s an Exceptional.  They can’t have physical health problems, so I had to go down the mental health route.  This is the option I prefer to use for my characters when it is appropriate.  The reason is simple, I’ve had to deal with depression since I was about seventeen.  It went undiagnosed until I was almost twenty.  I was lucky to have people who recognized the symptoms and were able to get me the help I needed.

This experience has influenced my writing as I’ve developed my various characters and plots.  When I first started writing, most of my main characters didn’t have flaws.  I thought they did, but I was just deceiving myself.  I created these perfect characters, in part, because I have my own health problems to deal with.  Aside from the depression, I get severe migraines, and I occasionally have to deal with bouts of vertigo. 

Instead of using these challenges as ways to give my characters more depth, I decided that no one should have health issues.  I mean isn’t having to save the world enough?  (No).  My early characters were boring.  I’d call them one dimensional, but I think that’s giving them too much depth. 

As I progressed as a writer, my own faults started slipping in, often without me realizing it.  My characters started having to deal with self-doubt, depression, emotional conflicts and so on.  It wasn’t until Ace came along that I made the conscious decision to give her PTSD (I don’t have PTSD, it just fit her character).

Now when I work on my many rewrites of older projects I try to find ways to make my characters real.  They have tempers, they have disagreements, setbacks, failures.  Even migraines crop up in the world of the Seven Swords.  I would be lying if I said they didn’t, in some small way, parallel my own experiences. 

To clear up something right now, I’ve met people who think migraines are just like any other headache.  That a few Tylenol, or Asprin will get rid of it.  I’ve even heard people accuse migraine sufferers of looking for attention.  Here are just a few of the secondary symptoms I’ve dealt with, on top of the agonizing pain in my head:  extreme light sensitivity, sound sensitivity, touch sensitivity, nausea, dizziness, heat/cold intolerance, there are others, because each one is its own unique slice of hell.  Try and be understanding if you know someone who suffers from migraines.  We have to deal with a lot, and there aren’t many things that help.

These physical/mental problems also serve to help develop relationships between characters.  Some get better, others get worse, such is the nature of life and having to deal with other people.