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Story Ideas from a Bizarre Trauma
By Deb Gallardo
I read a news article recently about a six-year-old girl whose hand was severed by a jump rope she was playing with by feeding it out the car window. The rope caught in the rear axle and her hand went out the window.
The number of possible story ideas from this reside not just in the big issue and what must have been terrifying trauma for both mother and child. It doesn’t take much to imagine ourselves in the mother’s shoes. It’s a little harder to imagine the child’s point of view, but “contacting your inner child” and brainstorming as many reactions as possible will surely yield some insight.
But as I said, I think there are fewer story ideas in the event itself than in the details. Let me list them, and I think you’ll see what I mean. But first, let me be perfectly clear: I am not commenting on the actual people involved. I am approaching this simply as a story. The questions I ask below are about fictional people for a fictional story, not about the real participants in this real life event.
I’m not speculating about their motives, their states of mind, their financial situations, their relationships with others, etc. I am asking questions of myself to scratch the surface of the truth of what and who my invented characters are. And I certainly don’t have the space here to ask every question to get to the full character truth.
All the questions I pose here are from a writer’s point of view. I could ask these questions another way. I could say, “What if the motorist who stopped had life-saving training? How did this help him? Hinder him?” Instead I just ask Who, What, When, Where, How and Why questions. It’s less cumbersome. But if I were brainstorming for myself, I would use “What if?” questions more than these others.
1) The mother flagged down a motorist, who after assessing the situation, whipped off his belt and made a tourniquet that saved the little girl’s life.
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- What in a person’s background would give him/her that split-second knowledge of what to do?
- Whatever happened to the belt? Did he get it back? Did the hospital cut it off? Was it expensive? Did he even give it a second thought?
- How might his heroic act change his life? His view of himself?
- Could the notoriety cause problems with relationships? With privacy?
- Might he want anonymity? Why? Might someone who found himself in this position be hiding something? Is he just a private person?
- Does saving a child’s life make up for not being able to save a loved one, like his own brother, his own child, his own wife, etc. in the past? Does it bring up past trauma in an eruption of feelings or could it help to heal old wounds?
2) Reports said the mother’s cell phone “got disconnected.” Why? Possible fictional scenarios might be:
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- Battery dead?
- Phone malfunction?
- Mom too rattled to make the call?
- She pushed the wrong button?
- She mis-dialed?
- Unpaid bill? (I thought you could call emergency numbers even on expired phones. Anyone know?)
3) A passersby found the child’s hand in the street and directed traffic around it.
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- What might her first impression have been of what she found? Did it look like a hand right away?
- What could her reaction have been? Horror? Nausea? Disbelief?
- What courage might it have taken to step into the street and direct traffic around the hand until it could be retrieved? How quickly did she act?
- Might she have phoned the neighbor who also helped direct traffic? Did she shout for help and a stranger responded?
- Could she have seen the hand land in the street as the car passed or might she have come upon it without knowing what happened?
- What might someone have seen when the hand was severed from the child’s wrist and flew out the window?
- Could the mantra which the passerby kept repeating, “It’s a child’s hand…” have become a source of calm? Of despair? Of panic?
4) At least one other person stopped to help and when the mother couldn’t make the call to 911, this person called for emergency services on the mother’s behalf.
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- Who might this person be in your fictional story? Male or female? How old? What prompted him/her to stop? Was this typical behavior or out of character?
- What thoughts might a person have had in these circumstances? About the mother’s phone not working? About the child’s trauma? About all the blood? About the potential for an accident from gawking drivers?
- What kind of phone conversation might a fictional character have had with a friend or family member after the emergency services were contacted? To the press? To explain why s/he will be late?
- How many other people stopped and why? Would the police disperse the crowd upon arrival?
- Might the police have arrived before the ambulance? If not, why not? Police strike? Traffic jam? Crime wave? Everyone nearby on a call or coffee break?
- Be creative about possible underlying situations, such as the strike mentioned above. Could there be police corruption? Politics within the department? Rivalry between emergency medical services?
5) The hand was successfully re-attached.
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- Who might have done the surgery? A local surgeon? A pediatric specialist? A severed limb specialist? The emergency room surgeon? A over-worked, underpaid medical student operating on too little sleep?
- How might this surgery affect the medical staff? Was it routine? Was it complicated? Delicate? Were there complications?
- Might there be excessive scarring? If so, would cosmetic surgery be recommended? How soon? Under what circumstances?
- Could the scar become a reminder to the mother? To the child? To other family members? What kind of reminder? Of horror? Of pain? Of a lesson learned? Of guilt? Of shame?
6) Someone retrieved the hand and transported it to the hospital where the girl was being treated.
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- Who might have been assigned this task?
- What preparations and equipment were needed?
- Is this a common “rescue” operation, all in a day’s work in the average city?
- What might the reaction have been of the person who took the hand? No big deal? “This is a child’s hand!”? “I’m running out of time!”? “This hand looks like my daughter’s/sister’s/cousin’s hand”?
- Is this person observed treating the hand reverently or with calm efficiency?
We don’t know about other family members, the mother’s marital status, her medical insurance situation, the type of car she was driving, or why she either allowed or was unaware of what her daughter was doing with the jump rope. This lack of knowledge is a GOOD THING for a fiction writer. It allows us to:
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- Speculate about all these items. This speculation will lead us to more possibilities.
- How might the experience change the mother’s life? The child’s?
- Might the notoriety affect the mother adversely or for the better? Could she be criticized and accused of neglect? Would people sympathize and empathize with her? Does she receive an outpouring of support and well wishes?
- How does all the attention affect the child? Does it cause behavior problems because she likes all the attention? Does she bear it with child-like aplomb? Is she precocious, giving answers to the media’s questions like a trooper or she uncommunicative? Does the mother protect her daughter from the media to prevent too much attention?
- When all the hoopla is over and “old news” to the media, how does this life change back to “normalcy” sit with mother and child? How does it affect all those connected to them? Relief? Anger? Jealousy?
- Does a reporter particularly affected by this story revisit the family 6 months or a year later for a follow-up? And every so often after that? Why? What part of the story got under the reporter’s skin?
- What kind of community outpouring (if any) occurred? If a fictional mother were greedy and on the take, what might be her reaction when she can’t profit from this? If there were an estranged father, would he suddenly come out of the woodwork to bask in the limelight, too?
This may seem like a lot, but actually I’ve barely scratched the surface. The actual event comes through strongly. The main players are real people. Our job as fiction writers is to create a story, not retell facts. For a novel, you would need all of these questions answered and more. For a short story, you’d have to be more choosy.
The most important decision would be WHO is the viewpoint character, because that would affect everything else. (Technically you could write the story from the point of view of the hand or the jump rope. Not sure I could do it, but someone else might.)
In a novel, you could have several viewpoints, but the danger with that is the story could easily become disjointed and difficult to follow for the reader. And the tendency would be to “report” what happened from each point of view. You will serve your readers best, in my opinion, if you tell a compelling story. Within a novel, reporting can be used as a literary device, but not the core of the story.
The next decisions should be how to change the characters so they don’t resemble the real people involved. Change genders, ethnicity, body part severed (maybe) and any other identifying characteristic. From what I’ve given you here, there isn’t a lot to change. I’ve made it as generic as possible, leaving out names and ages, except for the child’s age and gender.
Actually, the report I read offered very little in the way of detail to begin with, but it was a national news report, taken no doubt from one of the wire services. In the locale where it occurred, the news of this event would be reported in minute detail. For fiction writers, the fewer personal details the better. Then we’re not tempted to “steal” them.
From this example, I hope you can see how taking the details of a news story that involves powerful emotions and a crisis, could be broken down into facts over which we then brainstorm questions to be answered to help us get the essence of a story that is our own. Be creative. Dig deep. And write!
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