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I have a problem in my WIP novel, which is just in the outline stage. There’s a specific illness going around and to SHOW, DON’T TELL that the illness is really bad, an important character must become sick.

But then, I have this sick character, Em. And she’s, well, sick.
She’s become a Damsel-in-Distress, who has no active part in the story. She’s a weak love interest, whose only role is to be sick and provide motivation for the main character.

It’s a good motivator. Jake, my main character, really cares for Em, and he’ll do almost anything to find a cure. From that side of things, it’s working. But Em is still just a sick—and-convenient—character.

I’ve given Em some other character problems. She’s adopted and is looking for information on her birth parents. They’ll come into the story and the intersection of these characters will give Em some rosy cheeks of health. Her subplot will be one of discovering who she really is.

But the excitement doesn’t last long enough for her. She has a crisis in her health, which is necessary to get Jake moving. Again, Em becomes a sick, convenient, unappealing and placid character. How do I provide some sort of action around a sickly character?

There are precedents for sick or sickly characters.

Angelic character and how the illness and/or death affect the main characters. In Little Women, Beth dies from scarlet fever. While her health wastes away, she is active, though, knitting and sewing clothes for neighborhood children. Her death is a major impact on Jo’s life, the main character. By giving her selfless acts to perform, it elevates Beth. She’s angelic in everything, never complaining and dying without a lot of fuss. By elevating Beth’s moral character, we understand why her life was important.

Imaginary life. In Paul Fleischman’s Mind’s Eye, a paralyzed girl leaves the real world behind in an imaginary trip across 1910 Italy. Here, Courtney comes alive in her imagination. She and her nursing home roommate, 88 year old Elva, use a 1910 Baedeker guide to catch trains, to travel and to live. It reminds me of a Star Trek episode about Captain Pike, the original captain of the Enterprise, who is injured and in a wheelchair. There’s a forbidden planet, and we find out that it’s forbidden because the inhabitants live a virtual life. On that planet, however, Pike can live a happy and full virtual life, walking and climbing wherever he wants. Like Courtney, Captain Pike chooses the illusion of life over the reality of his paralysis.

Give the sick character an amazing POV voice. John Green’s character in The Fault in Our Stars is suffering from cancer, and indeed, the whole story is about living with a death sentence in your lungs. The narration is from her POV and it’s a distinctive voice.

Entwine the emotions. In My Sister’s Keeper, Jodi Picoult poses an interesting dilemma. A younger sister is conceived for the specific purpose of donating an organ to her sickly older sister. The sisters, though, are both active to an extent and the real success here is how the emotional lives are entwined, just as their fates are interwoven.

Writing Sickly Characters

Here are some take-aways for my own writing.

Sick, but not incoherent. A character can be physically challenged or sick, but there must be lucid moments where the character’s life and personality emerge. Em can be very sick, but the illness must ebb and flow. And develop her personality, hopes, dreams, fears, anxieties, dreams, etc. as possible.

No griping. Okay. Em feels lousy. But no one wants to read about a character who complains her way through the actual horrors of the human form when it’s sick. No explicity descriptions of throwing up, other bodily fluids, etc., at least in MY stories. Instead, the sickly person rises above those things and we see her character, not her illness.

Emotional impact. Sick or not, people are invested deeply in Em’s life. They want to be with her and they care about her thoughts, emotions, reactions, etc. Perhaps, she must be even more entwined than usual in the main character’s life.

Action when possible. When she’s feeling good, I’ll give Em as much action as possible. I’ll look for both major and minor actions. Maybe stealing a cell phone and making a forbidden phone call is enough of a physical challenge, while also moving the plot along in some way. Look for ways to add action, arguments, and conflict. Just because she’s sick, she doesn’t get away with an easy life emotionally. Otherwise, where’s the story? Story requires conflict and even sick people in your story must endure the conflict—or there’s no story.

Rescue. Well, it’s OK. Em might need to be rescued. I know, gender roles these days decree that she not be a Damsel-in-Distress; instead, she must be the conquering princess who fights the dragon herself and saves the poor, incompetent prince. But that’s a modern trope that is just as bad as the damsel-in-distress trope. The challenge will be to create a unique, living character without falling prey to either cliché.

In short, sick or not, Em must be a real character. She’s no damsel-in-distress; neither is she the modern woman who rescues the weak men in her life. Instead, she pursues her goals with the same fervor (and whatever physical strength she can muster) as the main character, Jake. It’s a plan.

By Anatoly Liberman

This is a weekly blog, and ever since it began I have been meaning to write a post about the word week. Now that we are in the middle of the first week of the first summer month, the time appears to be ripe for my overdue project.

In Latin there was the word calendae (plural) “the first day of the month.” These dates were “called out” or proclaimed publicly (from calare “proclaim,” not related to Engl. call, unless we take into account the fact that the syllables kal ~ kol ~ gal ~ gol designate “voice” in many languages; therefore, all such words may go back to the same sound imitative complex). The calendae were “called out” because interest was due on the first day of the month; therefore, money changers’ account books of interest got the name calendaria. Fortunately, our calendar (from Latin via Old French) does not remind us of debts and taxes only. Unlike calendar, week is possibly a Germanic word. Why “possibly” will become clear at the end of the post.

We will pass over the question about the origin of the seven day week but remember that, according to the Bible, the creation of the world took a week. Consequently, after the Christianization of Europe a word designating the seven day week had to be coined. Among the Germanic speakers the Goths were the first to be converted to Christianity (this happened in the 4th century), and long fragments of the Gothic Bible have come down to us, though almost only of the New Testament. As a result, we do not know how their bishop Wulfila translated, or would have translated, the Hebrew (or the Greek) word for “week.” The possibilities for naming the week are not too few. For example, Russian nedelia (stress on the second syllable), with cognates everywhere in Slavic, means “day on which no work is done”; the transference to “week” came later. A curious anti-parallel to nedelia may be Sardinian chida ~ chedda “week,” if, as has been suggested, it is a borrowing of Greek khedos “sorrow,” with reference to work and the “suffering” it entails. Yet for the Western translators of the Bible the main sources of inspiration were the ecclesiastic words containing the root for “seven,” namely, Latin septimana and Greek hebdomas. Hence Modern French semaine, Italian settimana, and Spanish semana. But Spanish also has hebdomada, and similar words have been recorded in many old and new Romance dialects.

We can now look at Germanic. In Gothic, the word wikon, the dative of the otherwise unattested wiko, occurred. It means “sequence” (not “week”!) and glosses Greek taxei, the dative of taxis (Engl. tactics, taxidermy, and taxonomy have its root). In the Latin version of Luke I: 8, ordine corresponds to Greek taxei and Gothic wiko. Old Engl. wice ~ wicu is akin to Gothic wiko, and at first sight their etymology poses no difficulty, for they seem to be related to the Germanic verbs for “move, turn; retreat; yield” (German weichen, Icelandic víkja, Old Engl. wician, and others). However, what exactly “moves” or “turns” during a week remains unclear, and various explanations have been offered, none fully convincing. Some Germanic cognates of week differ from the English noun considerably (compare German Woche and Danish uge), but they are still variants of the same word and mean the same, except Old Icelandic vika, which has two senses: “week” and “nautical mile.” Perhaps vika, before it acquired the meaning “week,” referred to the change of shifts in rowing. In my post on the etymology of Viking, I supported the idea that Vikings were called this fro