Writing ailments; their common symptoms, causes and general first aid.

• Writing is not taken seriously by audience
• Hard to read over
• Scattered lowercase ‘i’
• Looks messy

(Bad hygiene )

• General hygiene should be observed at all times including in most poetry.
• Capitalize ‘I’, proper nouns (names) and beginning of sentences.
• Add full stops.
• Fix the “there, their and they’re” and the “witch, which”
• Even when good hygiene has not been practiced, as long as an infection has not set in, it is easily rectifiable with a good scrub.

• Dialog is not working
• Dialog feels flat and formal

(snake bite)

• Apply compression bandage and condense what your character has to say.
• Drop ‘ums, heys, and uh?s’ or relevant slang into speech.
• Identify type of snake by eavesdropping on conversations and writing what is spoken in real time. Observe differences between people and the disregard for full sentences. Adjust your writing accordingly.
• Call ambulance and read out loud what you have written, preferably to someone else.
• Add body language text.

• Reading is boring
• Nothing is happening
• Or too much is happening and it does not make sense

(vitamin imbalance)

• If deficiency is not immediately evident, track diet, highlight adjectives blue, nouns yellow and verbs in pink. Try to create a balance of the three.
• When writing add action to your descriptions and descriptions around your actions.

• Looks like one big mass of words
• Heard to read
• Hard to read out loud and breathe properly

(asthma attack)

• Give space and separate into relevant paragraphs by topic or sub scene.
• Give puffer and shorten sentences with too many clauses.
• If not breathing properly within five minutes call emergency. Add commas where ever you breathe, when reading out loud.

• Repeats of the same word within same paragraph.
• I’ve read this before feel
• Sense of this is boring.

(ticks and splinters)

• ­After going outside, read it over, search for repeated words, and underline them.

• Look up in first aid book and find the word in the thesaurus section. Remove with tweezers and apply cream.
• Splinters and tick bights swell slightly to create red areas after a few hours. So save your reread till the following day if you can’t spot anything wrong straight after writing it.

• Rhyming feels forced

(Sprained or broken ankle)

• Leave for a few days to see if it fixes itself.
• Do gentle stretches; use the thesaurus to find words that are easier to rhyme or make more sense in context.
• If stretches do not cure sprain, the ankle may be broken and require an operation to change the rhyming pattern. Most commonly this operation from an a, a, b, b pattern to an a, b, a, b one.

• Characters are “boring”
• You can’t tell the characters apart

(concussion)

• When character comes to start by asking simple questions about their hobbies/personality. Compile answers into a character profile. In it decide what the character’s personality is, some history and their likes/dislikes. Refer to profiles when writing to see how they would react to the circumstances.
• Ensure each of your characters names are different enough.

• You don’t like it (without reason)

(flu)

• Wait a few days and see if the sniffles pass.
• If still persists see doctor to diagnose what is actually wrong.

• Story does not make sense
• Audience needs to look up words.

(laryngitis)

• Explain by showing the definitions of terms as in terraformed. It hasn’t been terraformed yet, because it takes ages for a planet to be made habitable.
• Have one character who does not know much about the subject so that it can be explained to that character.
• Add a glossary or asterix potentially complicated words.

• Boring to read
• Paragraphs looking suspiciously like info dumps

(Burn)

• Apply water to area and run for 30 minutes until all telling is washed away.
• Write an alternative scene where you show the facts from the info dump happening. Eg “she was sun burnt from being at the beach.” Becomes. “She climbed into the car brushing the sand from her feet. Her swimmers were already dry from heat and her arms and face, bright red and staring to peel.”
• In severe cases an operation may be needed. Research in to how to proceed is advised. see http://www.dailywritingtips.com/show-dont-tell/ or other relevant site.

• Red lines throughout document.
• Hand written
• Having to “work out” some of the words

(Head lice)

• Apply head lice spray in the form of a spell checker.
• Run through with a fine comb to catch any reminders.
• For the hard to remove ones, which do not show up on word, a google search may help
• Repeat regularly until itching stops.