How to Use an Illness in Your Story

Illness, like many other stressful experiences, can become a real testing ground for the strength of a person’s character. If illness plunges a character into despair, it might make you wonder how thin their veneer of happiness was before the illness ever occurred, or on what shaky grounds it rested. If a person surprises you and tackles the illness with fortitude and optimism, that, too, can be very revealing about a person’s inner attitude toward life. For these reasons, illness, or physical symptoms or problems, can be a very useful thing to pull into a story and test your characters.

This week, try putting more stress on the situation you’ve created in a story by having the threat of serious illness or even death looming over the scene. Is someone waiting for test results? A certainty that this is a terminal case? Even the nagging worries of a hypochondriac can add tension and sense of mortality to a scene. As I wrote last week, keep your reader uncomfortable by making him worry about your character’s wellbeing. And this illness will force you to ask some tough questions of yourself and your character. What would he do when pushed to the limit? How would he react to relentless, unresolvable pain? To the possibility of death? To the certainty of it? Ask the tough questions, and observe how the psychology of a person can change when an illness crashes into a normal life.