Helena Mary Cole

Last summer, I sent a message to a young man I found online who I thought might make a good beta reader for my manuscript. Mason (that’s his name) was paralysed in a downhill skiing accident a handful of years ago, and now he’s an online content creator who posts videos about the experience of being paralysed. I watched some of them, as part of my ongoing research to make the paralysed character in my manuscipt (Alex) as authentic as possible, and decided to ask Mason if he’d be willing to read what I’d written and offer feedback. Mason sustained the same level of spinal cord injury as Alex and is about the same age, which is why I picked him. 

And, as luck would have it, Mason emailed back several weeks later and agreed to read it. 

Note to my fellow fiction writers: Do your research. Don’t assume you are naturally in possession of all the facts ahead of time. If you have a question, explore it, find answers. If you get an editor and a publisher that doesn’t know the facts, either, and your novel gets published in that ignorance, sooner or later, someone who knows better will read it, and they might contact you and call you out, and then you’re going to feel mighty embarrassed. 

Personally, I love doing research for my fiction writing. I find that getting into the facts makes my imagination light up with ideas about how to write the story, and then my enthusiasm for writing it is even higher, knowing that my work is accurate. 

Even if you’re writing about, say, mermaids or some other creature of pure imagination, it can add a depth to your writing if you know what else has been written about mermaids over the centuries. Any creative liscence you want to take with them will be that much weightier. 

So, I wanted Alex Hale to come across as a believable guy, one who had been paralysed at a young age, and was going through life wheelchair dependent. This right here is where the imagination of an able-bodied person like me had great potential to lead me astray. So I took a good, long swim in the facts. 

And it paid off. I had my heart in throat, giving my manuscript to a guy who’d had this life experience that I’ve never had and can only imagine. I mean, I already did rely less on my imagination and more on having listened to to many wheelchair users talk about their lives, and that was working in my favour. But I gave Mason the green light to “be blunt” with me about what I’d written, and he claimed to be “good at that.” Being blunt, I mean. So, you know, yikes. In the end, it turns out, the only thing Mason found that could have been done better was the part where I described Alex transfering from the floor to his wheelchair, which involved a few paragraphs in one of the middle chapters.

Fair enough. And see, this is what I’m talking about. I wrote this scene where Alex and Jordan (the main protagonist) are swimming in the indoor pool, and having a poolside conversation, and that conversation leads to Alex inviting Jordan to his wedding, which means he wants to go get her a Save-the-date card. So now Alex has to go into the house and get the card. As the writer here, I had questions. Mainly, how to I get Alex up off the floor and into his wheelchair? Does Jordan have to give him a hand up? 

I’m glad I didn’t trust my imagination here. My imagination assumed yes, he’s going to need a hand. You’d think. But Alex is a young guy who’s not overweight and has been T12 paralysed for nine years. He certainly would have figured out how to get from the floor into his wheelchair independently in that time, a useful skill he would have been encouraged to develop. But the mechanics of how this is done depends somewhat on the person’s level of functioning, and I originally wrote the scene based on watching a YouTuber who’s T1 paralysed do it. And so Mason was able to point me towards a common way in which people with lower-level injuries do it, which was helpful. He’s more of a Tik-Tok and Instragram content creator, with crossover into YouTube, but I’m not on Tik-Tok or Instragram, which is how I missed his video on the subject, I guess. 

It’s such a little thing! And yet Jordan watching Alex climb into his wheelchair is the thing that sparks the next part of the conversation, which turns out to be the key to moving the plot along. 

Well, I’ve improved the scene now. Feels pretty good. Down the line, if some editor comes at me saying, “Are you sure this transfer is realistic,” I’ll be able to say, with confidence, “Yes, I had someone with the same injury read it and offer feedback.” And I imagine the editor would be pleased in that case that I already put in this legwork. 

Does anyone remember the old rom-com Notting Hill with Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant? Well, it’s not all that good on the whole, but once, I was too dumb to know that. I’ve seen it several times. A guy who owns a bookshop in London falls in love with a movie star. Which would be fine, except that’s all you ever really know about their relationship. She treats him like crap, very seriously like crap, on more than one occasion, but he takes her back in the end because why? Because of how kind, loving and supportive she’s been? No, because she’s a beautiful movie star. 

Sloppy. But it was a popular movie because everyone wants to live happily ever after with a movie star. 

Anyway, in Notting Hill, Hugh Grant has a friend named Bella, who’s wheelchair dependent due to spinal cord injury. And yeah, the way they handled Bella is kind of embarrassing at times, or should be to someone who was involved with that project. The writer? Thedirector? To Gina McKee, who played the character? Sure, it’s all very dramatic to show Bella’s husband sweeping her up into his arms in order to put her into that little hatchback (notice how they don’t show you exactly how he accomplishes this), but if you know anything about it, you’re thinking, “Um… Why can’t she transfer into the car by herself?” 

And that’s not the only weird thing in the movie that even only minimal research would have done away with. Writer, take the trouble to research stuff. Don’t embarrass yourself. 

But I suspect the thing that I did the most right with Alex Hale was making him a complex character wtih his own strengths and flaws, much like the other characters in the novel. There’s more than one reason, some not even related to his disability, why Jordan meeting and getting to know him is interesting and full of tension. If I do say so myself. I am very fond of Alex, and I like to think he comes across as a relatable guy. 

To think that he’s relatable to at least one real-life guy who’s had the experience of getting paralysed! According to Mason, I depicted the emotional experience of getting paralysed realistically. Well, believe me, I didn’t come by that naturally. Hard work pays off. 

And now, on with the work of finding an agent, which continues to be slow going and full of nothing but rejection. But pretty much everyone who reads my manuscript likes it, and if a young man in his twenties, which is not even my target demographic, “absolutely loved the story,” I must operate under the assumption that eventually some agent will also love it, and be happy to work with me on getting it published.

A link to one of Mason’s videos, in case anyone is interested: