Pregnancy, Labor and Your Fic

23Feb13

Pregnancy.

Chances are, if you are doing a Suefic, there will come a point where your Sue becomes pregnant. And there is a good chance that you have never been pregnant. Yes, I know that’s a sweeping generalization. And yes, I’ve read some stories where the author bases the character’s pregnancy on her own. But I’m not addressing them. I’m addressing the tween and teen writers who use a pregnancy storyline.

Ready?

Alright, here’s what these stories seem to think happens during a pregnancy:

1. Woman throws up or misses her period and that’s how she finds out she’s pregnant

2. She is only sick in the morning and for the first few months

3. She continues to do things she always done, regardless of the danger

4. Not many problems are suffered unless they are MAJOR.

5. When she goes into labor, she stays there for a long time and yells at her husband the entire time.

You know what that also describes? Your basic sitcom and/or rom-com pregnancy. Which is where I think most writers get their information about pregnancy and labor.

Here’s the thing: Pregnancy is different for each women. Yes, there are common symptoms, but each pregnancy is generally unique. So here are some things to keep in mind:

1. A missed period is not concrete proof a woman is pregnant. Women skip their periods for several reasons, chief among them stress. Maybe after two, though even then that could be something medical which isn’t pregnancy.

2. Morning sickness is not accurately named.  A woman may not be sick only in the morning. She could be sick at night or all day long. Also, certain foods may trigger sickness in women. A family friend said that when she was pregnant, she couldn’t stand the smell of raw chicken. Little details like that make it seem more real and less…sitcom-y.

3. When I took Ethics in college and we came to pro-life vs. pro-choice, the professor used this hypothetical scenario: Imagine someone has this life-threatening disease and the only cure is for them to be hooked up to you for nine months. My class picked holes in this as a comparison to pregnancy—this severely limited what you could do and create an inconvenience. Pregnancy doesn’t limit you as drastically as the scenario, BUT it does limit what a mother can do. For example, Solly in “Estel and Meleth” should not have been fighting.

4. Some pregnancies go smoothly; some have lots of problems. Chose how you want your character’s to proceed, but chose wisely. Don’t use it as a ploy for drama unless it is organic to the story. We’re going to look at a published book, “Dragonfly in Amber” by Diana Gabaldon. It will include a major spoiler so if you’re reading the book or plan to, you might want to skip to the moral of this example.

In the story, the main character Claire is pregnant. During the beginning part of the novel, she is often seen cavorting around Paris and helping in a hospital as she’s a trained nurse. The enemy from the first book, “Outlander”, returns and it puts her husband, Jamie, on edge. He is itching for a fight and eventually duels with the enemy. Claire had asked him not to and goes to stop it. Beforehand, a character mentions Claire was having a difficult pregnancy. All this leads up to Claire having a miscarriage while stopping Jamie’s duel.

So why do I use this example? Because when I read the comment about Claire having a difficult pregnancy, I got mad. I knew then and there she was going to have a miscarriage and it was just to make an already tense situation more dramatic. It didn’t feel organic to me. I feel Ms. Gabaldon should’ve had more build up to the miscarriage—to show us Claire had a difficult pregnancy rather than tell us.

The moral is: Don’t just do something for the sake of “drama.” Build up tension, get the readers invested. The reveal will be just as surprising and more impactful that way. So, what do I mean by “organic” you might ask. And it’s a good question. Organic means the event happens because you set it up in the story rather than shoehorn it in because you want it to be there.

5. Like pregnancy, labor is different for each woman. Some have easy deliveries, some don’t. But here’s the truth: Birth is a natural process. Most women can deliver without assistance. But studies show it’s better for a woman to have someone in the room, more for support than anything else.

Anyway, if you are going to write a labor scene, do some research. Don’t go by TV or the movies. If you’re too embarrassed to do the research, you might want to skip the scene. Just go to afterwards. Trust me, it’ll be better.

But here are things to remember: Lord of the Rings is based on a medieval culture. Men in these cultures did not hold their wives’ hands during labor. They were often not in the room. The mother’s female relatives and friends would gather around her to support her. A midwife might be summoned to help in case of problems. Chances are a woman would not want a man like Aragorn staring at her private parts so I wouldn’t use him for a birth scene unless you really want a dramatic life-or-death scenario.

Since I’ve seen this: A midwife helps deliver babies. A wet nurse is a woman who has recently given birth and is chosen to nurse the baby in lieu of the mother. There are several reasons for this but if you are writing about royalty, chances are it is because it was not expected for the queen to nurse.

Otherwise, do research! And for what happens after birth, see my other post: The Littlest Characters.

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