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Hi!
I don’t know much about rock climbing (I’ve read up on it, but I’ve never actually climbed anything besides a climbing wall), and I’m writing a scene in which a character falls off of the side of the cliff he is scaling and gets seriously injured. I want to make sure I’m writing it correctly, so if anyone knows from experience rock climbing lingo, that would be most helpful!
Let me set up the scene…
A group of boys who are undergoing dangerous tests are told to scale a tall cliff without the use of harnesses. To track their progress and help prevent injuries along the way, two brothers (Clyde and Rufus) are following along behind them. I made it so that a man below them is belaying them (I know it’s dangerous, but as long as it would work in the story I think it’s fine). The group of boys stop to rest on a ledge, and one of them (Ryker) gets scared and wants to go down. What I want is for Clyde to try to help him (by giving him his harness, I was thinking) then, since he is no longer secured by a rope, to fall off of the cliff (he’s a bit of a klutz).
Would this work? I might be missing something important, like that time when I was younger and wrote a story about some girls finding a key and a lock and discovering that it unlocked a cool house. The obvious plot hole with this, of which I was oblivious to, was that a lock would have to be attached to the house it unlocked LOL.
@hobbitchild I think what you have is great! The only things I’d add would maybe be to describe the stumble of the falling character and the split second reaction, just to maximize the scene! Example (I’ll use random names here): Dillon handed Hayden the harness, and as he pushed it into his hand, Hayden stumbled. His eyes widened, mouth opened, and he rocketed off the cliff, screaming as he slammed against the rocky face. “No!” Dillon’s face crumpled. “Hayden!” he shouted.
You see how it’s quite dramatic and maximized this way?
Hope that helped!
staring at the fields
if nothing's really real
i'll make the winter now my homeOoh, that sounds like a great scene:) I’m writing a couple of scarp scaling scenes too, but since it’s set in the 9th-century era, I wouldn’t be much help with the lingo.
Yep, that’s a completely believable scenario. I once went abseiling (like rock climbing but opposite) and I actually did fall off the cliff. Thankfully though, harnesses exist so no harm was done and I just had to climb back up again, but if I’d been in the position where I didn’t have a harness for whatever reason, I would have been majorly injured (it wasn’t a very tall cliff, so I might not have died, but I definitely would have broken something :P)
INFP Queen of the Kingdom commander of an army of origami cranes and a sabre from Babylon.
That sounds like a scary situation! Since I first published this post, Clyde has since plummeted toward the ground far below (and technically, he’s still plummeting since I haven’t written past that).
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