Answers to frequently asked questions about the writing process of Manacled.
HOW DID YOU OUTLINE MANACLED?
I wrote out a detailed plot summary for Manacled before I began writing the story, so I knew exactly where it was going and where I could not veer off course.
I think the main reason Manacled came out as cohesively as it did was because I didn’t write the flashbacks or the present chapters first, I wrote them in tandem. For the first six months or so, I was writing a present chapter for the weekly updates and two flashback chapters in the same week. So, if I invented a detail in one point in the timeline it was extremely easy to plug it into the other timeline without worrying about losing track of details and left lots of Easter eggs to be found that ranged from plot relevant to simply something fun to find.
DO YOU HAVE A MEDICAL BACKGROUND?
Haha. I have a medical background in the loosest sense, I studied midwifery and worked in a prenatal clinic for a couple years.
Mostly it was lots of research. I read a lot of medical reports, I read up on field medicine, watched videos of surgeries, and joined some forums where people described and discussed how what the onset of panic attacks and seizures felt like and how they experienced them in the moment vs how they saw it after the fact. I read lots of articles about what it feels like to be stabbed in various parts of the body and how long you can keep going.
My beta also had family with a medical background, and she grew up watching autopsies and listening to a lot of medical talk, so she was helpful for medical jargon, especially for terminology that has changed since the early 2000’s.
WHY DID YOU MAKE HERMIONE A HEALER?
It was a social commentary, honestly. I debated with myself a lot about what career to give Hermione in Manacled when it was in an early stage of development. The reasoning that clinched the decision to make her a healer was a combination of thinking it positioned her well to emotionally manipulate/endear herself to Draco and also from reading The Sparrow and personal observations about the ways people tend to blame and devalue medical experts and dismiss both the value and the trauma of wartime surgery. I read so many books growing up in which choosing to be a doctor in a war was treated as far less brave and valuable than being a soldier. A lot of stories tended to give the job to the pacifist who “couldn’t kill” but wanted to do “something.” So I enjoyed the trope subversion of making Hermione a healer not because she was incompetent as a duelist or too tender-hearted to kill a person, and instead because of her intensely ruthless sense of pragmatism.
There’s a notable tendency to blame doctors when things going wrong but then attribute success to anything else: the patient is a “fighter,” it’s a miracle, it was lucky, etc. etc. I don’t find that history tends to pay particularly much attention to the doctors when there are shinier heroes to praise. And, the Resistance lost the war, so a lot of the people Hermione saved died in later battles, during imprisonments, etc. If more of the records involving Hermione had existed she would have certainly garnered some attention, but as “just a healer” she was shuffled into the footnotes.
The choice to make her a healer and treat her as devalued on account of it, ended up being even more fitting than I expected, because throughout the Manacled flashbacks I got a number of comments about Hermione being weak because I’d chosen not to have her be a fighter like Harry, Ron, and Draco; that it was sexist and regressive for her to be a healer rather than giving her a job that was more valuable. Despite the fact that the story was told from her perspective with extensive attention paid to how needed and yet devalued her skills were; readers still regularly expressed dismay that she wasn’t doing something more grandly heroic in appearance. She could use her skills as a surgeon to keep hundreds of people alive; save Draco a dozen times over with healing, with political maneuvering, with personal risk and sacrifice, and I’d still get lots of comments hoping she’d eventually stop healing and do something badass instead so that people would be able to admire her. I regarded Hermione as hugely admirable precisely because she chose to do something that did not conform to the traditional standards of heroism and did it anyway because it was necessary.
That idea that being faced with all the horror of a battle would be less devastating because a medic was there fighting to save lives rather than to take them does not add up for me logically. Because humans are so quick to dehumanize others in times of war, there’s often a remarkable matter of factness and conviction that soldiers have about what was ‘necessary.’ I’ve often felt that the bravery that medical professionals have and the trauma they experience is often dismissed, because the grief and trauma of the individual or the family is what looms largest.
IS IT TRUE THAT YOU WROTE MANACLED ON YOUR PHONE?
It is. My baby had a lot of issues with sleep, and so I had to hold him during his naps, and so I started writing fanfiction on my notes app. Pretty much the entire story was written, revised, and posted via my iphone.
For more questions about my writing process when working on Manacled, visit my tumblr tags.