Effects of a glancing blow.

[Cordelia Bedelia]

I had been reading on here about the feasability of a character getting hit by an arrow and surviving. It seems like this idea of a "glancing blow" might work better. It's the age old dilemma of injured, but not dead. I'm not looking for them to continue fighting or anything like that. She's meant to sustain a wound when an unknown archer tries to assisinate her. At the last second she unwittingly moves out of the path. My original idea was to have her get hit in the shoulder by a second shot and pass out. Then her guard and a medic character do some immediate kind of treatment before she's moved somewhere safe for better treatment. After reading posts and blogs about arrow wounds and treating them I'm a bit nervouse to use the trope. What would a "glancing blow" from an arrow look like? Could it cause a serious enough injury to keep her held up in treatment for a few days? Plotwise I want to keep her in place a for at least a day or two before sending her home to bloody suprise.

 

[Mad Swede]

Well, there's no such thing as a glancing blow from a bullet or an arrow. They either hit you full on or they give you a sort of graze. But that graze can be quite deep, especially if the arrow or bullet was fired at close range - it will take a chunk of skin and flesh out of you, and we're talking about something 5-10 cm deep and anything up to 20 cm across. So an arrow which took a chunk out of someone's arm or leg or body will leave them with enough blood loss and shock to keep them out of the fight for a few days - if they survive the shock.

 

[Cordelia Bedelia]

Thanks. That’s helpful. Glancing blow was something I read from someone else, but yea graze is what I meant.

 

[pmmg]

You must have been reading Malik...

In real life, all these blows suck, are difficult to manage, will incapacitate, or will be fatal.

In fiction...that's not true.

In general, blows or wounds to arms, shoulders, or off to the sides of the torso, will suffice for injured and the reader will buy it. Wounds to the leg, should slow them down, and any more center mass, should cause them lots of issues. Head should usually be fatal. Course, any of these can be bad if you want them too.

So, how real do you want it?

And, I am pretty sure there could be a glancing blow from an arrow, it would just be unlikely.

 

[skip.knox]

At the same time people can suffer astonishingly brutal injuries and survive. Every option is open. It's up to you to sell it.

 

[Prince of Spires]

Humans are pretty durable creatures. We can suffer from serious injuries and survive, and later find a way to cope with the disabilities these wounds bring.

You're an author, you can do whatever you want. You can have an arrow hit someone's leg, make it strike a major artery and have the person bleed out in seconds. At the same time, you can also have an arrow strike someone's head, but it just grazes them, drawing a long gash across someones skull, but because it's a near miss, it doesn't damage the person's scull but only the skin around it. It would bleed a lot and look gruesome (headwounds tend to do that), but it wouldn't be fatal at all.

The most important thing to do is to make it sound believable. Otherwise readers will think your character has too much plot armor which removes some of the tension from the story. So don't hit someone square in the chest with an arrow and have them shrug it off. Or have the best archer in the world miss a shot at them without an explanation. Other than that, just remember that it can take a lot or very little to kill a human.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

There is so much "it depends" on this that it's hard to answer, and people have done a good deal of explaining. With arrows, the type of head, power of the bow, and range are critical, not to mention the type of armor. Even silk can alter the penetration and damage.

A modern piece where the main POV is a doctor would complicate things, because then you need full description of what was hit, the damage done, blah blah blah, and THEN if you're character survives something unsurvivable you have an issue. In typical epic fantasy, a description of taking an arrow to the leg is so vague you have the ability to fudge around with the results.

There are all kinds of famous tales of people surviving arrows through the eye, one was a William Tell society where a man stuck an apple on his head and got plopped through the eye... never let a drunken archer try this trick. Then there was this one...

PORTLAND, Ore. —
A man who was shot through the skull with an arrow by a friend trying to knock a fuel can off his head survived with no brain damage, doctors say.

Surgeons removed the arrow from Anthony Roberts’ head by drilling a larger hole around the tip at the skull’s back and pulling the arrow through.

Roberts, 25, was shot Saturday at the friend’s home in Grants Pass, about 200 miles south of Portland. No charges were filed against his friend.

 

[pmmg]

This man survived. Strangeness abounds.

This man also survived.

So what can we say?

I also saw a video about a guy who was shot four times in the face, and not only did he live, but when he was taken into police custody (another story), they could not tell for several hours.

My characters have been pretty beaten up. I think the MC has been hit by four arrows so far. Some worse than others. Heck, even Joan of Arc was hit by an arrow and lived. So it happens. For story purposes, you get to use a little bit of license in what is survivable and what isn't. I dont think I would say my MC was pierced through the head like those above and then explain their living. But a shoulder wound? I will accept it and move on.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Gotta love the damage a human take, then we can fall off a chair and croak.

 

[Puck]

You can easily be hit by an arrow and survive. Henry V was shot in the face just below the left eye and survived (he had the services of one of the most talented surgeons in Europe however).

If you were wearing late medieval armour of good quality you would be well protected from arrows. You could be hit by arrows at long range multiple times and not receive a scratch. Most arrows that hit you would be deflected. Only at very close range would you be vulnerable. (Your horse, having less armour, would be a lot more vulnerable however).

 

[Puck]

You could do worse than reading about Henry V's injury at Shrewsbury. Both in terms of the injury itself and the treatment and recovery. John Bradmore (Henry's surgeon) wrote a detailed account of the injury and the treatment.

You can read about it here:

Prince Hal’s Head-Wound: Cause and Effect - Medievalists.net

The future King Henry V was hit by an arrow to the face at the Battle of Shrewsbury – how did he survive? Research by Michael Livingston explains what happened in one of the most remarkable cases of battlefield surgery from the Middle Ages.

www.medievalists.net

Bradmore wrote that Henry:

"was struck by an arrow next to his nose on the left side during the battle of Shrewsbury. The which arrow entered at an angle (ex traverso), and after the arrow shaft was extracted, the head of the aforesaid arrow remained in the furthermost part of the bone of the skull for the depth of six inches."

Henry was lucky. Lucky as to the position of the strike and lucky to have a surgeon like Bradmore to treat him. In the same battle Henry Hotspur was not so lucky - also hit in the face by an arrow he was instantly killed. That's the difference a few inches can make!

Although it sounds incredible (and if you wrote it in a fantasy novel people might find it hard to believe) Henry V carried on fighting after being hit in the face with an arrow. He refused to leave the field until the battle was won and then walked off with the arrow still stuck in his head!

 

[R. R. Hunter]

Fitz Chivalry was shot in dang-near the spine with an arrow, but the Fool nursed him back to health. The old wound still bothered him from time to time, but not as much as the deeper emotional wounds he suffered.

We are pack.

If you haven't read The Realm of the Elderlings series. Don't. It will break your heart into a million pieces then scatter it into the wind with no other fantasy tale able to fill the gap. Or do, it's amazing.

I have to agree with everyone else so far. It's as believable as you want to make it. I wrote a fight scene where a character gets his leg hacked with a longsword as he's falling away. Then that character proceeded to walk maybe a mile with nothing but a bandage covering it. I mean it sounded good at the time. But then I starting picturing sword wounds to unarmored flesh and, yeah, he should have lost that leg. I did rewrite it to make it sound more believable. But honestly, if you tell your readers the person got up from the attack, they're just going to assume it didn't do much harm. That being said, suffering from wounds makes your characters feel more vulnerable and makes them more interesting. Readers will care more.