(For the record, because my friend said people might be concerned, I am fine. I just took a tumble t’other day and ripped some of the tendons in my chest, so now it hurts…but only when I laugh (breathe, cough, lift something the wrong way, but you get my point!).

There are a lot of TV shows set in hospitals. Excluding medical dramas, where the setting sort of sets itself, there’s the comedy Only When I Laugh (possessor of the best theme tune), drama The Singing Detective (which I know my family watched when I was a kid, but I have no lasting memories other than the disturbingly evocative sight of the character’s painfully blistered, arthritic hands), drama/crime drama Trust Me (which had the weirdest ending ever? First season. I still need to watch the next), crime drama Temple…(technically? It was an illegal, underground – literally – hospital, but still), Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital (not gonna lie, that was a weird one.)

Why? What’s the narrative potential there? Or anywhere. How do authors pick where to set novels?

It all depends on the author, of course, and the book. King and Potter, for example, both spent a lot of time in hospital and that is where they came up with the ideas for their books. So, the stories lived where they were born.

Hospitals give a story a claustrophobic, furtive quality. Most people only have a layman’s understanding of how medical procedures work, so there’s also that little bit of suspicion that they can enjoy as the author fans it with a little bit of dramatic license. Plus there’s a whole cast of interesting, varied people to draw from on the story, from the patients to the staff, in a setting that you can believably control and constrain them in. People are in hospitals voluntarily, so they can move around easier than in prisons, for example, but they are also restricted by their health and the hospital regulations.

Don’t want your lead character to get a glimpse of whatever is going on in that particular theater? A nurse just catches them and shuffles them back to their bed.

You want the character to see something they shouldn’t? No-one gets much sleep in a hospital.

Plus the built in reason for other people to doubt their veracity. Sick, bored, possibly medicated…

Then there’s the drama of it! Literally life and death, every day. Every HOUR. The stakes start high and only get higher as authors throw oil onto those troubled waters. That’s rich soil for a story to take root in.

On the other hand…ugh, hospitals. I’ve spent my share of time in them and while I have nothing but respect for the NHS? I have no desire to spend more time there, especially in my own brain. My characters visit hospitals — they are the sort of jerks that stuff happens to — but a novel actually based in a hospital? It doesn’t appeal to me. The same is probably true for a lot of people. It also favors a very controlled type of story-telling, all sharp turns and tucked in corners. Blueprints of the space and a catalogue of the various weird smells. It’s not that a pantser can’t write this sort of hospital-set story…it’s just easier for a plotter.

I like my settings to be more…free-range, room to roam, crannies to explore. It’s why Plenty is a town that exists only in my head. It’s just as controlled I suppose, built entirely by me from the Starbucks to the Feedlot, but it’s controlled in a way that I work with well.

Still, never say never! And don’t make me laugh. It’s really still pretty sore!