Character is the embodiment of obsession. A character must be stupendously hungry. There is no rest for those characters until they've satisfied their needs. Born in 1820 into a rich English family, Florence Nightingale was passionate about medicine from an early age. In a world where it was normal for women of society to remain at home, she broke through gender barriers and pioneered a profession in a field previously reserved for men.

My department training an average of 12 people a day for a full calendar year (4,380 people) in basic bleeding control and hands-only CPR, and giving them all a tourniquet Rhythm is key. Use as many sounds and cadences as possible. Think of dialogue as a form of percussive music. You can vary the speed of the language, the number of beats per line, volume, density. You can use silences, fragments, elongated sentences, interruptions, overlapping conversation, physical activity, monologues, nonsense, non-sequiturs, foreign languages.

Opening Lines

Florence dedicated her life to helping those in need. She was a trailblazer who led a group of nurses to care for wounded soldiers during the Crimean War and developed revolutionary views about hygiene and sanitation. Hailed as a heroine by Queen Victoria and the British people upon her return from the front, Florence Nightingale went on to establish the Nightingale Training School for Nurses and despite chronic illness, continued in her efforts to reform healthcare at home and abroad from her London salon. An ER doctor I followed around on my emergency medicine rotation would walk past the room of a screaming child or patient and often remark, “Welp, A and B are working.”

Fly-on-the-wall documentary inside a GP practice in Gateshead as it faces increasingly heavy demand. Radio 5 Live

This couldn’t be real. At any point I would wake up from the most realistic nightmare I’d ever had, spend the waking hour with relief that the horrors I had witnessed were nonexistent in waking life. I myself had been the recipient of such calls. Family doctors had called me in a panic, getting in too deep with their own procedures, and I had nonchalantly arrived to solve their problems. Spahn DR, Cerny V, Coats TJ, Duranteau J, Fernández-Mondéjar E, Gordini G, Stahel PF, Hunt BJ, Komadina R, Neugebauer E, Ozier Y, Riddez L, Schultz A, Vincent JL, Rossaint R, Task Force for Advanced Bleeding Care in Trauma: Management of bleeding following major trauma: a European guideline. Crit Care 2007, 11: R17. 10.1186/cc5686 It came from his nose and eyes and ears. I could plug one area momentarily only for the liquid to find some other path of least resistance.