Ah-choo

Today’s prompt: “A sneeze”

Lazy Screenwriting 101: One of your characters is going to die of a terrible disease. Write a scene where they cough.

I know I’m not the first to point that one out. It’s right up there with dream sequences and amnesia, but it does seem like a particularly silly trope. Maybe it’s just a carryover from when all the ladies were dying of consumption, or maybe the writers just want to indicate the onset of an illness in a fairly genteel way, without all the mucus and body aches.

You don’t die of tuberculosis. You die of the flu. It leads to a lung infection that proves to be fatal. But up until then, it wasn’t a single gracious cough here and there. It was pretty gross. There was a lot of phlegmatic coughing, and there were many, many sneezes.