Every one has emotional triggers – are you using this to increase the emotional tension in your story?

What Does Your Character Think is Their Strength?

What does your character pride themselves on having, being, doing, possessing, needing, controlling, etc? Do they rest their identity in any of these things? Some common ones are: acceptance, respect, being liked, being needed, freedom, attention, being in control, autonomy, safety, etc. 

It could be a strength or aptitude that was reinforced when they were young. A child identified as gifted at a young age might place all their identity and self-worth in being smart, in being the smartest person in the room. How would they feel when faced with a new colleague who is smarter, faster, more innovative? What would that do to their self-confidence? 

This where personality plays into things. Would they react in anger and lash out, gossip, try to undermine the new colleague at every opportunity? Would they sink into shame and beat themselves up constantly? Would they become competitive and work themselves into the ground to maintain what they believe they’re owed or due?

A woman who’s always told how pretty she is might begin to expect that compliment from people, from men in particular. What thought takes root if that doesn’t happen? What emotions come to the fore if she’s in the room when another woman gets all the compliments and not her?

Emotional triggers are often linked to anything a character feels they’re really good at, that they deserve, something they see as their personal identity, or that they’re constantly striving for (feeling heard by a spouse for example).

What Does Your Character Value Most and Fears Having Taken Away?

This is where the primary and secondary emotions come into play. You can read more about that here – but to recap a primary emotion is an instinctive emotional response: fear, guilt, envy, jealousy, attraction. A secondary emotion is any emotion that requires a thinking response: love, anger, hatred, shame, etc. 

Anger, shame and love are always secondary emotions.

Some emotions can be either a primary or secondary emotion. For example, attraction can be an instinctive thing (a primary emotion), but it can also develop over time with familiarity (a secondary emotion).

An emotional trigger skips the primary emotion phase and jumps right to the thinking response – the secondary emotion. That’s why you can instantly be angry at something and not know why.

So, for example, I have a character with an emotional trigger of “feeling high maintenance.” If she perceives that people think she’s being high maintenance, too-big-for-her-britches, because it’s a learned response (one that she’s practiced many times) she skips right to feeling shame. The shame is what’s observable (shown via actions or dialogue). The shame is what I show when writing this emotional trigger.

What Emotions Are Activated When Key Needs Are or Aren’t Met?

Activated is another way to say triggered, but in this context it seems more descriptive. Once you’ve identified the feelings or fears that are emotional triggers for your character (and yes you can have more than one), figure out what emotions are activated when that situation crops up.

You have to think in terms of secondary emotions here. Do they immediately become angry? Are they riddled with shame? Do they feel loved? Remember, triggers don’t have to be negative!

Now, to manage or overcome an emotional trigger, an individual needs a good measure of self-awareness and humility. Then, as Brene Brown would say, they need to get curious. Why do they feel that way? What do they feel is at stake? 

How to Show and Not Tell an Emotional Trigger

In my Method Acting For Writers Masterclass, I talk about how primary emotions are usually felt and secondary emotions are usually seen. How does that play out?

Eliza’s husband is three hours later coming home than he said he’d be, without answering texts, emails or phone calls to explain the delay. Eliza has shipped the kids off to grandma’s for the night, prepared a nice dinner, and gotten all dressed up — as a surprise.

By the time hubs arrives home, Eliza has cleared the romantic setting from the table, put all the still-edible bits of food in the fridge, and Eliza’s changed out of the sexy outfit she’d been wearing into a terry bathrobe.

During the whole clean-up, her primary emotions are going wild. Frustration (feeling taken for granted). Concern (did something happen at work). Fear (was he in an accident). Jealousy (was there another woman). You’d show all these emotions colliding around inside through physiology, actions, and internal dialogue. 

Once hubs arrives home and is safe – oh, whoops – went out for drinks did I forget to text you? Now she has to DO something with these emotions so now she’s angry. But if Eliza had an emotional trigger of say… feeling in control, then not knowing where her hubs was when he was supposed to be at home would be a trigger for a secondary emotion. Having her well-thought-out plans for the surprise would be an emotional trigger. 

Emotional triggers can be powerful and effective, because they’re so often over-the-top emotional reactions. When your emotional triggers are activated, you’re not just angry — you’re livid. People can observe these night-and-day emotional hairpin turns. They seem to come out of nowhere if you’re not privy to what the trigger is.

Are you using emotional triggers in your novel?
What is your character afraid will be taken away or threatened? 

Need Help Describing Your Character’s Emotions? 

The key to drawing readers into a character’s perspective is showing (and not telling) their emotions. The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression Expanded Edition covers 130 unique emotions, and guides you how to convey them through body language, thoughts, expressions, dialogue & cues, visceral sensations, and more.

View sample entries: Euphoria, vindicated, and schadenfreude

Browse the complete list of emotions in this book

LISA HALL WILSON

If Lisa had a super-power it would be breaking down complicated concepts into digestible practical steps. Lisa loves helping writers “go deeper” and create emotional connections with readers using deep point of view! Hang out with Lisa on Facebook at Confident Writers where she talks deep point of view.

The post Identify Your Character’s Emotional Triggers appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

How do we get readers to cheer for unlikable characters? We cheer for anti-heroes and characters who are surly, have anger issues, and even questionable morals. Why? They all have one thing in common but it means we have go right back to the basics.

I came across this post from Writers Helping Writers on 10 Ways To Make Your Character Likable. You could do some of your own research into any of the methods mentioned there to strengthen your writing.

Locate The Main Story Thread

Sometimes we make things more complicated than they need to be, don’t we? I am prone to creating complicated plots with huge casts and then I get tangled up in my own fictional web. Most of the time, what I need to do is simplify. Get back to the basics and find the main story thread and pull on that. Which other story threads are unaffected by this central thread? Those unconnected threads have to go.

Creating a likable character is directly tied to this main story thread. When I read the above post, I agreed with everything there, but those techniques must be employed with a lot of art and subtlety. I like to go back to the basics first, and in the editing phase, add in some of those other techniques if I feel they’re needed.

So let’s get back to the basics.

What’s The One Quick Way To Create A Likable Character?

Some of the characters I have found hard to like would be: Katniss Everdeen (Hunger Games), Scarlett O’Hara (Gone With The Wind), Clary Fairchild (Immortal Instruments), Jack Reacher, James Bond, Ross Poldark, Wolverine, Walter White (Breaking Bad), Bella Swan (Twilight)… I could go on.

Now, you may have loved some of those characters. There’s a lot of personal taste involved in this. I found these characters hard to like, but have wholeheartedly cheered for them at the same time (OK – maybe I didn’t cheer for Scarlett… Mostly I just wanted to smack her). How could I cheer on and root for characters I don’t actually like all that much?

They were the underdogs.

These are all characters who face what seem like insurmountable obstacles. They could turn tail and run and live happily ever after — take the easy road, but they chose the hard thing. They put their lives and hearts on the line because of something they believed to be right. I can cheer for that.

Think of the school-yard bully. This could be the most attractive, smartest, best-dressed kid in school, but you’re probably going to root for the little nerd who has no power, no influence, and no voice but stands up to the bully anyway because somebody has to. Because enough is enough. Because it’s the right thing to do.

“Turns out likability, or niceness, is often the least important factor in convincing a reader your character is worth his time…characters who ooze nothing but niceness are often saccharine, exasperating, and anything but charismatic. Think of a handful of the most memorable characters you’ve encountered in literature and film. I’m willing to bet a good-sized chunk of money that the characteristic that stands out most is not niceness. Rather, we connect with the characters who are interesting…Dichotomies drive fiction. When we write characters who are fighting both their circumstances and their own natures, we create characters who are instantly real. And, thus, instantly interesting.” K.M. Weiland.

Some Examples…

Katniss is a loner, at times irrational, romantically-stunted (in my opinion), and is often the author of her own misery. However, she steps up for her sister. She takes on President Snow and the Capitol because it’s the right thing to do even though she doesn’t seem to have much chance at all of succeeding. She goes out of her comfort zone and puts herself on the line for the good of others. I can cheer for that.

Wolverine is surly, has anger issues, is a loner, and you can’t count on him to stick around. However, against his better judgement he goes back and stands in for others. He can’t stand to see kids in danger or bullied. He takes the skills and gifts he has and he uses them for good. I can cheer for that even though I think he’d make a pretty lousy friend day to day.

James Bond. *shakes head* Where do I start? He’s an adrenaline junkie, a womanizer, takes irrational risks, is an alcoholic (probably), and likely has some kind of mental health issue (depression, manic — there’s something there). But he does whatever is necessary, even at great personal physical and emotional risk, to take down the bad guy. He’s often alone and because of that faces impossible odds. I can overlook a lot of traits I don’t like because I can cheer for what he chooses to stand up for.

Did the writers who crafted the above characters use any of the above-mentioned ten tips for creating likeable characters? Of course, they did. Wolverine, Clary, Katniss (and probably a few others too) have tragic backstories. They all have a save the cat (or pet the dog) moment at some point early in their stories and they all struggle with their own personal demons. But when you boil everything down to the basics (when you pull on the main story thread — the obstacle they face in the climax), they chose to stand up to the bully. They take on impossible odds to see right done.

Find the basic story thread and give it a tug — what is your character up against? Is it impossible? Put your character up against a situation, an obstacle, a villain, they have no realistic hope of overcoming. Your reader doesn’t have to like your character to cheer for them to win. Sometimes getting down to the basics is the easiest way to get unstuck!

If you need ideas for conflict–adversaries, dangers, obstacles, relationship conflict & more–for your characters to go up against, check out The Conflict Thesaurus GOLD and SILVER editions.

Do you enjoy writing hard-to-like characters?

LISA HALL WILSON

If Lisa had a super-power it would be breaking down complicated concepts into digestible practical steps. Lisa loves helping writers “go deeper” and create emotional connections with readers using deep point of view! Hang out with Lisa on Facebook at Confident Writers where she talks deep point of view.

The post One Quick Reason Readers Cheer For Unlikable Characters appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

There doesn’t seem to be much info out there to tell writers how to realistically capture emotions and trauma while still leaving room for plot, characterization, and genre tropes.

The most common problem I see is that the character THINKS about their past trauma—they have flashbacks and backstory—but the writer seems to forget that the character is a whole person. Trauma (past or present) should be felt in the character’s whole body, and pain is one of the devices that is often overlooked to show that trauma, to show increasing tension, to show internal conflict and build character arc.

Writing the Lived Experience

Readers are not looking to read a lab report. The objective listing of details and descriptions (or symptoms) add little meaning for readers without context—particularly, emotional context.

The lived experience of trauma must include how a character’s emotions affect the body alongside the impacts to more tangible effects, like relationships and school and work.

If your goal is to create an emotional connection with readers, show them how this trauma FEELS in every fiber of the character’s being (where it’s relevant to the story). Show how that trauma makes every decision more difficult because going against whatever revives the emotional pain or creates a sense of being ‘unsafe’ is essentially creating an internal war the character feels they can’t win.

Google can give you lists and clinical symptoms, but I’ve found forums a great source of lived-experience info because people often share their personal accounts as they look for support or advice.

Note from Angela: To help writers brainstorm emotional wounds and understand how they shape a character’s behavior, fears, missing needs, false beliefs, etc. and impact character arc, we created The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma.

But keep going with your curiosity. How does the trauma affect the character’s thinking, priorities, choices and decisions, confidence, energy levels, goals – everything? This is a fantastic way to show escalation of internal tension for your character!

When Does Trauma Cause Physical Pain?

The obvious answer is physical injury, right? If you’re hit by a car, you’re likely to experience trauma … and a broken leg. However, writers often overlook physical pain as a sign that trauma memories and emotions are being suppressed or denied, how long-term trauma responses take a physical toll on the body, and how thoughts or patterns of thinking can create pain in the body. Coping strategies lose efficacy over time and psychosomatic pain turns into chronic or even life-long medical issues.

Pain from emotional trauma is the body’s desperate attempt to warn us that something isn’t right and needs our immediate attention. Use this natural function to SHOW your reader that everything is not okay.

Ripley pressed the heel of her hand into her sternum, her shoulders caving around the pain. But what if Steve is at the party? What if she has to talk to him? The pain deepened and her pulse kicked at her throat. She leaned back into the chair, stretching to relieve the pain but there was no escaping it. She can’t see him. Like that afternoon had never happened. Like he’d never held her down. Her chest tightened more. Her ribs ached with every breath, wouldn’t expand for a deep breath. Her heart pounded up into her throat. Was she dying?

Use Pain to Show Trauma Backstory

Pain is a great device to show a backstory of trauma. Many writers are familiar with using minor aches or pain to show stress or tension, and that’s fine. The language of a stiff spine, clenched fists, or aching shoulders and necks is very relatable. But there’s so much more to it than that.

Try using pain that gets ignored, suppressed, or self-medicated without seeking treatment. Consider illness or pain that has no medical explanation (psychosomatic or psychogenic), or a series of worsening symptoms and diagnoses. Show a character desperately seeking to validate that their pain isn’t all in their heads. It’s important to show the character’s thinking behind the pain (their internal reaction to it) for the reader to understand what’s going on. It’s a great use of subtext.

Sally stuffed three chocolate-covered peanuts in her mouth and on the first bite a sharp pain shot up into her sinus. Her tongue carefully moved the nuts farther back in her mouth to avoid the sensitive tooth. She still had a couple of solid molars to chew with.

Use Pain and the Body as an Alarm System for Readers

Some trauma pain is psychosomatic (physical symptoms without a medical cause). For instance, anxiety can cause heart attack-like symptoms: racing pulse, intense chest pains, and shortness of breath. These are actual physical symptoms that drive people to emergency rooms all the time. You can clarify that the attack isn’t really heart-related by showing your reader the other key symptoms that don’t fit the diagnosis, such as the randomness of the attacks, the character’s pain remaining static in intensity for a long period of time, an attack being brought on by specific thoughts or upcoming events, etc.

Resource Alert:
Writing About Pain

But there are also medical conditions, physical illnesses, and disabilities that can result from emotional trauma. Fibromyalgia and psychogenic seizures can be caused by psychological distress. There are measurable markers of emotional pain from trauma, such as elevated cortisol levels. According to the Mayo Clinic:

“Cortisol, the primary stress hormone, increases sugars (glucose) in the bloodstream, enhances your brain’s use of glucose and increases the availability of substances that repair tissues.

Cortisol also curbs functions that would be nonessential or harmful in a fight-or-flight situation. It alters immune system responses and suppresses the digestive system, the reproductive system and growth processes. This complex natural alarm system also communicates with the brain regions that control mood, motivation and fear.”

Your character and the reader likely won’t be aware of an elevated cortisol level; maybe that’s just for you to know. But it’s now plausible for your character to develop diabetes even though they don’t eat a lot of sugar, to be more susceptible to illness, struggle to lose weight, have irregular and/or very painful menstrual cycles, experience sugar cravings after panic or intense stress, have sudden outbursts of anger or rage, or constantly be dealing with dental problems. Some of these aren’t pain signals specifically, but they cause a waterfall effect of growing physical problems.

Pain Builds upon Pain

Let’s look closer at the chain reaction of trauma pain. Consider sleep disruptions from emotional trauma (something that is super common). Exhaustion has all kinds of implications for the body and the mind: headaches or migraines, body aches, joint pain, clumsiness, stinging eyes, rapid breathing, elevated resting heart rate, sudden heart rate spikes, impaired thinking and reasoning, lack of focus, low energy, memory issues, depression… You get the idea.

Now, compound that even further. Your character starts having performance issues at work. One day, they forget to pick up the baby from daycare. They get in an accident because they can’t focus while driving. They slip on the stairs and suffer a concussion.

For a character who is tired or in pain, EVERYTHING is more difficult.

Be Honest About the Consequences of Living with Pain

I love the spoon theory (the economy of energy) to explain how debilitating pain can be. Let’s say a person without chronic pain begins each day with ten spoons (total available energy for the day). They go for a run, which uses up two spoons, spend half a spoon on a shower, and use five spoons over the course of their work day. They return home in the evening with two and a half spoons left for a hobby, to make dinner, or go out to the bar.

The person who is managing chronic physical/emotional pain or is struggling with depression, PTSD, or anxiety may begin most days with only five spoons, and that shower might cost them two. They learn to hoard their spoons because they’re a finite resource that has to last all day. Just like in real life, that chronic pain will change everything for your character—their thinking patterns, priorities, decision-making abilities, susceptibility to depression. Everything.

The body’s response to trauma is very unique and individual, but when we use it strategically, it’s a great way to show not just past trauma, but internal tension, characterization, and conflict, as well.

How could you incorporate any of these tips into your WIP?

For more help on showing your character’s pain, stress, and other after affects of emotional trauma, visit this database.

LISA HALL WILSON

If Lisa had a super-power it would be breaking down complicated concepts into digestible practical steps. Lisa loves helping writers “go deeper” and create emotional connections with readers using deep point of view! Hang out with Lisa on Facebook at Confident Writers where she talks deep point of view.

The post Using Physical Pain to Show a Character’s Past Trauma appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Trauma is defined as anything that’s overwhelming or unpleasant that causes long-term mental or emotional problems. It rewires the brain and causes disordered thinking. So, if you’re looking for a way to SHOW a character’s trauma background, the WHY behind poor choices, and irrational behaviour, use internal dialogue that reflects this disordered thinking. This is the key to creating emotional connections for readers. 

Below are some common ways that trauma causes problematic thinking patterns. Showing this flawed thinking, the emotional reactions to it, and the behaviours it causes will reveal to readers what’s important to your character, what inner obstacles they face, and often a whole lot about their priorities, values, and self-worth.

1. Fear and Safety Are Constantly Considered

For a character who’s endured trauma and continues to struggle with the aftermath of that event, the brain becomes preoccupied with staying safe and is very sensitive to any sense of fear. Imagine placing a smoke alarm directly over your toaster. You’d get a lot of false alarms, but that wouldn’t mean the alarm or the toaster were malfunctioning.

A brain preoccupied with staying safe will see danger around every corner – literally, whether that’s the reality or not. And when danger lurks around every corner, the energy required to see it coming, be ready at a moment to react to it, is exhausting. Every decision is filtered through this risk assessment. 

Does your character need to sit near a door? Do they need to know a LOT of details about a party, event, or meeting before they can agree to go? Will they avoid anything that might remind them of the past trauma? Maybe they take ten flights of stairs everyday because the elevator feels unsafe (since there’s no quick escape from it). The illusion of control is very comforting. And of course, this can stray into self-sabotage, right? Because when an office shuffle moves them out of a workspace with a door and into a cubicle, they end up quitting.

2. Truth Isn’t Based on Fact or Reality

Decisions are made based on a blending of past experience, this preoccupation with fear and safety, anxiety of what could happen, and/or on personal truth (see below for inner dialogue problems). Those with PTSD assess everything based on what DID happen and strive to make sure it never happens again. Those with generalized anxiety see the world through the lens of what COULD happen. Often though, these assessments always skew to the negative. They don’t often see the hope or potential in a new situation or positive change, only what could be harmful.

One of my favourite examples of this is Karl Urban’s portrayal of “Bones” in the latest Star Trek movies.

Kirk : I think these things are pretty safe.

‘Bones’ : Don’t pander to me, kid. One tiny crack in the hull and our blood boils in thirteen seconds. Solar flare might crop up, cook us in our seats. And wait’ll you’re sitting pretty with a case of Andorian shingles, see if you’re still so relaxed when your eyeballs are bleeding. Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence.

Kirk : Well, I hate to break this to you, but Starfleet operates in space.

‘Bones’ : Yeah. Well, I got nowhere else to go. The ex-wife took the whole damn planet in the divorce. All I got left is my bones.

These sentiments don’t have to be spoken aloud; sometimes, the negative can be shown through internal dialogue. This edge-of-your-seat-expectation that the sky is falling, or that sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop – imagine what that would feel like. How exhausting that would be. The juxtaposition between what the character wants to do to feel safe and the decision or action they actually take can be very compelling.

This goes past just being grumpy or irritable. The key is showing the inner tension and the real impending sense of constant doom that pervades the trauma character’s thinking and emotions. For example, many who struggle with PTSD believe they’ll die young, though they won’t have a concrete reason for that belief. So maybe they want to do everything right now. Maybe they take risks that are truly unsafe.

3. Most of Life Becomes Black or White

When a character with a trauma background is struggling, their disordered thinking often becomes very black and white. There’s little nuance or room for subtlety in the effort to stay safe and not feel afraid.

I can’t trust anyone.
I can’t trust any man.
Everyone hates me.
Everyone is talking about me behind my back.

Show the reader this isn’t actually true. For instance, you can have other characters counter this with behaviour or dialogue. By showing that the character’s thinking is unreliable, the reader gets a sense that something’s out of balance. The reader can see why the character makes the decisions they make while also seeing the flaws in that thinking or rationale. The character’s decisions only need to be rational TO THEM in that moment.

4. Inner Monologue Delivers Harmful Messages

For the character with a trauma backstory who’s unconsciously (or consciously) preoccupied with safety and predisposed to fear, often the messages they tell themselves influence their reactions. The character may in fact seek out situations where those messages are confirmed (confirmation bias or a self-fulfilling prophecy). How you craft these messages can show the reader a whole lot about how the character sees themselves and their place and value in their world.

The messages are not based on fact or reality but on a personal truth/belief that’s been reinforced over time. In real life, many people aren’t aware of those harmful messages, but in fiction, we need to show this clearly so the WHY of the character’s decisions make sense. Some common harmful messages those struggling with past trauma repeat to themselves include:

I’m not lovable.
I’m stupid.
It was my fault this happened.
I don’t matter.
There must be something wrong with me.

Sprinkling in thoughts like these shows the reader the character’s foundational understanding of their worth. If this is done well, it adds buckets of tension. These small bits of inner reflection answer the WHY for readers without needing to tell them the character struggles with depression or PTSD or intrusive nightmares, etc. They can also show that the character isn’t consciously looking to harm themselves with risky or dysfunctional behaviors, that they may be seeking out those situations because they actually believe they deserve the consequences.

5. The Status Quo Is a Survival Mechanism

When the character knows what’s coming–even if it’s harmful or painful—that’s better than facing what’s unknown. They know how to handle/survive the known. That illusion of control is pervasive. They can’t imagine a different future, and often don’t feel they deserve anything better. 

Stepping out into something new, changing old patterns, trusting someone new – these become heroic efforts for those struggling with past trauma. The character’s internal reaction, emotions, and thinking should reflect the monumental effort and courage this kind of change requires. 

Trauma and Disordered Thinking: Showing vs. Telling

To pull everything together, here’s what trauma looks like when it’s told vs. shown. You can decide which is more powerful, more compelling.

Telling: Stan woke up from the nightmare, sweat pouring off his face. He took a deep breath. It was just the PTSD again giving him bad dreams.

Showing: Stan bolted upright, chest heaving. He searched the dark corners of the bedroom, his heart pounding against his rib cage like a man buried alive. Sweat covered his chest and back, and he shivered under the brush of cool air from the ceiling fan. He’s at home. He kicks off the covers and sets his bare feet on the cold floor. Not in the desert. Not at the FOP. His toes curl under from the chill. There’s no sniper. His heart slows to a dull bone-jarring beat. He’s safe. 

But Billy is still dead. Tears fill his eyes and the moan that erupts from his gut stays trapped in his throat, constricting his airway. He stares at his hands, willing them to stop trembling. What’s the matter with him? He makes fists and pounds the mattress. This is what he got for coming home in one piece. He glances at the clock. Three hours til dawn. He reaches for the bottle next to the bed.

Trauma and anxiety are like the schoolyard bully who seems too big to fight. But the underdog character who takes this on, who pulls the curtain on the wizard, so to speak, is very compelling. Everyone has faced a similar situation in the form of a childhood bully, an overbearing boss, whatever. Most people know what that feels like and what it would take to stand up for themselves and enact change.

If you need help brainstorming your character’s emotional trauma, and its impact on your character’s personality, behavior, sense of self-worth, fears, and motivations, take a moment to look at The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma.

Do you struggle to show and not tell internal conflict or tension in your fiction? Have you included any trauma backstories for your characters? 

LISA HALL WILSON

If Lisa had a super-power it would be breaking down complicated concepts into digestible practical steps. Lisa loves helping writers “go deeper” and create emotional connections with readers using deep point of view! Hang out with Lisa on Facebook at Confident Writers where she talks deep point of view.

The post 5 Ways Trauma Makes Your Character an Unreliable Narrator appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Many authors give their characters past trauma that makes life more difficult and at the very least adds internal conflict. But are you strategic with the kind of trauma you choose—the severity, the onset, the symptoms and coping mechanisms? What’s the character’s emotional arc and how does the trauma shape that arc?

Types Of Trauma

Trauma is anything that leaves a person feeling overwhelmed.

That’s it. There’s no threshold of “bad” that needs to be reached. We tend to think of trauma as huge horrifying events, such as combat/war, displacement, a natural disaster, car/plane/train accidents, rape, kidnapping, a near-death encounter, etc. These kinds of events change you, sometimes in only the span of minutes.

However, what’s more common is the everyday kind of trauma that every one of us has suffered to varying degrees. Some common examples might be divorce, forced relocation, public ridicule, loss of a loved one (even to natural causes), job loss, relationship loss, betrayal, poor response to a personal disclosure, sibling rivalry, emotional neglect, a health crisis or a sudden medical procedure, etc. This kind of backstory influences characters’ decisions, motivations, priorities, likes and dislikes, prejudices, and blind spots just as much as the big trauma events. 

I really love the character Tyrion in the Game of Thrones series (books and TV). Tyrion is shaped by the fact that he has dwarfism. Having dwarfism is not a peripheral detail to differentiate him from the other characters. The specific and unique kinds of trauma he suffered growing up because of his stature influences every future decision and is subtly woven into every emotion he expresses, numbs, and holds back. His past trauma equipped him to survive, even though that same trauma was also a handicap and an anchor. The trauma wasn’t just a detail added to create sympathy in readers for a hard-to-like character.

Strategic Use Of Trauma

Before randomly choosing a trauma from the past, think about who your character is and how this trauma could make their story journey more difficult for them. Get really curious about this.

As an example, let’s take a look at Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo is a perfectly respectable hobbit until a wizard shows up with 13 loud, strong, obstinate, opinionated dwarves. Knowing what sort of challenges are ahead of him, what kind of trauma background could an author give a character like Bilbo that would make solving his story problem even more challenging (and definitely feel impossible)?

Bilbo is a homebody and an introvert, and living with so many boisterous individuals with strong personalities is a challenge. But imagine a Bilbo with a past of abuse that comes out in his adult life as extreme people-pleasing and conflict avoidance? How would this anxiety have made life even more difficult and bring additional challenges during his encounter with Gollum, facing off with Smaug, or negotiating with a walled-up Thorin to honor his promises to the people of Lake Town? 

The past trauma you choose to include should be more than emotion-theatre. It should make your character’s journey more difficult and be specific to the journey ahead of them. I know this is hard if you’re a pantser, but it may be something to consider for a rewrite or editing phase.

Emotional Wound Database at One Stop for Writers

Trauma Memories Are Often Avoided

Part of being strategic with trauma backstory is knowing when and how much to share. My personal preference is to drip in backstory. What does the reader need to know to make sense of what’s going on right now? It’s often far less than what you think the reader needs. This slow peeling back of emotional layers can increase the tension for readers.

Because the reality is that most people will do almost anything to avoid being reminded of the worst moment of their life. These are not the sorts of things people navel gaze over.

“Trauma comes back as a reaction, not a memory.” 
~Bessel Van Der Kolk

Consistent use of coping mechanisms can show a past trauma early on without having to delve into the backstory before it’s necessary. A great example of this are the opening scenes from the movie Sleeping With The Enemy—Laura’s obsessive straightening of cans in cupboards, of adjusting towels on towel rods to precision, etc. It all pointed to this frantic need to appease someone else, someone she was afraid of. The specifics of the trauma weren’t necessary in those opening scenes to create tension.

There have been studies done on young men who suffered abuse by priests as young boys. Those who struggle with anxiety (of any sort) often become gym rats. They work out, they are health nuts, because they don’t ever want to be overpowered again. This obsessive need to be strong, stronger than most everyone else, is the reaction.

So ask yourself: How can you be strategic with the reaction to the emotions your character suppresses or tries to avoid?

Trauma Is Like A Spider’s Web

Trauma is not just something the character thinks about. Emotions are the key to making trauma reactions believable and visceral for readers, so be strategic with specific and unique ways those emotions affect the character’s body. Where do they hold or carry the tension? Do they clench their teeth? Does their neck ache? Do they have stomach problems? Do they have trouble sleeping? Do they startle easily? Do they get angry easily? 

The way they carry the past in their body will also affect their behavior and choices. Some people become angry when one of those old emotions are triggered. Some people become compliant and seek to please everyone around them. My point? It’s all connected. One symptom or coping mechanism or trauma memory doesn’t exist in isolation from the character’s thinking, feeling, reacting, and decision-making. Avoid the temptation to use past trauma as emotion-theatre. 

You can’t tear a hole in a spider’s web and not create reverberations felt throughout the entire structure. How could you use those reverberations to create more inner or external conflict? Maybe a woman who’s been raped obsessively uses exercise to regain a sense of control. But then she breaks her leg and is stuck on the sofa for two months. There’s a tear in the web. How would removing that coping mechanism affect her thinking, her emotions, her ability to cope with all of it?

LISA HALL WILSON

If Lisa had a super-power it would be breaking down complicated concepts into digestible practical steps. Lisa loves helping writers “go deeper” and create emotional connections with readers using deep point of view! Hang out with Lisa on Facebook at Confident Writers where she talks deep point of view.

The post Use Trauma Strategically To Create An Emotional Arc appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Trauma: any event that overwhelms our ability to cope, causes feelings of helplessness, and diminishes our ability to feel a full range of emotions. Anything can be traumatic depending on the individual and what they can cope with.

Giving a character a trauma background, having them experience some kind of trauma, or having to live with and manage PTSD is something more and more writers are choosing for their stories. 

Trauma is full of conflict and emotional tension, but readers don’t want objective news coverage. They want the lived experience of the event whether it’s happening right now or fifty years ago.

How Our Brains Record Trauma

Memories aren’t recorded in continuous action like a film. It’s recorded in bits with skips and blanks. Human brains crave beginnings, middles, and ends to things. Context. Continuity. Closure. So, the brain will always look to other sources to fill in those gaps (other survivor accounts, news reports, documentaries, etc) to label, understand, find closure. I cover this more in-depth here.

What a victim takes in during any trauma may differ from what they remember immediately after and may differ again a week or a month later. This reality is particularly apparent in rape cases. The Netflix show Unbelieveable captures this aspect of memory with compelling realism.

This aspect of memory is where you, as the author, can strategically choose which details your characters focus on, are haunted by, prioritize, deny, self-medicate to avoid, etc. 

A PTSD Memory Is Frozen In Time

Generally speaking, memory is flexible and fluid. With time, some elements fade and others come to the fore. With PTSD however, the event is captured with photographic detail that doesn’t change much or at all. 

If you think of the brain as a giant old-school file cabinet, most memories—even traumatic ones—are filed away for later reference. This relates to how we handle this, react to that, etc. Context. 

But, the PTSD memories are left in the to-be-filed box because the brain doesn’t know where to put them—in modern times there’s usually no context for rape or a natural disaster, right? And those trauma memories are the first ones the brain turns to in order to figure out how to react to things, interpret things, measure risk—everything. The lack of closure means the trauma memory remains a constant and present threat.

There were studies done after WW1 where soldiers just returning from the battlefield were asked to recount a specific battle or incident while it was fresh in their memories. Forty years later, those same soldiers were interviewed again. Those with PTSD recalled the same sights, sounds, smells, and sensory details almost word for word. It’s like an old record or CD with a scratch that gets stuck in one place.

Those who didn’t have PTSD (which represented the majority), their accounts were very different from their original statements, because they’d had time for other sources to fill in the gaps, to find context and closure. As time went on, some or many details changed or were lost.

So how can you use this information when writing trauma or PTSD memories for your character?

1. Know Which Kind of Memories Your Character Is Dealing With

Emotions are the key to capturing the effects of these memories for readers. Emotions have three jobs: to warn us, to tell us something, or to protect us. This is super helpful when thinking about how to SHOW the effect trauma memories have, or why they’re triggered. I go into more detail about emotional context here.

With any trauma memory, there’s one or more emotion concerned with protecting the character from this ever happening again. So any character with a trauma background could have those memories brought forward by feeling too small, insignificant, or weak (as an example). Any situation that recreates that feeling can trigger the trauma memory: someone standing next to them while they’re seated, having to speak with someone in authority (ie., a police officer), etc. 

For those with PTSD, this triggered emotion will activate survival instincts the character will immediately NEED to obey and are often be disproportionate to the situation. Usually, whatever helped them survive initially will be the default reaction. This is not a reaction they can think their way out of. In real life there wouldn’t be much internal dialogue to rationalize or contextualize or self-soothe (though there may be some repeated phrase or warning: good girls do what they’re told, for instance). They may, however, be aware that their reaction isn’t “rational” to the present situation, though it made perfect sense in the trauma situation.

Get curious about the consequences of your character being triggered, because whether he or she chooses to resist or go along with their instinct, those consequences should play into the story. What might happen in a situation where their gut response is anger, but they resist that urge? Or what if they did react instinctively, and they ended up causing physical, emotional, or relational harm to themselves or others? How do they handle the aftermath of a reaction that “makes no sense?” Do you see the kinds of complications this leads to for those with PTSD?     

Without PTSD, someone with a trauma memory is able to retain the ability to think, to problem solve, and intellectualize when faced with those same emotions. It will be upsetting, it will influence their decisions, but the reactions diminish. For those with PTSD, most of the time, their solution is to avoid those emotions being triggered because the consequences are costly.

2. Choose Details That Are out of Place 

Trauma memories will focus on the things that aren’t as they should be—those will be the upsetting details. Survivors will often focus on what’s out of place, on what’s wrong, what shouldn’t be. They will register this as wrong, but may be unable in the moment to articulate WHY it’s out of place or shouldn’t be. 

One holocaust survivor recalled how she (as a child) was in hiding with her mother when they were discovered by the Nazis. She hid and her mother was dragged outside several meters away. The girl peeked through a crack in the doorway, saw a soldier point at her mother’s head and heard a crack (a gunshot). In vivid detail, she recounted how the snow turned red. She focused on waiting for hours for her mother to get up. She didn’t have any context for what had happened at the time, but in her retelling there were many details added from an adult perspective.

I also read an account of someone who survived the Oklahoma City bombings. She recalled paper fluttering from the sky, personal papers, and scrambling to try and pick them up. She remembered walking, and the ground crunching underfoot with every step. In the moment, she was deeply upset by this sensory detail but couldn’t say why. Later, she could explain that those were papers people wouldn’t ordinarily be so careless with, that the asphalt was covered in shattered glass from the blown-out windows. She didn’t remember seeing anyone injured or upset, though she acknowledged she must have. Her brain had selectively blocked what was overwhelming. 

When writing memories like these for your character, instead of seeking to capture the complete horror of an event, try narrowly focusing on what would be most upsetting to them. To show what was overwhelming or traumatizing, use things they remember or forget. 

Be visceral with the sensory details. Sound and smell are two senses very closely linked with memory. This will be specific to your character, unique to their experiences and threat levels.

If you’re giving your character PTSD, these memories may have skips and gaps they can’t explain. They may vividly recall every emotion they felt, or they may not recall feeling anything at all (though those same emotions will still be triggered).

3. Use Flashbacks—Carefully

There are two kinds of flashbacks used in novels. One is a glimpse into a character’s past, basically a cut scene to something that happened before, which may or may not include anything traumatic. This is usually written as a dream or as backstory. 

The second kind of flashback is a trauma memory replayed in detail associated with or to show PTSD. Avoid the temptation to use just this aspect of PTSD and ignore all the intrusive and debilitating aspects of this disorder (well, it’s more correctly a brain injury). Flashbacks are trauma memories re-lived: emotionally, visually, and/or as an auditory memory. 

Here’s the thing: in real life, a flashback is the body immersing itself in and re-living the worst event of the character’s life over and over without any warning or control to stop it or prevent it from happening. It’s more like a nightmare than a memory, because it can block out all sense of time and place. These memories can also show up in nightmares that might thematically have no resemblance to the trauma but instead focus on the triggered emotion, like helplessness. These memories are exhausting—mentally, emotionally and physically. I’ve written more about PTSD flashbacks here.

4. Remember that Memories and the Reactions to Them Are Very Individual

When writing trauma memories, keep in mind how much time has gone by. Those WW1 soldiers recounting events from forty years previous—their memories consisted of what they remembered but they were also made up of what the news reported, what they saw on TV, and what others said. Some consciously or unconsciously altered their memories to avoid a variety of internal consequences (guilt, shame, etc). Think about what other sources might be available to your character to fill in the gaps in the character’s memory, or what reasons they may have to hide or diminish their outward reactions to those memories. What would be the consequences of that emotional suppression?  

No two trauma survivors are the same. Take the time to research trauma and mental health. Try to find someone you can interview. My experience of PTSD is unique to me. There are commonalities that are used as diagnostic tools, so those are good to be aware of, but the intensity, relational/physical/social consequences, coping mechanisms—all of this is very individual. Use the lengths the character goes to in order to avoid the memory or its resulting feelings to SHOW the depth and intensity of the pain and tension.

In summary, no one wants to be defined by what’s happened to them, but if you’ve given your character some kind of traumatic memory, be sure those memories significantly influence their decisions, actions, thoughts and feelings—otherwise, why bother?

Resource to help you:

If you would like help unearthing your character’s backstory wound and gain valuable ideas on how each experience might impact their behavior, self-worth, fears, and more, try this Emotional Wound Database.

It can guide you on what to expect for different types of trauma, so you can accurately show the strain of having such a wound be part of their past.

Have you given your character any sort of trauma backstory, or do they experience significant trauma in your story?

LISA HALL WILSON

If Lisa had a super-power it would be breaking down complicated concepts into digestible practical steps. Lisa loves helping writers “go deeper” and create emotional connections with readers using deep point of view! Hang out with Lisa on Facebook at Confident Writers where she talks deep point of view.

The post 4 Tips for Writing Your Character’s PTSD and Trauma Memories appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Deep POV (point of view) is a popular (and lately, divisive) writing style to employ. Many blogs about deep pov will list out the same four or six foundational tools as though any newbie could pick this up and run with it from these meagre explanations. Deep POV is complex and involves many tools that overlap and interact with one another to create specific effects. It’s truly a disservice to simplify deep POV to such an extent that newer writers stew in frustration for years trying to figure out why they can’t get this simple style to work for them.

What Is Deep POV?

Deep POV is a style of fiction writing that aims to remove all the psychic or narrative distance between the reader and the character so the reader feels as if they’re immersed in the story. By removing the author/narrator voice, the reader takes a vicarious emotional journey along with the point-of-view character. Here are 7 ways you can use deep POV to make that happen.

1. Remove The Writer Voice Entirely

First, it’s important to understand the role of the author/narrator in each point-of-view style.

• Most are familiar with Omniscient POV, where the writer tells a story about a group of characters and shares how all the characters feel or think (and often whether they’re right to feel or think that way). 
• Objective Third Person is a writer/narrator telling a story about one or more characters, but there’s little focus on what the character thinks or feels.
• Limited or Close Third Person POV is a writer/narrator telling a story about ONE character, and that character shares thoughts intermittently with readers through free indirect speech (the parts we like to italicize).
• First Person POV can also utilize this narrative or psychic distance, but it isn’t in deep POV by default.

Deep POV is one character living out a story with the reader at their side, in their head. The writer will use free indirect speech when writing in deep pov, but the focus of the story is the character’s emotional journey. There’s no place for the writer/narrator voice.

2. Avoid Drawing Conclusions For Readers

In deep POV, you share the raw information the character takes in and not the conclusions they reach. Their emotions and decisions are based on this information, so this basic data provides the WHY behind what they think and do and feel. Let’s look at some examples of how this works.

With limited third person, you’re telling the story, so you’re free to share the conclusion the character or you have come to: 

• Anxious energy surged through her.
• Bob looked at me with a sad face.
• She imagined what he looked like without his shirt on.

In deep POV, you’ll focus instead on the raw info the character sees, hears, touches, learns, intuits – and how these things feel.

• She jigged her leg under the table and tapped her nails on the chrome armrests to help keep her mouth shut. 
• The corners of Bob’s mouth turned down and he stared out the window, his shoulders bowed with some unseen weight.
• She stared at the wedge of chest hair exposed by the missing button on his shirt and bit her lip. Her gaze continued down to the top of his jeans before jerking away.

In deep POV, you focus on presenting the raw data in the form of internal sensations and physiology, sensory details, thoughts, expressions, gestures, posture, tone of voice – what Psychology Today calls the silent orchestra of communication. 

3. Filter Everything Through the POV Character

This is so critical to making deep POV work for your story. Everything comes to the reader filtered through the point-of-view character – through all the things and all the feels. When another character is speaking, the reader receives that dialogue through the point-of-view character, not the writer (as they would in limited third person). The POV character will have an opinion about what’s said and the person saying it. What’s said will have an effect on how they think and feel. 

The same goes for setting and description, to the beats written to attribute dialogue to another character, how characters move, their expressions, ambient sensory details… EVERYTHING is filtered through the POV character’s perspective. This is a hard mindset shift to make.

4. Get Inside the Character’s Head 

Each time you narrate a character’s thoughts (Bob wondered what the implications of this might be), explain things the character would already know (there’s Judy, Bob’s second wife), or insert information that you, the all-knowing writer, want the reader to know (it had been five months since she’d seen him) – this is author intrusion in deep POV.

In deep POV, internal dialogue is written entirely from the POV character’s perspective, filtered through their own scene goals and emotional journey. The point here is to deepen the character’s emotional journey. These bits of telling and author intrusion undermine the immersive fictive dream you’ve spent so much time creating. Deep POV is not about characters ruminating and reflecting and navel gazing as a workaround for talking to the reader.

5. Employ Greater Emotional Range And Intensity (Emotional Arc)

Most writers have learned about the three-act structure, creating tension, and understanding pace and characterization. They don’t always learn about creating emotional arcs for their characters at the scene, act, and story levels. The emotional conflict needs to intensify and escalate as the story progresses. Each scene or sequel would do well to surprise the reader with its range and intensity of emotions. 

Deep POV falls flat when writers rely on the same easy emotions. We reach for these low-hanging-fruit feelings because they’re universal and can be explosive – things like anger and love and attraction and fear. Those emotions aren’t wrong, but they most certainly are more complex and nuanced than many writers instinctively explore. I highly recommend James Scott Bell’s writing from the middle teaching and Donald Maas’ book The Emotional Craft Of Fiction as good places to start if this is new to you.

6. Limit the Reader’s Knowledge to What the Character Knows

Every word on the page comes from within the character. If the character knows it, and thinks of it, the reader should know it. Similarly, if the character does not know something, the reader can’t know it. Because of this, many who write mystery and suspense especially feel that deep POV won’t work for them. Let the character discover things, be surprised by things, remember things – the key is that the POV character doesn’t see the plot twist coming. 

7. Create Specific Effects, Not Constraints

Challenge yourself to learn the more advanced tools of deep POV while also focusing on what effect the tools aim to create for readers. Deep pov is neither template nor prison. It’s a set of stylistic choices that should serve you and the story, not limit what you want to write. Once you understand the effects these stylistic choices are going for, you can choose when and where to apply (or not apply) them.

Do you use deep POV? Is there anything about this style that has you stumped or frustrated?

LISA HALL WILSON

If Lisa had a super-power it would be breaking down complicated concepts into digestible practical steps. Lisa loves helping writers “go deeper” and create emotional connections with readers using deep point of view! Hang out with Lisa on Facebook at Confident Writers where she talks deep point of view.

The post 7 Ways Deep POV Creates Emotional Connections With Readers appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

It is such an easy thing to do. Once you become aware of author intrusion and what that looks like in limited third person, first person, or deep POV, the easy workaround becomes a rhetorical question. A rhetorical question is used to create dramatic effect or make a point rather than elicit an answer. Instead of telling the reader how the character feels or inserting information into the story, you have the character wonder about the information instead.

Here’s a paragraph from a manuscript I’ve stuffed in a drawer. 

Laurel slunk deeper into her seat. The two other reporters and the admin glanced at her, but mostly they stared at their notebooks. She straightened in her seat and hooked her hair behind her ears. Why was everyone acting so sullen?

There it is. The rhetorical question that’s slipped in to replace the bit of author intrusion I had there. Problem solved, right? Maybe. Except, when I do a search for question marks, there’s 22 rhetorical questions in eight pages. TWENTY-TWO?? Hmmm…

I saw this trend of overusing rhetorical questions in my student’s work too and the question marks began jumping off the page at me. The problem is that the author intrusion or narrator voice we’re trying to avoid by using rhetorical questions ends up being a crutch that prevents us from taking that next step to go deeper with our character.

So I challenged myself to limit the rhetorical questions to one per chapter. One. And here are the benefits of stretching yourself in this way.

Rhetorical Questions Aren’t Wrong

Rhetorical questions have their place in internal dialogue, the goal shouldn’t be to completely eliminate them (mostly, rhetorical questions are fair game in dialogue). They can offer great surprise for the reader. 

But most of the time, the character’s rhetorical questions are offering information the reader already knows the character is thinking about. You’re repeating information instead of moving the story ahead. You’ve just tied an anchor to the pace of your novel right there. Why waste valuable space on the page repeating things the reader already knows?

Flip-Flopping

Readers want characters that stand for something. They want characters who have decided to press on towards a particular goal no matter what the cost – there’s no turning back. To do this well, your character needs to plant a flag, draw a line in the sand, pick a path, choose a side.

While we hope rhetorical questions help us create tension and uncertainty in characters (and therefore readers), over-using them allows the character to waffle. This waffling or hesitation makes the character harder to cheer for, harder to relate to. Instead, force them to be decisive and live with the consequences. Take a rhetorical question in your manuscript and have the character think of the answer to the question instead. For instance:

Could she trust him?

Could become: He’d betrayed her before and nothing stopped him from doing it again. But maybe he was her only chance at a relationship. The ache in her chest kicked up, a sharp penetrating throb over her sternum. No, she couldn’t trust him, but she didn’t trust herself to make a good decision either.

The rhetorical question is a shortcut that’s meant to increase tension, but many times the shortcut undermines the emotional potential in a scene. It’s a lost opportunity to go deeper. There’s more emotional depth to the answer than the rhetorical question offered.

Try Starting with the Rhetorical Question

Back-to-back rhetorical questions point to weak writing or undeveloped characters. I’m a pantser at heart, so my first drafts are riddled with rhetorical questions. Case in point:

But could she do it? Could she go back to the farm—to him? Could they fix their marriage? Did she even want to?

I have begun to see these paragraphs as fluorescent sticky tabs marking a place I need to revisit and go deeper with the emotions.  

In revisions, get curious about how the character would answer those questions. Start with the rhetorical question as a launching point for going deeper. What are the implications of one or more possible answers? 

In the paragraph above, the female character is trying to decide if she should give her marriage another chance. There’s so much depth to plumb there. If she goes back to him, what kind of person does that make her? Would her opinion of herself change if it doesn’t work out? Why is it so hard to decide – what’s at risk? What parts of herself are upset and why is she refusing to listen to them? What would a stronger person do? Why can’t she do that? 

Are the Rhetorical Questions Always Coming from One Character?

This was a pretty humbling question to ask myself, because I saw a trend in my first drafts where there was always one POV character who overused rhetorical questions to an embarrassing level. The other POV characters would have a reasonable use of rhetorical questions, but there would be one with back-to-back paragraphs of rhetorical questions. *womp womp*

Has this happened to you too? It’s a signal to me that I don’t know my character well enough. I don’t know WHY they’re doing/thinking certain things, what’s motivating them, what emotions are involved or at risk, or even what they really want. The rhetorical questions allowed me to waffle and skim, to avoid the hard work of going deeper. I had to stop being a lazy writer and get curious about aspects of this character I didn’t have an answer for yet. 

Going deeper with the emotions in a scene allows the reader to connect with the character. Rhetorical questions can be a great starting point to diving deep into emotions, so don’t be discouraged if you find quite a few!

LISA HALL WILSON

If Lisa had a super-power it would be breaking down complicated concepts into digestible practical steps. Lisa loves helping writers “go deeper” and create emotional connections with readers using deep point of view! Hang out with Lisa on Facebook at Confident Writers where she talks deep point of view.

The post What You Can Learn from Rhetorical Questions in Your Manuscript appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Giving a character a trauma or mental health backstory seems like an easy way to add internal conflict to our characters – and it is. But where do you start that research? What should you be looking for?

No one likes to read a story and find the writer just plain got something wrong. It ruins the story. It’s important to get the details right, most writers agree on that, but I think we need to raise the bar of what we expect of ourselves. People read fiction to be entertained primarily, but through our characters we can impart factual information instead of maintaining harmful perceptions and stereotypes. 

Know How Much Trauma Your Character Will Live With

First, be sure you know what level of trauma or mental health you want your character to struggle with. Is this a minor annoyance or a major stumbling block? Is this something they need to overcome by the end of the story or something they simply have to learn to manage and live with? Do they need to be able to maintain a healthy romantic relationship? Do they need to hold down a high-stress job?

Understanding this up front will help you decide what kind of trauma or mental health issue to start researching. I’ve seen way too many movies and TV shows that give characters PTSD, but the only symptom they have are combat flashbacks. Their life is not impacted in any other way.

*face palm*

That’s not how PTSD works. If you give your character PTSD, they should struggle (a lot) with many, many aspects of life including holding down a job or maintaining a healthy romantic relationship. 

Labels Help Authors More than Readers

When doing research, being able to label what your character is struggling with will help you target your research better. Be sure you’re using the correct label in your research. The way we use these words in conversation is not necessarily how they’re used in a clinical setting, but you need the facts from credible sources, so labels will be important.

Do you want your character to have an anxiety disorder or just be anxious? Those can be different things. Does your character have PTSD or c-PTSD? Do they have any co-existing issues? People with anxiety can also struggle with OCD, depression, panic disorder, suicide ideation, etc. Flashbacks are specific and debilitating, not a convenient vehicle to deliver backstory. Sometimes, symptoms can appear to be contradictory, but once you’re in that person’s head you realize it’s not contradictory at all. People who struggle with PTSD are often preoccupied with feeling safe, yet risky behaviour is a common symptom. You get to decide how complex to make their inner struggles. 

Low-Hanging Fruit: Friends And Family

The low-hanging fruit for your research will start with your family and friends. Ask around. Hey – you’ve mentioned you struggle with x. I’m writing a character who struggles with that. Would you be willing to help me out by answering a few questions?

Ask them if they know anyone who might be willing to talk to you. If you have an author page, Insta or Twitter following, ask on social media. Most people are happy to help an author with research. And they don’t need to have had the exact same problem or past. Talk to more than one person, if possible.

When you do talk to them, avoid phrasing questions in a way that makes it seem like you already know the answer. You’ll get your presuppositions echoed back often. 

Instead of: What’s the scariest part about having anxiety?
Try: Can you describe what your anxiety feels like when it just starts up?

Most of the time, what you need is that first-hand experience. What it FEELS like. Let them talk. It’s always more helpful to get their experience in their own words—not so you can copy them, but you begin to get a sense of their attitude towards things, you sense where the emotion surfaces, where they carry shame or anger, etc. 

Utilize Experts And Websites

Try your best to stick to accredited websites for your initial research. Charities, hospitals, and support groups will tend to address the issue with sensitivity and facts. You can parse where careful language is used – what words they don’t use. People with PTSD often feel “broken” and they will use that word to describe themselves, but you won’t find that language on accredited websites. Instead you’ll find descriptions of why PTSD is the brain’s natural coping response to overwhelming trauma.

Read widely, and pay attention to the publishing dates. Of course, there are tons of books out there on these topics. Research who the leading experts are in that field. Do they have any books out? Have they endorsed any books? Try those first. 

Find the most current content you can. I tend not to consider something for my fiction unless I’ve seen it verified on at least three credible websites/books within the last two years. Psychology and mental health information is changing rapidly, so avoid relying on anything more than five years old at the very least.

Reach out to experts in that field. University faculty lists are a great place to start. Many of these people are willing to answer questions or read pages to help you make sure you’ve got it right. I like to offer these people scenarios rather than ask them simplistic questions I could find the answers to on Google. They’ll lose interest if your questions demonstrate you’ve not put any effort into research on your own.

Angela Tip: The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma covers at over 118 types of real-world trauma, and was reviewed by a psychologist. It offers ideas on how a character may respond in the aftermath of a traumatic event, even if they try to bury the pain rather than work through it.

What If You Don’t Know Anyone To Interview?

In this case, start surfing Reddit threads, Quora, and other sites where people post questions and get responses. Read newspaper articles and watch news videos from events that were similar. Look for witness accounts. Memory can be faulty, so look for quotes immediately following an event. If this is a historic trauma for your character, you can watch or read testimony of survivor accounts. Where are they filling in the gaps in their memory? What do they do with their hands, their expressions, as they recount the parts they do remember with clarity? 

I’ve found lots of gold watching Holocaust survivors tell their stories, particularly when people were children during the war. They retell aspects of their experience they clearly got from another source much later, and their own memories stand out. They remember images – what things looked like, a smell, a sound – things that were out of place. The snow turned bright red and my mother didn’t move again. Every step crunched under my feet. I couldn’t figure out why, but later I realized it was because I was walking on shattered glass.

Researching mental health and traumatic experiences may seem daunting, but it can be done. I hope these tips give you the information needed to get you started and moving in the right direction.

Do you have any other tips on researching for mental health or trauma responses for your characters?

LISA HALL WILSON

If Lisa had a super-power it would be breaking down complicated concepts into digestible practical steps. Lisa loves helping writers “go deeper” and create emotional connections with readers using deep point of view! Hang out with Lisa on Facebook at Confident Writers where she talks deep point of view.

The post How To Research Mental Health and Trauma For Your Characters appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Have you ever had an editor or critique partner say “go deeper”? And you throw up your hands and glare at the screen because you DID go deeper.

Deep point of view is a writing technique that aims to create an emotional connection for readers by immersing them in real time in the character’s emotional journey. Because this is something my readers frequently ask about, I’ve been exploring it at my blog. If you’d like to read up on it, you can find more information here or here. You might want to start with this post on how to know if you’re writing in deep point of view.

Something that trips writers up is that their character’s emotions lack context. Your character has a reason for feeling the way they do and reacting the way they do. In deep point of view, everything is filtered through your POV character’s perspective. What does this situation mean to THAT character, RIGHT NOW, based on their own unique past experiences, prejudices, fears/concerns, priorities, and goals (emotional context)? Even when a truly new experience presents itself, the brain is always searching for context, for something from the past that will help keep us safe in the present. Understanding this as a writer helps you show the WHY behind your character’s emotions, thoughts, and actions. 

Emotions Serve A Purpose

Emotions (I talk about them like they’re people – stay with me) are preoccupied with keeping us safe by giving us information, warning us about something, or raising a concern. The longer your character suppresses or denies an emotion, the louder and more insistent it should become. 

This is how emotions work. Take a look at one of the more emotional scenes in your WIP. Can you identify what function the emotions in that scene are serving? How are they trying to protect your character, warn them, or get their attention? 

The Kids at The Table

Back to emotions as people. Imagine your character has a table in their heads and around it sits their younger selves from key moments in their past, but the seat at the head of the table is empty. The character hasn’t decided how to act or what to feel yet.

When a difficulty arises, each kid at the table does a quick evaluation, and those with a concern raise a hand and start talking over each other. Each of them believes their concern should be the character’s priority and the solution they used last time is the way to fix this current problem. Why isn’t your character listening – this is IMPORTANT!! (The pitfall is that putting a terrified five-year-old in charge of the emotional reaction to your adult boyfriend’s anger probably isn’t going to be helpful. The concern can be valid while the proposed solution can get the character in hot water.)

Internal conflict isn’t when more than one kid at the table is upset, it’s when those kids can’t agree on what to do or which concern should be the priority.

This is where emotions gain context for our characters. Psychology tells us that our brains are constantly searching our past experiences to see what’s similar, what other experiences might apply to (or help us deal with) the current issue. The kids at the table have valid concerns and usually offer the solution that helped them feel safe (even if it was ultimately harmful or wouldn’t apply any longer). The five-year-old is afraid; they’re concerned about vulnerability and propose running away. The nine-year-old is afraid, too, but their concern is that they’re not good enough to accomplish something and propose working even harder (a coping mechanism to avoid fear). And the sixteen-year-old is full of fear, too; they’re concerned with maintaining control and their solution is anger (another coping mechanism for fear).

The kids want to keep the character safe – they mean well. Does your character just give the head seat at the table to one of the kids? Or do they acknowledge the kid’s valid concern and attempt a new way ahead with a different solution? In essence, which past experience is going to inform the current reality? The emotion your character prioritizes will be influenced by their goal for the scene.

Going Deeper With Emotions

When I’m looking to “go deeper,” I brainstorm three or even five possible emotional reactions in a high-emotion scene. Get curious about which other kids (emotions/concerns) are present. The context of that feeling can influence the intensity, duration, or fallout of the felt emotion. 

If you can get curious about this, you’ll have a more specific and nuanced understanding of WHY your character is feeling what they feel, what’s behind their actions and thoughts. You’ve given the reader a reason to lean in and engage, to care, as the emotional context brings unique specificity to your character’s emotions. 

Once you’ve explored the emotional context for your character in their situation, consider the following questions to figure out what he or she will do: 

1. Will your character give in to the emotional impulse or squash it? (There’s always a cost to squashing a kid with a valid concern.)
2. How will a squashed or denied emotion/kid escalate things to get the character’s attention in that scene/book? (In real life, this will escalate eventually to psychosomatic symptoms: stomach aches, high blood pressure, migraines, trouble sleeping, inability to focus, etc.)
3. What coping mechanisms does the character employ to squash an emotion? What specifically is it about that coping mechanism that silences the emotion? (A wrong or betrayal is explained away because they’re just being dramatic, too sensitive, etc.)
4. What happens when the coping mechanism no longer works? How would they feel/react? 

Does the analogy of the kids at the table help you better visualize the variety of emotions and concerns a character could bring to any high-emotion scene? Is there another way you visualize this process?

LISA HALL WILSON

If Lisa had a super-power it would be breaking down complicated concepts into digestible practical steps. Lisa loves helping writers “go deeper” and create emotional connections with readers using deep point of view! Hang out with Lisa on Facebook at Confident Writers where she talks deep point of view.

The post What Is Emotional Context And Why Does Your Story Need It? appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

I love to get geeky about deep point of view and I’m so excited to be a guest writing coach here. *mittened fist bump* What is Deep Point Of View? It’s a writing technique, a strategy, that removes the perceived distance between readers and characters so readers feel like they’re IN THE STORY, in real time. Deep POV straps a Go-Pro to your main character and takes the reader on an intimate, visceral, emotional journey. You can use deep POV for your entire novel or for key scenes where you’re looking for an emotional gut-punch. 

Take fear, for instance. It’s such a common emotion that it’s sometimes hard to make it real for readers. When I’m critiquing, I find that writers don’t go “deep enough” into fear to really create that emotional punch they’re looking for in key scenes. Have you ever had an editor or crit partner say “go deeper?” Here are some of my best tips on how to dig deeper into fear to really make it work for you. 

You Understand More About Fear Than You Think

Fear is not only horror, terror, or panic. It has many faces. Worry is a form of fear. Perfectionism is a form of fear. Doubt, being shy or timid, having cold feet, agitation, suspicion, concern, phobias, lying/boasting, jealousy, loneliness, anxiety, PTSD – these can all be fueled by varying degrees of fear. (On a sidenote, fear and excitement use the same neural pathways – they FEEL the same.)

You know how fear feels. You’ve been afraid, you’ve reacted poorly when afraid. Everyone has. Get curious about how that felt! 

Get Curious With Your Emotive Memory 

Take a few minutes and think back to a moment when you were afraid. Fear is uncomfortable because it’s supposed to be, so this will have to be an intentional choice on your part. 

Reflect on why you were afraid (what was at stake, what did you risk losing?) and how it felt to be afraid. Where did the fear sit? Did it clench your gut? Constrict your throat? Make it hard to breathe? Were you able to think your way out or did you just react? Were you jumpy? Did you startle easily or remain calm? Relive that experience and get curious about it. Most of the time, the reason for our fear is very individual, can be irrational, is rarely linear, and can be volatile or unstable. How can you make your character’s fear uniquely theirs? 

Fear Involves The Body And The Mind

Overly simplified, fear is an alarm system that warns of danger, and that alarm is connected to other important systems in your brain – thinking and reasoning, emotions, physiology, etc. Fear will shut down systems not deemed necessary to survival (like feeling pain for instance) and amp others up (breathing, heart rate) to allow for a quick response. Learn more about the body language of fear here. Have you considered how you might employ this reality in your fiction? How this could create problems or amplify tension in a particular scene? 

Fear has many uses, but don’t get fixated on being strictly realistic. Real life doesn’t happen in tidy three-act structures. Technically someone in a life-and-death showdown probably isn’t thinking very much at all, but you need the scene to feel like time has slowed for readers, so you use more internal dialogue than would happen in real life. That’s a stylistic choice. 

Fear Must Be Specific And Unique To Each Character

Take bees, for example. We know how helpful they are, but many people fear them for a variety of reasons. Maybe Sally is afraid of them because when she got stung, she cried and her friends laughed at and excluded her. Cindy, on the other hand, is afraid of bees because her mother told her a sting will hurt and her face might swell up and she might have to go to the hospital (and Grandpa died in the hospital). Jamie is afraid of bees because the sound they make is too loud, and loud things aren’t safe. Rich is afraid of bees because the first time he was stung he couldn’t breathe and the next sting might kill him. 

First – notice how each fear is specific and unique to the individual AND shows us a good deal about their character. Sally’s fear is fueling shame, maybe. Cindy’s fear is fueling anxiety. Jamie’s fear is irrational but still has huge stakes for him. Rich’s fear fuels his survival instinct. 

While Rich is the only one with a tangible reason to be afraid of bees, the other children’s fears feel as real and as incapacitating as Rich’s. The stakes aren’t the same though, right? The thinking fueling their fear (the WHY) will be very different and so will the consequences of feeling that fear, which is what deep pov drills down into. Your job is capture that experience of fear for your character in the way that feels real to them, that shows the stakes they’ve attached to that fear.

If you want fear to really grab readers, the fear needs to be specific, needs to have high stakes, and readers have to understand WHY the character is afraid.

Prime The Fear Pump

“Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I’m not gonna hurt ya. I’m just going to bash your brains in.” Stephen King, The Shining

Once fear is already present, even innocuous events can bring it about. How many people shiver when they see a clown or red balloon? For them, that association with Stephen King’s It primes the fear pump with specific imagery.

The abusive husband/father comes home from work and slams doors, kicks toys out of his way, curses at the dog. The family sits down to dinner and the father cracks open a beer and chugs it. He demands another beer and cracks that one open, too.

His family is now primed for a fear response. They see the red flags that will set him off, and experience tells them they’ll be the first targets of his rage. They’ll be hyper-vigilant to a threat, and any small thing will push them into a fear response. They’ll adopt whatever behavior they’ve learned de-escalates the situation, even at great physical or emotional cost.

The father leans over to cut his four-year-old son’s meat, the knife scraping the plate with a wicked screech, and the father curses at the sound. The child winces and begins to cry but stays in his seat, shoulders hunched. Mom stares at her plate and resists the urge to comfort the boy. The father bursts out of his seat and tosses the chair aside. He hasn’t DONE anything to make the boy cry. What are they all afraid of? All kinds of things could be explored in a scene like this from various points of view.

Fear feels like a complex emotion, but it’s not. What makes fear work in fiction is when we take the time to make it personal and give it high stakes. When we prime the character to feel fear through deep point of view, the reader will be on the edge of their seat as well!

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Want to dive into your character’s specific fears?

Try the Fear Database at One Stop for Writers. In it, we cover a range of fears your character might have, everything from A Loved One Dying, Being Betrayed, Trusting Others, Not Fitting In, and more.

Each entry takes you through what that fear will look like, what internal struggles they may cause, and how this fear will hold your character back in the story.

Here’s an example of someone with a fear of commitment.

LISA HALL WILSON

If Lisa had a super-power it would be breaking down complicated concepts into digestible practical steps. Lisa loves helping writers “go deeper” and create emotional connections with readers using deep point of view! Hang out with Lisa on Facebook at Confident Writers where she talks deep point of view.

The post How To Scare Your Readers Using Deep Point Of View appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.