Brainstorming the Wound in Your Character’s Backstory

by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi

Brainstorming the Wound in Your Character’s Backstory

I’ve spent the better part of the last year digging into the topic of character wounds or “Ghosts.” If this topic sounds familiar, it might be because Angela Ackerman and I (among others) have been yammering about it to anyone who will listen. The wound is a fascinating and vital piece of your characters’ pasts, which has lasting, formative effects on who they will be at the start of your story.

As such, it’s super important to figure out which wounds are crippling your characters, so you’ll know how to write them realistically and consistently. Whether you’re building characters from the ground up or they come to you fully formed and you just have to figure out their backstory, it’s imperative to identify this important event from their pasts.

What Is an Emotional Wound?

Simply put, a wound is a negative past experience or series of experiences that causes extensive emotional pain. It could be a devastating moment (a life-threatening accident), repeated traumatic episodes (living with an abusive caregiver), or an ongoing damaging situation (growing up in poverty).

However it manifests, this excruciating event births powerful fears that begin to drive the character’s behavior and choices. New personality traits develop as a way of protecting the character from re-experiencing that trauma or the emotions associated with it.

As you can see, wounds have long-lasting effects that are, sadly, true to life. When we take the time to discover what this event is for our characters and how it might impact them, they instantly become more realistic and compelling to readers.

How Do You Discover Your Character’s Wound?

There are a number of ways to ferret out this information, but today I’d like to share a simple brainstorming method involving the different kinds of wounds. It can be difficult to examine these events closely, but knowing the categories and asking some pointed questions about your character can help you figure out which kinds of trauma are a distinct possibility. The list of potential wounds becomes much more manageable.

1. Traumatic Events

These are the ones that most easily come to mind because of their dramatic nature.

A school shooting, a diagnosis of terminal illness, a fatal car crash—these are singular moments of devastation that easily stand out as changing the course of a character’s life. Because of this, these wounds are often the easiest to identify.

Questions to Ask: Is there a specific traumatic moment from the past that haunts your character?

2. Misplaced Trust and Betrayals

Being betrayed by a sibling, getting dumped, suffering childhood abuse by a trusted adult—wounds like these are often the hardest to overcome because they’re inflicted by the people who should love and protect us. It’s those closest to us who can do the greatest harm, so wounds like these are sadly common.

Questions to Ask: Which people from your character’s past did he trust and look up to the most? How might any of them have betrayed him?

3. Childhood Wounds

I joke a lot about how my parenting mistakes will provide good therapy fodder for my kids. I hope that doesn’t happen, but it’s true that some of the most lasting wounds occur in childhood. Children are more vulnerable than adults, and they’re less capable of coping positively when something horrible happens. As a result, these traumas can be more difficult to overcome.

Questions to Ask: Which memories from your character’s childhood does she shy away from? Who were the trusted and most-loved people in her life, and how might they have mistreated her? Which of her caregiver’s techniques, beliefs, or philosophies does she adamantly reject and will never use with her own children?

4. Injustice and Hardship

Very often, our difficult circumstances come about due to an inequity (real or perceived) that someone is able to exploit, such as when a character is bullied, experiences discrimination, or is wrongfully imprisoned. Moments like these often result in disillusionment with the people, groups, or establishment that failed the character, making it easy to unearth the wounding event: just follow that trail of breadcrumbs back to the originating event.

Questions to Ask: Does your character harbor resentment or anger toward a person, people group, or organization? On the flip side, does he feel apathy toward anyone, believing the person is too powerful or established to be confronted? What happened that caused these feelings?

5. Crime and Victimization

Wounds in this category come about when the character is targeted and victimized, making them fairly straightforward and easy to identify. Examples include having your identify stolen, being stalked, and having one’s home being broken into.

Questions to Ask: At what point was my character the victim of a crime?

6. Disabilities and Disfigurements

These kinds of wounds can be both physically and emotionally crippling because they set the character apart from others. Her difference (whether physical, mental, or emotional) is often perceived to be a weakness or limitation by the character herself or by the people around her. It makes her “less than,” setting real or imagined limitations on what she can do and achieve.

Questions to Ask: How did the physical disfigurement or disability occur? Is my character haunted by that event or by something that resulted afterward, such as being bullied about her disability or failing in some way because of it?

7. Failures and Mistakes

Mistakes are a normal, everyday part of life that don’t usually result in lasting harm. But some are more devastating, such as when the fallout is great, the event negatively affects other people, or it impacts the character’s sense of self-worth and esteem. Wounds like these might include making a very public mistake or accidentally killing someone.

Questions to Ask: Which negative experience from the past is my character in some way legitimately responsible for? Is there an event that dredges up feelings of extreme guilt, making him wish he could go back and undo it?

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Once you’ve decided which kind of wound makes sense for your character, it becomes easier to zero in on the exact trauma that has befallen him. To this end, we’ve put together an extensive(though far from comprehensive) list of possible wounding events broken down by category. Then it becomes a simple matter of examining a short list of possibilities to determine which one is haunting your character, impacting him even into the current story.

Understanding Character Wounds: A List Of Common Themes

Posted on February 27, 2014 by ANGELA ACKERMAN

Characters are the heart of a novel, and within that heart is the Hero’s Inner Journey. The protagonist’s path is much like yours or mine–one that will (hopefully) bring him closer to lifelong happiness and fulfillment.

In real life, people strive to become something more, to be something better. But the wounds of the past never quite leave us. Old hurts, betrayals, and injustices stay in our memory. Worry that a bad experience could happen again causes us to hesitate, and sometimes readjust what we want, and what we’re willing to risk. In other words, fear gets in the way.

Wounds Change Everything

Just like you or I, a hero has wounds, a trunk full of scars he lugs with him wherever he goes. And like us, his determination to not repeat a painful emotional experience carries the high cost of lessening his feelings of satisfaction and fulfillment.

Because wounds influence a protagonist’s behavior so deeply (to the point he will do almost anything to avoid feeling such pain again), it’s important to have a good grasp on what emotional trauma from his past is now shaping his present. Here are a few things to keep in mind.

Every Wound Contains a Lie

Emotional wounds are more than just painful memories. Inside each wound is a seed of doubt. Is this somehow my fault? Am I to blame? This doubt blossoms, eroding one’s self-worth.

When something bad happens, it’s human nature to try and rationalize it, make sense of it. We often blame ourselves, believing if we had chosen differently, done something else, there would be a better outcome. Most times there’s no logic to attributing a personal failure to what happened (especially when events were out of our control), but we do it anyway. Because of this internalization, a lie is born. We believe we are somehow deserving of this pain, or we become disillusioned in some way.

Let’s say a character discovers her husband plans to leave her for another woman (wound). Under all the anger and rage and heartache she would look within, to what she did wrong. The lie she might believe could be: He cheated because I am not worth loving. This lie burrows deep into her self-esteem and self-worth. Moving forward, she may avoid relationships because she believes this lie of being unworthy. Or, she may choose men who are likely to be unfaithful, because deep down she thinks these men are the only ones she deserves.

Wounds Cause Flaws To Form

When a character is wounded, he straps on emotional armor to keep his feelings safe. Flaws develop, working under the ‘guise’ of protecting him from being hurt. For example, a female character who was mugged and sexually assaulted (wound) might develop flaws like mistrust, paranoia, and evasiveness to protect herself from being targeted again.

On the outside, these flaws “appear” to help her be safe, but they limit her instead, preventing her from building healthy relationships, hampering her spontaneity and placing a filter of distrust on all she sees. This in turn steals her her freedom, and puts a choke hold on self-growth and true happiness. (For more on flaws & their role in Character Arc, please reference The Negative Trait Thesaurus.)

Dig Into The Character’s Backstory

A character’s past will be a minefield of negative experiences, but at some point, there should be an event you as the author can define as “the wound.” Small, painful events change a person bit by bit, but to focus all this hurt and pain into a single backstory moment can really help you better understand who and what damaged your character, and why, as a result, they question their self-worth. This also guides you to the false belief they must see for the lie it is in order to become healthy and whole, strengthening them so they can achieve their goal.

To help you pinpoint what your character’s wound might be, here are some common “themes” that could be the root of this psychological damage.

7 Common Wound Themes:

A Physical Wound. A defect, scar or condition causes real life complication, doubt, low self-esteem and can make it difficult to feel like one fits in. Handicaps are real and can alter a character’s path, limiting them and hurting their confidence.

An Injustice. Being a victim of crime, witnessing a traumatic social injustice or living in a time period or reality that is unbalanced or full of corruption will all leave a mark.

Failure or Mistakes. People are naturally hard on themselves when things don’t happen as expected. The guilt associated with a failure or mistake (even if it is only a perceived failure) can paralyse a person, and send them on an alternative life path.

Misplaced Trust/Betrayal. Trusting or relying on someone and feeling let down in some way can cause deep hurt. This could be a parent/child dynamic, a friendship that goes sideways or even a deep betrayal of a loved one (infidelity, etc.)

Isolation. If the character felt left out or isolated in the past, it has lasting effects. Isolation might be relationship-related (a mother who favored a sibling over the protagonist), power imbalance (educational or social “status” barriers) or even simple economics (living in poverty, etc.) that restricted opportunity, achievement and fulfillment.

Neglect/Abandonment/Rejection. Some relationships are cardinal when it comes to care giving: a parent and child. Siblings. Partners in a marriage. And to a lesser degree, a citizen and his government, parishioner and his minister, or a doctor and his patient. When the person in the care giving role neglects or rejects the other party, this can cause deep feelings of abandonment to form.

Disillusionment. Believing one thing to be true and then discovering it is a lie can shake a character to their core. This might be a world views or political beliefs (discovering leaders that one has supported have been negligent or corrupt), a revelation in religious or spiritual beliefs, or uncovering immoral behavior. It could also be something closer and more intimate like a role model who was not who they pretended to be, or personal (like finding out one is adopted, for example.)

If you found these helpful, we go deeper into the types of wounds inside The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma, including Childhood and Traumatic Wound categories.

THE POWER OF THE CHARACTER WOUND

November 5, 2017 Tamar Sloan Character Development, Psychology for Writers One comment

We’ve talked about the character wound on PsychWriter before when I explored the negative core belief. We know it’s a painful past event that changes who your character is, a thinking pattern rooted in their past. One that will impact how your character perceives the world, and ultimately the choices they make. But what is this core negative belief going to mean for your character and your story? Well, psychology has spent years (and who knows how much money) on proving these beliefs influence our actions, which is a veritable goldmine for writers. So once you’ve identified your character’s unique belief (if you haven’t, then check out this post), ask yourself the following questions:

How aware is your character of their wound?

The capacity to recognise what drives our emotions is dependent on our ability to self-reflect. I see it in my office every day, and I would say that ability to self-reflect is one of the predictors of client success. It’s the same for your character. How aware are they of their inner monologue, but more so, how aware are they of what drives it?

Consider how self-aware your character is, because its going to make a difference to their trajectory. Being blind to our true motivations (not just our external motivations like wanting the dream job, falling in love or world domination) means we are less likely to address them. In short, developing self-awareness is going to be part of your character’s arc.

How does their wound colour the way your character perceives the world?

One of the challenges of being a good psychologist is being able to put yourself in another persons’ shoes, to see the world the way a client sees it, and writers face the same challenge. We all know that reality is subjective, that everything we perceive is filtered through our expectations, our beliefs and our personal truth. Just like many other beliefs, core negative beliefs are deeply ingrained, possibly more so because your character’s brain has learned a painful lesson that it doesn’t want to experience again. This means they will be constantly on the lookout for when it could happen again. If your character has decided the world is an unsafe place, that’s what they will expect to see. If they’ve decided that they’re a failure, then all the times they failed an exam, shouted at their kids or forgot to buy eggs will jump to the forefront of their experience. If they’ve decided they’re unattractive, then one sideways look from a stranger and they’ve got all the proof they need.

Consider how the belief system that has set root in their mind colours their perception and then capture that in your book.

What lengths will your character go to hide this vulnerability?

No one likes to feel vulnerable. For the brain, feeling vulnerable means feeling unsafe, which it will go to great lengths to avoid. In the previous post about defense mechanisms, I went through the most common ways we will do this — anything from denial to projection. They generally all comprise some sort of avoidance. Another way to frame our avoidance behaviours is the fight, flight or freeze phenomenon. If your character is feeling vulnerable, and therefore unsafe, they may default to running (physically or emotionally), fighting (a well-aimed barb or left hook will usually get the source of your discomfort out of your face) or freezing until you can think of a way to get out of their predicament.

So think about how far your character will go to feel safe and protected, and what they will do when this sense of safety is challenged.

What triggers your character’s belief?

Core negative beliefs are buried so deep that they are often unconsciously triggered. What pushes your character’s inadequacy buttons? Triggers can be external — a frown from a parent, losing the faith of your team, the death of a loved one; or they can be internal — jumping to conclusions, mind reading or allowing yourself to hope.

Think about what will trigger your character’s wound. The answer to the above question will give you some insights into your plot. What could happen that will have your character worried, anxious or scared that what they think about themselves is actually true?

How does your character’s belief translate into behaviour?

The core tenant of cognitive behaviour therapy is the thoughts – feelings – behaviour cycle. Our thoughts (i.e. core negative belief) leads to an emotion (usually a negative state we don’t particularly want to experience) which then leads to an action. Spend a bit of time considering how all the above factors are going to manifest in your characters choices and behaviour. Will they run themselves ragged trying to prove they are not their belief? Will they give up at the first sign of difficulty because there’s no point trying?

Spend some time projecting how your character is going to respond to various plot points from their unique perspective. Take into account all the points you’ve just been mulling over, because they are going to help answer your question.