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Many years ago, when I was a hormonal adolescent just starting to bloom out of an unfortunate braces-and-glasses-and-bad-hair phase and beginning to realize my appeal to the opposite sex, one of my cousins and I met two really, really cute boys on a family vacation to the beach.
And these boys were into us.
As we sat out on the stoop of our vacation rental with them one evening, clumsily flirting, my older cousin—the elder sister of the one on the porch—came outside to hang with us.
I don’t even remember exactly what I said to her, but I do remember I made it clear that her presence was not welcome and finally managed to drive her back inside so we could bask in the boys’ exclusive attention.
Readers, this brief incident has haunted me for years. I don’t even think my older cousin remembers it, but I will never forget the hurt look on her face as she went back inside.
Somehow sitting out there with those boys no longer felt good. I felt pretty damned bad, in fact, and I don’t think we sat out there talking much longer. I don’t even think we ran into those boys again on our trip. I don’t remember them at all. But I sure as hell remember what it felt like to make my cousin feel unwanted.
So much focus in storytelling seems like it’s put lately on discovering your character’s wound that I worry every author feels they need some major trauma in a character’s past to create it.
A wound, commonly understood as some formative psychic injury that created a key disconnect in your character’s understanding of the world, has become almost an accepted necessity in storytelling and characterization. But not every character or story needs one.
A wound, commonly understood as some formative psychic injury that created a key disconnect in your character’s understanding of the world, has become almost an accepted necessity in storytelling and characterization.
But not every character or story needs one.
Small Injuries Can Leave a Big Mark
Childhood is a nightmare, says Buddhist teacher J. Krishnamurti, and I think that has many layers of meaning, but here’s one I often take away from that statement: No one escapes unscathed from the complex process of learning about the world and ourselves.
No one takes steps forward without occasional injuries. Those might be major, a specific trauma event or formative injury like a parent’s abandonment. But they might also be as seemingly minor as my moment on the porch with my cousins.
That experience shaped me. It made me cognizant in the most visceral way of how my words and actions could affect others. It made me aware that focusing on my own desires without considering other people’s emotions felt terrible. It taught me that once something is said or done that’s hurtful to someone, it’s hard to take it back and you can never erase it.
Those realizations were key in my becoming a person I hope tries to operate compassionately and mindfully of others. I hope that it helped me learn to be a little less self-focused.
What shapes us as human beings is every one of our experiences, good and bad. Our successes and failures. Our kindnesses and cruelties. Just like in learning any other skill, the process is one of trial and error, growth and setbacks.
Read More: “Identifying Your Character’s Illusions”
Certainly the major traumas of our lives can define us, but so can the seemingly minor slings and arrows. If you ask me about my biggest regrets and painful life lessons, I have four. This story with my cousin is one of them, and two of the others are equally seemingly minor. Only one verges anywhere close to what is commonly thought of as a trauma experience, but all four carry equal weight in the scars they left and the way they shaped me into who I am.
The same idea can apply to joyful formative memories. I can’t hear the Maroon 5 song “This Love” without instantly flashing to an afternoon drive with my niece and nephew when they were young, the two cousins sitting in the backseat of my car and singing along together at the top of their lungs, both of them gloriously off-key as I chimed in with them. It brings tears to my eyes even now just to think of it, yet I couldn’t tell you what day it was or where we were going or what we were doing or anything about that memory except that brief flash of pure love.
Read more: "Who Shaped You; Who Shaped Your Characters"
How Even Minor Incidents Can Define Character
Using small incidents like this can lay potent groundwork for a character’s arc. And even relatively minor cumulative events can create the foundation for a character’s misconceptions; for instance, the memory of a character’s parents’ voices arguing in their adjacent bedroom many nights as he fell asleep can create a powerful negative image of what marriage is, or form the belief that people present one face to the public but another in private, or that there’s rot at the root of every relationship.
These seemingly small but concrete, granular events in a person’s life pack outsize power and effectiveness in your story in several important areas.
Create Clarity and Depth
How much more deeply and directly and viscerally do you understand my feelings about my niece and nephew from that memory than if I simply said how much I love them? How clearly do you understand my discomfort and concern with hurting others from the story about my cousin? The clearer and more concrete and specific you are in showing what shaped your characters, the more real they feel to readers and the more deeply and directly we can relate to them.
Incorporate Fluid Backstory
Notice how neither of these stories begins at the beginning and plays through like a movie through the end of the scene. That’s not necessary for you to understand the point of them. And it’s not how they live in my long-term memory. The way memory works is in flashes and snippets of the most impactful parts of experiences we’ve had. You can use that fact to create efficient, economical background, rather than long swaths of backstory dump, and to smoothly and fluidly draw readers in and out of it rather than hanging a lantern on it with clunky, artificial lead-ins like, “She remembered the scene as if it were yesterday.”
Set Up Character Arc
Perhaps most important for the topic at hand is the fact that these formative experiences can be the basis of who your character is at their point A and what arc they travel in the story—even when they are seemingly minor.
When we’re talking about creating high stakes and making the strongest choices for a story, that doesn’t mean you have to find the biggest and most traumatic psychic injury possible for your character. Remember that backstory is crucial to story, but it is not the story. The story is the story. The backstory can play a bigger or smaller role in it, depending on your intentions and the story you’re telling.
For instance, if you are telling the story of a character who never asks for what she wants or pursues her dreams because she thinks it’s selfish, who learns to assert herself and fight for some specific goal, then my backstory about my cousin would serve very well to lay the groundwork for that. All readers need to understand is why your character is the way she is, what contributed to the internal obstacle holding her back from what she wants in the main story.
Read more: “Using Assumptions to Strengthen Your Storytelling”
In this case it’s more than enough to know how deeply that minor incident with her cousin affected her, and you can show that the lesson she took from it was that asserting her desires makes her a bad person and feels terrible. The formative part of the memory for the purposes of your story is the out-of-scale message the character took from it, the life lesson she learned wrong from her misinterpretation of the meaning of that event.
If you try to create a “higher-stakes” trauma wound for her to justify that misconception—for instance that after she sent her cousin away, the older girl got in her car, upset and hurt, and because of that had an accident that has left her disabled—you’re going to hijack your story.
A trauma at that level dictates much more development to feel real and organic, but this isn’t a story about that level of trauma or guilt for your protagonist. It’s about what’s happening to the character now in her pursuit of whatever her dream or goal is. In this case you don’t need a backstory that intense, and using it doesn’t raise stakes; it steals focus from the main story and diffuses its impact.
A seemingly minor memory like the one about my cousin can create all kinds of misconceptions and meaningful arcs for a character. Perhaps she learned to put others’ needs ahead of her own. Perhaps she’s unable to forgive herself for even minor transgressions. Perhaps it led to a feeling of shame that has left her feeling inadequate and worthless in her life. Any of those things, or an infinite number of others, can be what’s holding your character back from what she wants in the main story—all shaped by that one seemingly minor incident.
Knowing What Shaped Your Characters
Of my own four deep regrets, two were minor and cost me nothing tangible, beyond mental anguish, though they both revolved around casually hurting someone else.
One was minor but cost me major, a stupid but relatively unimportant misjudgment where I did the wrong thing for the right reasons, which I suspect helped sever a very important relationship.
Only one was a major event that had major fallout for me—and ironically a misconception based on that original regret with my cousin to some degree, where I put someone else’s wants above my own and made the wrong decision. Yet although the pain of that one might have been more acute, I can’t say that I regret it any more deeply than the others. I wish none of them had happened.
But of course the fact is that no one escapes pain and regret in life. It’s not so much the level of trauma each one causes, but how it affects us and what we do with it and how it shapes us that makes it relevant and impactful to who we become and how we live our lives—just as it is with our characters.
Think about your own life and the factors that shaped your beliefs, ideas, ideals, and view of the world and people. The seemingly small moments that shaped you, that have created the most powerful life lessons or stumbling blocks.
Consider whether your story needs an actual traumatic “wound” or you can set up your character’s arc equally strongly by developing specific minor incidents that bring it to life every bit as vividly and impactfully.
And though I’ve already said this to her before: Cousin Meg, if you’re reading this…I’m sorry.
If you want to dive deeper into why your characters are the way they are—in other words, developing and showing backstory—join me and Lorin Oberweger May 23 for my hands-on online workshop, “Why Are Your Characters the Way They Are?” at 7:15 ET ($39, recording available for registrants). Learn all the factors that create character, and how to mine out relevant backstory to bring them vividly and fully to life.
How about you, friends—what tiny moments had an outsize impact on who you are or have been? Do you always seek a trauma wound for your characters in creating powerful backstory?
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30 Comments. Leave new
Great questions! I’ve been worried that my protagonist’s wound was not enough. Now I’m relieved. It’s the perfect incident. I mean, he’s only twelve! Thanks for the boost.
I’m glad it helped offer some confirmation of your instincts, Chris!
Tiffany,
Thank you for pointing out that often small wounds have outsize effects–often when we’re children. The tiny details of a regretted moment burn in our heart for years after, and inform many of our decisions later in life. The same should hold true for our characters.
So true, Bob. I’m not a parent, but it must be so stressful to be one, knowing even the smallest moment you don’t even realize is remembered can have a formative impact on your child…! And then things you think will, don’t–I have two incidents with my nephews that I felt so bad about for years, where I thought I accidentally crushed their feelings, and when I have apologized for them now that they’re older, they don’t even remember those events. 🙂 Thanks for the comment.
I hurriedly opened this and read it because I’m working on a story where my character overhears her father say a disparaging remark and it affects her. But she also has a loving, supportive mother and a grandfather who guides her and enjoys her company. She can incorporate her father’s remark with strengths of character that comes from the other family members. She is faced with the hurdle of overcoming her father’s remark at the beginning of the story, but then leaves it behind as she explores (and faces the consequences) of her gift/talents.
I love how you are considering the whole family dynamic, Paula, and how all these relationships may affect your character. This is how you create organic, cohesive, fully fleshed characters.
Plus this stuff is fun for me. 🙂 I was realizing as I wrote this that my background as an actor and director really informs how I think about character–and it helps to put yourself in that situation as much as possible, imagine the “what ifs” of those situations. It can really bring characters to life. Thanks for sharing this!
Tiffany, I love your reminder on the power of a seemingly small incident as backstory. I’m going to scale down my protagonist backstory. No letting the tail wag the dog! PS I very much enjoyed your three-part class on backstory.
Oh, thanks, Bret! And I’m glad this post was useful in your WIP. No need to overplay backstory if it’s not necessary for the story–or steals focus!
OMG. I had a very similar incident with my sister and everything you said is true of me as well. Terrific writing lesson to learn. Thank you.
Thanks, Victoria. And <3 about your incident with your sister. Those moments hit home, don't they? It's all fun and games till someone gets hurt. 😉
Every time I read one of your posts, I get one huge take away. This time it was: “All readers need to understand why your character is the way she is, what contributed to the internal obstacle holding her back from what she wants in the main story.”
Did I say that in the post? Yay, me, if so! I was just about to vehemently agree with you about it. 😀 Honestly, it’s surprising how often I see manuscripts where it’s not clear why the character wants what she wants, feels how he feels, acts as she does. It’s fine pointillist development work, but it makes such a big difference–and it’s so fun, to me!
Dear Tiffany, I was choked up at the end when you apologized to Meg. All along, I felt your compassion, identified with your inclusion of Krishnamurti, who I saw several times in Ojai, CA, but those final words brought tears to my eyes. Now I will have to introspect to see why. Thank you.
Thank you, Charles. <3
Thank you for yet another invaluable lesson, Tiffany. A good reminder that the most authentic stories often arise from the human drama inherent in everyday life. I especially love the nugget about how a major backstory trauma, rather than developing character, can instead hijack the main plot. So true!
It is, and I see that often–mostly I think because of the rampant advice right now that all characters need a trauma wound. But it can really derail the story if it’s not directly germane to the main character arc. Thanks for the kind word!
I was the ‘Meg’ character in someone else’s life, asked to leave because my friends each had a boy to talk to. My reaction was to shrug, think boys are quite a bit of bother, and I went to find someone more fun to hang out with. Now, I wonder if my friends remember it differently, if they remember it at all. That could set up quite a bit of tension in a story with multiple points of view. I love the idea of small stakes reverberating, or as we have stolen from chaos theory, the butterfly effect. Thanks Tiffany.
Oh, that’s funny, Deborah. Good for you! Honestly that may have been my cousin’s ultimate reaction. She was hurt at the time, but when I mentioned it years later and apologized, she didn’t even remember it. Funny how we can torture ourselves for our own actions more than others hold them against us. I love your idea of exploring it from both points of view–that tension between the two characters’ memory of an event like that adds a great layer to the story too.
Tiffany, I so appreciate your message. I have attended several writing conferences where a main speaker brings up the subject of a character’s wound and how it affects his choices, his problems, his relationships, and everything in between. The writing world seems to have gone nuts with this new fad. I have seen the recommended books that give character traits and “how your character would respond if this happened to him.” Some of it borders on the absurd. One presenter even used Gaston from the film, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST to uncover and follow the many, many “wounds”—- none which were evident in the story or the movie. I appreciate your bringing some sensibility and truth to this new “fad” in writing.
I think it dovetails with the recent focus on trauma research in psychology, and it makes sense. And I do agree that characters often have…whatever you want to call them–illusions, misconceptions, assumptions, wrong beliefs, etc., and often as a result of something in their past, either childhood or more recent. I just don’t think it always has to be a major trauma, and trying to force one where it’s not needed takes over the story and draws too much focus, which doesn’t serve the main story if it’s not directly germane to it. Thanks for the comment–glad this resonated for you.
Thank you for this! It comes just as I’m thinking about my character’s backstory which is also not a gaping wound but just all a part of the tapestry. One of the things that happened in my character’s past also happened to me and did not scar me either because I could get perspective and realize some people are just not good. Most people are, especially when you learn not to take any crap. I appreciate your point of view. My character doesn’t have a big misbelief. Though she’s not necessarily reasoning real well either sometimes:) where would the fun be in that?
Isn’t that the truth? Yes, that’s the kind of assumption or even illusion a character can form not just from a trauma wound, but from the regular challenges and slings and arrows of life. Lots of the motivations for our behavior stem from things like that–lessons we’ve learned or mislearned based on input, much of it probably just the kinds of (relatively) minor injuries we’re talking about in this post. It helps to realize that high stakes doesn’t have to mean slathering on more and more danger or injury–it just means adding more meaning.
Glad you didn’t develop a thick scar from your version of my cousin incident. Not everything does (or has to in story), but I do think we can always be learning from all our experiences, good and bad–and so can our characters.
Thank you for such an honest and useful post. It’s one of my favorites! As an aspiring MG writer I am always looking for ways to lighten things up a little, even when they’re intense. This approach will help. It also widens my understanding of “stakes.” One of my own tiny moments from childhood was when a slightly older girl (I was about 8) got us younger kids to put together a “beauty kit” for an older woman who was the crank of the neighborhood and leave it on her porch..I felt so guilty about I went home, told my dad, and threw up the chili he had just made for lunch! To this day I cannot eat chili. But the experience gave me compassion for older people, and even for cranky people. 🙂
Oh, Nancy, this story made my heart ache–for you, as well as for your neighbor. Kids can be so cruel, not having the emotional maturity yet to fully understand compassion and putting yourself in someone else’s skin. Of course, that makes childhood rich turf for all sorts of things we struggle to overcome in adulthood, or mistaken ideas about the world or ourselves that calcify in us and hold us back–or simply in shaping who we become. It’s fertile ground whether your character is the recipient of childhood cruelties or the perpetrator of them. I can tell from your comment that this lesson left a mark on you–and likely shaped you into a compassionate person in general.
In that regard I almost think painful little experiences like this, or my cousin situation, are necessary to help us viscerally learn certain values and beliefs. We can be told and taught all our lives to “be kind to others” or “put yourself in the other guy’s shoes,” but I’m betting no lesson sinks in as foundationally and formatively as ones like this, where we feel the consequences of our actions. It’s rich turf to sow for our characters. Thanks for sharing this! (And maybe your neighbor got the package and misinterpreted it as a kind gesture from a friend giving her some lovely fun beauty gifts….)
I find this an interesting article for several reasons. At school, I set a girl’s hair on fire. I always regretted it, and years later, I came across her on social media and said I was sorry. To my shock, she was very friendly and said she didn’t remember – like your cousin. The event has affected me all my life. Consequently, it seems to me that a character’s bad action may serve as a more realistic cause of any wound than something being done to the character.
That’s incredible that she didn’t remember. But as you say, not uncommon that we torment ourselves with our actions more than the consequences they may have had in the moment. (Although, DAMN, son–you raised the bar here with setting her hair on fire….) And valuable to consider for character development, you’re right! Thanks for sharing this.
Interesting thought provoking post. I’ve long thought there was a disconnect between the ‘big wound’ school of thought and much of what I enjoy in the novels I read.
If a story is an interplay of personality and predicament then certainly, each should be chosen with an eye for maximum dramatic impact. If Jack and Jill are going up the hill to fetch a pail of water, the trek can become more interesting if Jack once spent days wandering lost and thirsty in the Sonoran Desert and Jill has a traumatic near drowning event in her past. But . . . many times less is more. A scar isn’t always needed to star in a story.
The first novel I ever wrote, and a glorious unpublishable mess it was, I’d fallen into the sway of the big wound mode of thought. Used a gapping one as the basis for some story significant quirks and proclivities of my main character. All fine and well, except that in retrospect there was slim chance that anyone who experienced that traumatic event could have emerged as a reasonably functioning adult. The past that I used to make twenty percent of his personality plausible would, in reality, have made the other eighty percent implausible.
Yes, artistic license has its place and thank God for the willingness of readers to suspend some disbelief, but there comes a point. . . It strikes me now that there may be an inverse relationship between the size of the wounding incident and the uses of the incident. As the reader encounters the formulative event in the character’s past I don’t want her reaction to be ‘well duh, of course he acts this way now’ But if the incident is relatively small but profound in impact, there is a better chance the reader responds with ‘that is so fascinating, how he’s clung to it so long. Gonna be a problem when (impending story event) lands on his plate. I wonder what will happen.’
A formulative experience that has stayed with me from when I was age 5. I had a child’s love of snow. I woke one snowy morning to a child’s sense of ‘there is something going on in the house’ found my cousin, age 20 or so, wrapped in blankets in a chair by the radiator. Turned out he’d gotten lost in the woods the day before while hunting. Spent the night cold in the snow while relatives who had a general idea where he’d gone looked for and tracked him. When they found him, our house was the closest warm shelter. (don’t read too much into my example of Jack lost in the desert). I knew this was a ‘bad’ thing. But it didn’t dent my fascination with the storm raging outside and what I wanted to do most was go out and play in it. But I felt I was supposed to curb or hide my excitement. That the prevailing mood was that cold and snow is cruel and dangerous and that I ‘should’ be processing it through a filter of ‘Eddie could have died’. Not, ‘This is so great! What a fun day ahead!’ My awareness, even then, of duality of the event playing out by the radiator and my nose pressed to the window in wonderment has stayed with me. I’m drawing on it in my WIP via a character who is an arson investigator who loves the puzzle of finding cause and origin of criminal arson and tracking the fire setter. Loves it for the chase itself, welcomes each opportunity. Longs for them even as he is aware that fire is a destructive and deadly thing that no one should hope for.
For my purposes and the characters and themes I’m drawn to, this set up – including his not knowing and having to grapple with why he loves fire so, and where it might lead him – works better than the more reductionist ‘big wound’ approach of ‘at age nine he accidently caused a serious fire, managed to avoid blame and now balms his guilt by finding and punishing people who set fires.’ Not that the latter lacks potential for a compelling character, but that is a different story. And something that leads to the unendingly fascinating subject of why we chose to tell the specific stories we do.
Garry, I love how clearly your story about creating an unnecessarily traumatic “wound” in your first manuscript illustrates how that can hijack a story and character arc. I think you’re onto something with “there may be an inverse relationship between the size of the wounding incident and the uses of the incident.” I do think that big-trauma wounds usually indicate that backstory plays a large role in the main story–and that’s just not always true for every story. It seems to me that more often, readers just want to more deeply understand the characters’ actions, behavior, thoughts, reactions, etc., and all we need is enough context for that. I also like your point that a smaller incident with more profound impact can help engage readers more, keep them asking questions–and that’s a good way to hook them. That’s so well illustrated by your snow story. Thanks for sharing these insights! Good stuff…
re: Maroon 5. Did you happen to catch this poem – You’re the Top – by Ellen Bass “The baby’s in her seat in the back singing the first three words of You’re the Top. Not softly and sweetly the way she did when she woke in her crib, but belting it out like Ethel Merman. ” I have a few poems I carry with me – actually – and this got added to that pile.
Oh, no, I didn’t! So similar to my Maroon 5 memory… <3 Thanks, Vanessa.