Episode 39: How Do You Write Trauma?

Content Warning: JP and Crys do discuss sexual assault in the context of writing trauma in this episode.

In this week’s episode, Crys and JP talk about how they incorporate trauma into their writing and the challenges that come along with it. They discuss big and little trauma, different types of traumatic events, and the emotional impact those events have on their characters.

Show Notes

Radish Fiction

Kindle Vella

How to Write Light Novels and Webnovels by R.A. Paterson

Circle Of Magic by Tamora Pierce

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

Stolen Things by R. H. Herron

Chime by Franny Billingsley

The Eye of the World: Book One of The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan

The Emotional Wound Thesaurus by Becca Puglisi

Your Brand Should be Gay (Even if You’re Not) by Re Perez

Transcript

JP: Hello, friends. This is episode 39 of the Write Away Podcast, and it is the 15th of April, 2021 as we are recording. I’m JP Rindfleisch with my cohost…

Crys: Crys Cain.

JP: How has your week been?

Crys: It’s been mostly good, but I have an super interesting realization. The day that this episode comes out is the one-year anniversary of Write Away.

JP: I’m glad you remembered. Because I remembered and then forgot.

Crys: Yeah, I looked it up fairly recently because I was like, that year 2020 is a blur. I know that sometime between January and June is the one year anniversary. So I did look it up. And it will be the day that this episode comes out, so happy anniversary! And we should probably do something other than just have this wonderful conversation we’re about to have about trauma, because people will see the title before they listen to this. But it’s also the best way to celebrate an anniversary.

JP: I think so, especially for what 2020 was. So I think we’re fine.

Crys: Writing-wise, I struggled. I don’t know why. I sat down and I would write, and it just is taking me a really long time to write. Part of that’s probably a little bit of distraction. Part of it is the words are just coming very slowly. I do think part of that was that the story that I’m attempting to write wasn’t going in the right direction, even though I have it all plotted out. The nuances of how I was portraying one of the characters was not correct. So I think I fixed some of that yesterday.

I’d eked out like 1400 words. But that was frustrating. And then as JP knows, because I’ve been complaining for the last 20 minutes about it. I found this map generator on the internet and map generators, meh most of the time. Oh my gosh, this one is everything I need because I do not like most of the choices of world building, like where towns are, what countries look like. Like I can do like the local setting of my place and I can make things up on the go, but I really like being confined by “existing places” or “existing rules.”

And I found this generator. It does your world. It does your alliances between countries. It does religions. It does like shipping lanes. It does biomes. It does histories of the relations between the countries. It’s wild, and then you can generate city maps too. And it just names things, and you can change them.

You can edit everything, which is perfect because I don’t like a lot of the names, but it gives me a layout. And so between that and the whole new Kindle Vella announcement, which if you haven’t heard about that, this will be a week after everybody’s going crazy over it. Amazon’s getting into the serialized novella game or novel game in a way they haven’t before.

They’ve tried this before, I think with the Kindle shorts, a lot of that was intended to be serialized fiction. But this is really popular in Asia. It’s called bite-sized fiction, web novels, light novels, and Radish fiction is probably the largest US or English based seller of these kinds of stories. But you’ll have seen similar ones on ads where it’s like the choices game, which isn’t necessarily the same format, but just these short stories that you can consume quickly.

And so between that, I was up for hours last night and I have four pages of notes that comprise a story from start to finish with at least five novels worth of content, if not eight. Anyways, I’m fine with that, but I would’ve liked some sleep.

JP: Yeah. I feel like you probably hit some sort of a mine for yourself because from the way you were describing it to me, like the bite sizes come out in 1500 to 2000 words.

And so you’re able to structure it a little more. And I think I was thinking about this, and coming from romance where you have these shorter bits, you’ve created a structure that contains the shorter bits but then expands it to the longer bits. And it like cohesively adds it all together.

You definitely sparked an interest in me when you mentioned it.

Crys: If anyone’s ever written fan fiction, this is a great crossover for you into publishing your own fiction because they’re trying to generate that same kind of relationship between author and reader, where things are published quickly, they’re published fast, they’re often written in response to the readers’ comments.

Some authors will plan things out and edit them and then publish them. And some will be like, Hey, I Write 1500 to 2000 words a week, I edit it lightly, and I put it out there and I try to make it as catchy as possible. So if you are a fan fiction writer and you’ve had any success there and you’ve always wanted to make money off your work, creating an original world there where you can publish through something like Radish or Vella or any of the other options will be really good for you.

And I’m going to link everything that I’ve talked about, the information about Kindle Vella, Radish fiction. There’s also a book that I was reading on what writing web novels and light novels that I think is super useful, so I’ll link that as well. We’re not ready to have a full podcast on serialized fiction yet.

Amazon hasn’t said when they’re going to release this to readers. The community guesstimate is July. So if you want to write a story for it, now’s a great time, but we also don’t fully know what the contract will be. Because they haven’t put out a terms of service yet. And yeah, so it might be not something that we want to participate in if the terms aren’t clear, but it seems like Amazon’s updating the info pages pretty quickly as there’s all this chatter about it, and they’re responding to the questions and concerns.

So it does sound like they just threw this out there to be like, Hey guys, what do you think? And we’re all like, yessss, but tell us this and tell us that and answer this question and that question and everything. How was your week?

JP: No, I’m going to have more thoughts on this and then I’ll tell you about my week. No, I think that it’s a good thing to consider, regardless of if you will end up using it or not, because the whole concept of, if you have only 1500 to 2000 words to really capture someone’s attention, that’s how all your chapters should be.

So this kind of helps you focus down on your chapter structure and make sure that each chapter that you’re writing has that gripping closed unit, that is a part of a larger story. So I’m going to consider it strongly. And the fact that I’m going to look at what the fiction is that I’m writing now and see what I can do to make those pieces. Because even if I don’t go with it, it’ll just make for a better story.

Crys: I do want to just call out that should and specify that your writing does not have to be fast paced and cliffhangery to capture a reader’s attention. And that will be the difference between serialized fiction and a novel, in that these, you want your bite-size pieces to be very cliffhangery.

Because that is what will keep people coming back and paying, because you’re paying per chapter basically, generally with these platforms, paying per chapter. So if you cliffhanger them then they have to know what happens next. Think about TV shows. I literally watch most TV shows from middle episode to middle episode, because I could not handle cliffhangers.

And those are actually like beginning and starting points of the arcs are the middle point to the middle point of episode.

JP: Yeah. And of course now you just made me think of Wheel of Time and the chapter called, Dumai’s Wells, which is like an audio eight hours long and it’s one chapter. So just FYI.

Crys: It’s a book, it’s a book! Anyways.

JP: A book in a book. Okay. Sorry. So, derailed. But my week, my week was good. I’m still on the revision train, but I figured out a process that’s working for me. So I can only revise between 1000 and 1,200 words in the mornings. And so what I’ve been doing is leaping ahead in the revision work of first drafted words to about that range.

I highlight a word and then I know where my last point is that I need to reach, and that is helping a ton because the past week prior to that, I was just getting caught up in paragraphs and trying to rework the whole paragraph and just sitting there, like, how could these be better? And I know that my brain works better as I’m going along.

So highlighting it and telling myself like, this is the point you have to reach. So you only get so much time per word, works for me. So it’s been really great. And then on another note, I got my second dose. Yay, vaccines. And then the next day I got a 100.8 fever, which just means that the vaccine is working.

Because it’s how vaccines work.

Crys: Really high and uncomfortable. 

JP: It was, it only lasted for 12 hours.

Crys: It’s like did you just sit in a cold shower, which also would have been miserable.

JP: I just took, I don’t know, ibuprofen and dealt with it. It was fine. So nerdy vaccine moment, whatever, but the fact that vaccines give you the information for your body to then fight against so that when you get the real thing, you’re not just going to die. Because that’s a probability. I’m  totally fine with getting a fever for 12 hours. Because I now know several people who have no sense of smell or have lost so much of their sense of smell. And I cannot imagine a life where all beers smells like hand sanitizer, which is exactly what they told me. And that sounds terrible.

Crys: Our hand sanitizer here in Costa Rica smells like tequila, and I’m pretty sure they just use bottom shelf and aloe gel.

JP: They probably do. So when hand sanitizer became more necessary, I’m 95% positive they started using corn ethanol, which has a very distinct smell. So up here it smells like a corn ethanol.

Crys: Everybody just smells like complete alcoholics, unless you’ve had COVID then nobody smells like anything at all.

JP: Truth. All right. We have some comments. How about we go to those. So, since our last time that we chatted, we have a comment from Abe from Episode 36: What Skills Do You Lack? He agreed with me that it’s hard to get back into something that he’s already written. That’s why working with me is such a blessing. Wow. This just sounds really weird coming from me.

Crys: Such a blessing, JP.

JP: I think talking about this or talking about the idea of co-writing is great because it gets a second set of eyes on something and both of you are committed to working on the project. Because it becomes both your babies. And then he’s just talking more about trying to stay in a fluid schedule so that he won’t get upset over missing a day of writing.

And this is another thing that tracks back to atomic habits, miss a day that’s okay. But if you start missing more than that, like you have to reconsider what your actual goal is. So I think that’s a really good mindset to have.

Our next comment is from Jeff from Episode 37: Be More Gay. He is talking about his current work in progress. He’s writing a trans man who is married to a woman. And he has some fears about writing these characters. So stereotyping, using them as props and not a true person, and then misrepresenting the community, and then triggering trauma because the trans man will be harassed in his book.

He then noted that he has a trans friend lined up to sensitivity read, but he’s still terrified to write it. I thought that last line was pretty key to knowing that Jeff is definitely on the right path, because if he lined up a sensitivity reader who is trans, I think that’s perfect.

Crys: I agree. I have seen people bitch about hiring sensitivity readers and every time I just want to slap them.

I’m like, what is wrong with asking for insight into a life that you do not have experience with? And just, you’re not asking somebody to change your story. You’re asking somebody to spend time teaching you something you don’t know in a way that is palatable to you. In that, Hey, I have done my best to explore this circumstance and I would like your information. Like we do that all the time in conversation. One of the best ways of communicating and learning is to repeat back to someone what we think they said. And then having them tell us whether we process that, how they intended or not.

And writing a novel about someone’s experience that you don’t have actual experience with is the long form version of doing that, and asking them like, Hey, did I appropriately engage with this in a way that shows I’m understanding or that people will connect with, there’s nothing wrong with that.

JP: Yeah. And to think you didn’t do that, you’re just going to see it in your review. I guess when do you want to hear it? Do you want to hear it when it’s one-on-one and someone can point out those issues or do you want it blasted for the rest of the world to hear. Personally, I definitely want to know right off the bat from one person, Hey, maybe you should change a couple things here because you’re not capturing that information.

I did have longer response to that that I just kinda wanted to toss out there. It’s partially in response to Jeff and it’s partially just a bigger statement about including LGBTQI characters. So I’m just going to read this off because it’s slightly longer, but in my opinion, writing LGBTQI characters in your fiction tells me that that we exist, giving us problems that don’t include being LGBTQI issues, it tells me that you view me as a valid person. Giving LGBTQI characters in your fiction on page relationships tells me that you don’t love the sinner, but hate the sin. It tells me that you accept my existence. Giving healthy, gay relationships on pages gives me hope that you believe that I am just as deserving of the same rights as you. Writing our truth, which includes, sometimes, pain, trauma, spiteful family members, and violence, and then showing those characters overcoming those strifes, that shows me that you’re willing to fight and speak out for people like us. And then letting us live in your fiction and not killing us right off the bat tells me that you don’t think of our lives as disposable, but that you believe that we are just as equal.

Crys: I agree. Apparently I’m just in a grumpy mood because my brain side trails a lot, but this morning it’s inside trailing into grumpiness and my brain side trailed into grumpiness thinking about how terrible The Happiest Season was as an example of the kind of story that we don’t necessarily need in about gay relationships.

JP: Yeah. I think just as a last thing, like Jeff, you’re on the right track. I I definitely think that you should keep writing this and don’t be too concerned. You’ve got that like last brigade and you also are so conscious about your concerns. And I think that voicing them is great. And then we’ll be here for more conversations about this.

Yay. And then one last comment, this is from Lon. He has a work in progress with at least three gay characters. Two are in a relationship, and his biggest problem is he doesn’t want to come across as pandering or saccharin or just plain WTF is wrong with you. One of the first things he wants to do when he has time to focus on the story is to have a beta reader look over it and give him direction.

He does know one thing he’ll try to do is work on the setting more and have a lot less old school fantasy way of thinking. I think yet again, like you’re on the right path. Including more than one gay character is great because you’re showing more variety. You’re not coming off as stereotyping.

And I definitely I don’t think that you’re pandering.

Crys: Yeah.

JP: Lon, you’re on the right path. Just keep rolling, man.

Crys: Yeah. And just trying is so important and putting characters in, these are your first steps. Yeah. Keep doing it.

JP: Yeah. 100%

Crys: Okay, now the exciting part. Trauma.

Okay. What do we mean by trauma, JP?

JP: Do you want me to define trauma?

Crys: Okay, sure. Do you have a definition up?

JP:  I do. I came prepared.

All right. Trauma is something that is deeply distressing or a disturbing event that overwhelms an individual’s ability to cope. It causes feelings of helplessness, it diminishes sense of self and the ability to feel a full range of emotions.

Crys: Excellent. So how this appears in stories in a million ways, but what I have notes for is particularly how trauma informs your characters arc, but specifically what lie the character believes or what their fatal flaw is. And Sacha Black kind of refers to the trauma as the soul wound. And that was something important to notice the trauma is not the lie or the flaw.

It’s part of the recipe of the lie or the flaw. It’s part of what was taught to your characters, a lie that they believe about the world or themselves that they have to overcome. And I also categorize trauma into two types and neither is more traumatic than the other. They do have different affects, and that’s big trauma and little trauma.

And these are not official terms in any way, shape, or form. These are my terms. So please do not judge me based on these. There’s so much gray area between the two. But big trauma is definable events. So that is, being bombed, being kidnapped. I would put most rapes under big traumas. Though it can evolve into a little trauma and a little trauma is a repeated normalized event.

The examples I have for big trauma, Iron Man 1-3. Iron Man 3 is one of my favorites because he’s so clearly traumatized, has PTSD, and that is not engaged in often with our superhero movies. And I love that whole trilogy just for that portrayal.

Little trauma. The examples I have are walking on eggshells constantly around someone in your life because you have this constant repeated, normalized expectation that they’re going to get upset at you, that they’re going to yell at you, that some form of abuse is going to come out of that.

Consistently broken promises, sexual coercion within a relationship, gaslighting, consistent hunger, lack of food. These are just a few examples. Trauma comes in so many ways, shapes, and forms.

JP: So I think I know the answer to this, and I think that it’s big trauma. But from your definition of small trauma, Jessica Jones almost sounds like it starts a small trauma and builds into bigger and bigger trauma as she starts to recollect what actually happens to her.

Crys: I don’t know. I think I would actually, I would probably label that big trauma because even though his magic basically it keeps her from recognizing what she’s doing and engaging with her own brain. But the moment she snaps out of it, it is not normalized.

Like it’s never normalized, that’s a normal thing to do. When she is in control of her brain it’s always recognizes that was a violation.

JP: Yeah, because I originally noted it as big trauma, but then it just like the fear of always being abused because she’s just constantly haunted by it. But I think, yeah, definitely big trauma which that’s in the same line as Iron Man.

That one’s really good representation of trauma too. Because it’s rough, but good.

Crys: And I actually tend to write small trauma more than big trauma, partially because I have lots of experience with little trauma and I don’t have a lot of experience with big trauma.

That kind of often one time event that scars you for life. I don’t have experience with that. Grew up pretty safe, US, we don’t have a lot of bombs or natural disasters.

JP: I think that I write more big trauma. And I think that it’s part of my understanding as I have surrounded myself with people who suffer from anxiety, panic attacks because I was not exposed to that when I was younger. And so it’s my way of coming through and understanding how that functions.

So for example, I know someone who for a time was not physically capable of leaving their car to go to work and then eventually could not leave the house to go to work. That didn’t make any sense, but then as I slowly started to understand it, like it’s not the same, like trying to leave your house for them was the equivalent of skydiving for me.

And so starting to understand that the actions that I would view as every day were major actions for them. And the whole like Spoon Theory as well, which started to flow into that really helped me understand it. And so now I like to use that in my writing as a way to normalize or help other people who may have been in the same boat, as I understand it, by giving characters those sort of reactions and internal thoughts, so that it’s something that other people are exposed to.

Crys: Why don’t you explain a Spoon Theory for anyone who’s not familiar with that?

JP: Yeah. The idea is that we’re allotted a certain number of spoons when we wake up in the morning. And then everyday actions give up a spoon or two or three.

So for me, probably I don’t even need a spoon to get out of bed, it’s just an action. Or I have too many spoons and that’s just one spoon that’s tossed out. For someone who may be suffering from anxiety that may be all their spoons, just getting out of bed and then they may go back to bed and that might be their day.

It’s just it’s a way of giving a physical representation to basically energy levels that someone has for that day or their will to do things.

Crys: Yeah. If you are a spoonie, this was originally created to explain chronic illness but it applies to mental illness as well. And for a normal person, “normal”, getting out of bed, brushing your teeth, preparing breakfast, these are autopilot things. You don’t have to think about them, you just do them. For a spoonie, each one of those costs a spoon. So you’re already down four spoons before the normal person has even thought about anything that’s going to take their energy. I need to stop saying normal, I don’t like that. Anyways.

One of the interesting things to be aware of is that, and this goes to what JP was saying about the getting out of the house being equal to skydiving for two different people, any experience can be traumatic. No two person are going to process the same event or series of events the same way. And often, like you will see this in families where there is family trauma, each of the children will react a different way. And some will be more traumatized or have more visible effects than the others.

So as a writer, when you are considering, does my character have trauma or what trauma do they have, because I personally believe everybody’s traumatized in some way, shape or form. Personally, it could be small. But if your family consistently rushed you to eat food and you only ever ate food in the car from fast food places, as an adult you might be traumatized from that because that means like that life is rushed.

You can take anything as a writer and it can be traumatic or it can be not. A lot of that will depend on where you want to take your character. And this is where I bring that lie in, the lie about the world or lie about themselves that they believe, what traumas have informed that lie.

JP: I was just thinking about a person I know they grew up poor, in a sense, we were middle-class.  It was odd shopping with them because anything on sale was this, like, perfect thing to get.

It was almost like a consumer mindset and I had to take a step back and I started to learn a little bit more about it. But there’s this thing that happens when you have a scarcity of cash, that you almost need this physical representation of your wealth. And that may come in the form of a purchasing a TV that was on sale, you know, 50% off.

And so it was interesting shopping with them because I didn’t come from that world. I came from a world where my mom was a banker. And so we’re super frugal about our money, where we just didn’t buy things if it was on sale, we’re like, no, we’ll just buy it if we need it and we don’t need it.

Crys: Yeah. And I’ll specify because I think you skipped this, if something was on sale, they would buy it even if they didn’t need it.

JP: Exactly. Yes. And so it just became this learning curve of understanding where they were coming from and where I was, because for them in this sense that the trauma was that they had a scarcity of income when they were younger.

And so they grew up in a family that needed those sorts of items because it showed that they were of equal level to the people that they surrounded themselves with.

Crys: I have insight onto this because my family was a scarcity family and it’s not even necessarily the equal level. For some families, it is.

But its, if I don’t spend this money now to get this thing that I want, it will be more expensive later and I won’t be able to afford it. Not taking into account that you’re spending far more, getting things in preparation for a possible future that doesn’t necessarily come around.

JP: Yup. Yup. That’s like to a T that explains it.

And it’s still, as you can tell from how I’m talking, I’m still processing and understanding how that works because it’s just foreign to me. But I acknowledge that’s foreign to me and I’m still willing to learn and understand how that works and how that affects them. And how my own history has affected me, because I’m not stating that I’m by any means the control or the “normal”.

But that we’re just two different people coming in it from a different perspective.

Crys: Side note, this also shows up when you have 20 fricking giant bottles of Ragu because they were on sale like 10 for $10. And every time it goes on sale for ten dollars, you buy another 10 and then you have to just give them away after five years because you have too many and you’re moving.

Just as a possibility, not that its actually happened in real life.

Do you put big trauma on the page? You personally?

JP: I have not. No, I have. Yeah, I did.

Sorry.  On-air processing.

We did in our first novel, Abe and I, we did put big trauma on the page. And then we did the mental processing for the character throughout the rest of the book.

Yeah. So the answer is yes. Do you?

Crys: I don’t. Or haven’t. Part of that has been the writing romance. Romance readers right now in the current climate, don’t actually want a dark night of the soul, they want a gray night of the soul. So that’s part of it. There’s never really any like giant big traumatic events for most characters.

Most of my trauma events are– I say that, but all of my characters are massively traumatized. I usually show them escaping from the trauma, like the trauma source, rather than showing the trauma itself.

JP: One thing that I want to do with the character that Abe and I have written is I don’t want them to “overcome” or “get over” the trauma. I want them to cope with the trauma. Because I think that it’s a misconception that people get over their traumas. I just don’t… I’ve seen it enough that there are points in lives where things get re-triggered.

So it’s more about coping mechanisms and finding those coping tools. And so that’s one thing that I’ve been really focusing on keeping that character, keeping that mindset in that character and not just shifting her into overcome mindset because I just don’t think that’s healthy.

Crys: I think I have my answer for this. I don’t like putting the actual traumatic event in prose. But before and after is fine. Because I think it is far too easy to just get gross, honestly, for a lot of big traumas. And I’m thinking particularly sexual trauma, as I’m thinking through this.

Getting bombed, like I’ll put that trauma on the page. Absolutely.

But intimate trauma like that, I would hesitate to put that actual scene there. And because I think the before and after is enough of the emotion. One of the best examples I have of this is Rachael Herron’s Stolen Things, and this happens at the very beginning of the book, so I’m not going to spoiler much, but a 911 dispatcher gets a call on the 911 and it’s her daughter. They don’t know what’s happened, but her daughter has woken up in a bed, feeling unwell, her body hurts. She doesn’t know where she is.

She has no memory, but she knows that something bad has happened to her. She suspects that she was sexually assaulted. And one of her friends is, I think he’s missing. The guy she was spending the  evening with before, he’s missing.

And you feel all the terror of that without going into the actual assault.

But part of that is it’s, that’s one of the big questions and that’s one of the story questions that are being explored. But also you think about that with Jessica Jones, they never show, previous to the first episode, all of the assaults, all of the abuse that Killjoy, is it? Killjoy would put her through.

We see the effects. I personally prefer that portrayal of trauma in fiction because it’s honestly the trauma itself isn’t important in this way. It’s not something our character did. It’s not something our main character did. They had no agency in that moment. And so therefore it’s not story important to have on the page.

It’s everything they do with what happens that is important on that page.

JP: Agreed. I definitely think in terms of like sexual assault I don’t feel comfortable portraying the event on page because I think that there’s a fine line between glorifying and I just… not a fan. But yeah, like in my example with our novel, it involves the character’s family and a traumatic event which she witnesses. Murder, basically.

I think an example of a… like a sexual assault that happens on-screen kind of is in The Magicians. And I… it’s still like, they still showed the event, but I think that it was handled… okay? I’m not going to say that it was handled great because I don’t know, maybe you shouldn’t have had it made, but and the end of the episode, they also included a number to call if you’ve ever experienced this, because it is a traumatic event that you’re forcing people to, not forcing them because they could have turned away, but you are showing.

So if you were showing something, it could be triggering to people. In this event, they, at the end of the episode, they gave a number. But the timeline, it happened, and then there was a point in which the character was not cognizant of the event. And then it slowly became that they became aware of it.

And so the event actually came back in flashbacks. And it’s partially important to know what happened for the story because of what the assaultor was in the story. He wasn’t just a normal guy. And so it was important to know what happened because of what happens to her and how it changes her.

I think that it was handled well for the fact that they did show it on screen. But I think I agree with you for the most part, like showing it on page, I think it’s more about the the way the character develops as opposed to glorifying the event.

Crys: Of course, as in everything with writing, there are no hard and fast rules.

There’s absolutely ways and times where it makes sense to have big trauma like that on the page.  It is really interesting that we’re far more accepting of portraying murder. And we’re like, Oh yeah, that’s normal storytelling. That’s fine.

JP: It’s murder, whatever. You’re right. It’s still traumatic.

Crys: That is, and that is at least American sensibilities. A hundred percent.

JP: Yeah, 100%. Thanks for pointing that out. That was great.

Crys: I was like, yeah, I murder people all the time in my books.  I just have realized, and granted my books are not dealing with this, but my characters rarely face emotional repercussions for killing bad guys.

They just accept that as par for the course. In reality, that’s probably not the truth, yay fiction. And that’s, again, coming back to anything can be traumatic but it also does not have to be.

I think that one of the reasons I enjoy the little trauma most is that often… one it’s the most common form of trauma. Researchers doing a lot of study into complex PTSD. I’ve seen it said that no neurodivergent child in America can escape childhood without being traumatized because the world is trying to make them into something they are not. I fully believe that.

I’m pretty sure most not straight millennials could not escape childhood without some form of small trauma. Gen Z-ers are probably doing a lot better on that front.

So that level of trauma in small and great amounts is extremely common. And often after a complex trauma, because the character may no longer be able to interact in the world in a typical way, they are further traumatized in small ways as they are gaslit, because people are not ready to deal with like how they are acting, how they are dealing with their trauma.

So they’re told their trauma isn’t that big a deal. They need to move on with their lives. And it’s just so prevalent. It’s what I tend to explore more than anything. And one of my absolute favorite stories is The Chime Child by, and I always get this wrong, I can’t remember if it’s a Fannie or Franny Billingsley, and it is honestly the most perfect example of childhood emotional abuse from a character who does not realize that’s what’s going on.

You are in the character’s shoes and you do not realize until you get deeper into the story, like a lovely unreliable narrator, not intending to be unreliable, just telling things the way that they see them.

And at the end, you’re like, Oh my gosh, like this poor child is abused AF. For most of the book, you’re there with the character thinking that they have the right perception of things, because that is what fiction often tells us is your main character has the right perception of things.

Which is what makes unreliable narrators so powerful and so hard to do, because you want to keep that belief for as long as possible while giving hints that, hey, the character doesn’t actually understand what’s actually going on or they’re lying to you.

JP: Yeah. That made me think of Pan’s Labyrinth, the movie, because I always go back to movies.

But the main character has these fantasy aspects that are this like escape and a coping mechanism for the ongoing war and death that is happening around her. And you have no idea if it’s real fantasy or not, no clue. You don’t know if she’s lying to you through the whole movie.

Crys: If you haven’t seen it, it’s basically Alice in Wonderland plus horror.

JP: Yeah, 100%. And you can almost see like reflections of how the “real world” is treating her in the fantasy world through the different characters and how they interact with her. And it’s just, it’s very fascinating.

Crys: Yeah. And that’s another way of engaging with the trauma. Not doing so directly, like transposing it to this world where she interprets it as different things.

JP: One of my favorite resources to use, Emotional Wound Thesaurus.

Crys: A hundred percent.

JP: Because I use this for the short from the tarot episode that we claimed the second episode was going to be next, and then it never was but it will be coming up soon. But I really liked this because it gives those wounds, those traumas.

It also includes the false beliefs that could be embraced, which really ties back to the lie they believe. And then it gives those kinds of like emotional responses and the way that they may talk and like the way that they may act towards other people. It becomes a super valuable resource for anyone who hadn’t suffered through that emotional wound to get a base level understandings that can write a character who had it.

Crys: Yeah, I do love the Emotional Wound Thesaurus. And I’m sitting here thinking of The Chime Child and the lie that she believes is that adults are right. And that she is evil. That’s the lie she believes.

I have some other book, mostly, references. The Circle of Magic or The Magic Circle? I can’t remember which is actually the name, by Tamora Pierce. You have four traumatized teenagers with special magic. Sandry is a noble whose parents were murdered. And then she watched her nanny be murdered, basically in front of her. And then she was trapped in a closet, so she has a fear of dark.

Tris, her family couldn’t deal with her magical outbursts. And so they basically shipped her off to be dealt with in an institution. Briar was raised on the streets, so much trauma there, and Daja’s entire clan was wiped out and she was the only survivor. And so they each have some really strong lies.

Sandry’s lie is that she’s always alone and that no one can save her. Tris’s lie is she’s not worth anything. And she will never be able to control her magic. Briar is a street kid, again, he doesn’t believe he’s worth anything. He doesn’t believe he can trust anyone. And Daja’s lie, they all have big worth issues, is that she’s worth literally nothing, which is what her culture teaches. If you’re the survivor of a big traumatic event and you are the only one, you’re cursed and you are worth nothing and no one in that culture can ever acknowledge you ever again. They can’t even look at you or they’ll be shunned.

Then The Way of Kings, Kaladin is the character that comes to mind. This guy’s got a lot of trauma. A massive betrayal. Slavery. He’s forced to face death, basically on the daily, running straight into it, where people are murdered left and right beside him. And he’s also one of the best on-paper examples of depression that I’ve ever seen.

And I know that Sanderson has said before that I don’t think he’s dealt with depression and so it was really important to him to get this character because it is something that it’s really hard to do on paper. I think it’s much easier on screen because a lot of times depression is doing nothing and being sad faced, and that’s hard to put into a book.

And then I have House, MD. I know that he went through physical trauma. It’s been so long since I’ve watched the show. I don’t know if he went through emotional trauma. But one of his beliefs is that he’s only worth anything if he’s smarter than everyone else.

And then most romances have some form of parental or relational trauma that have made them believe that they’re not worth loving.

JP: I love The Circle of Magic. And Way of Kings, so good. I have like maybe one, I’ll just list it. Cherry recently came out on Apple TV with Tom Holland, that one’s actually pretty good representation of PTSD and the lie that he would believe was just about like self-worth more or less because he just went down this really dark spiral because like his PTSD just influenced more and more of his trauma about his worth.

And it was like the two interplayed with each other, but they weren’t the same thing. And so his depression and his view of himself kept diminishing because his PTSD kept preventing him from being a functional member of society. And so he just went down this sad route. It’s a very sad movie, but… it was good. It was just sad.

Crys: I think that most trauma will create a sense of worthlessness. I think that’s what we’re pulling out here as we’re having this discussion or that a sense that their worth is only from XYZ. I think a lot of sexual trauma survivors will often, and not everyone, but often have feelings that they are only of value as a sexual creature. That is the only way that people see value in them.

If you survived a bombing one of the beliefs… someone I know who grew up in Iran, she’s like, I don’t understand how people can wear headphones when they’re walking. And one of her beliefs is, deep down, you’re never safe. There is no safe place. Whether she would put that into words or not, that’s what she’s saying with the headphones. That’s not safe, you’re never safe like, why would you do that?

JP: The portrayal of the character in The Magicians who was sexually assaulted, I’m rewatching the series now and even in the fourth season, the events happened in the first season. It’s still something that comes back every once in a while, something triggers her again. So it represents the fact that… it’s not that she overcame it. There’s still a little triggering events, but at the same time, she’s evolved into this person who is able to compartmentalize that, like this past me suffered this traumatic event. And it’s not that this event made me better. It’s the way that I handled it, made me into a better person.

There was an article I was reading with Margaret Atwood and how she uses trauma as a starting off point in most of her fiction. And she uses that suffering and pain to become a knowledge and understanding.

And since most of her characters are women, these women, they gain the knowledge and confidence to then teach lessons to other women. And that’s how she approaches trauma.

Crys: I like that.

Another thing that I think needs to be kept in mind as you’re writing trauma is that one of the most common responses to trauma is forgetting or numbing. Yes, it’s very common for people to have PTSD and flashbacks and be very much in the moment of the trauma, another really common response is to forget swathes of your life.

And not just the big trauma event, but years of memories and only have very strong memories that pop out, positive or negative, of years of your life. Both my mother and I have years where we just don’t remember a lot. And we have a really hard time placing specific memories in specific timeframes.

She had postpartum depression from the time my littlest sister was born when I was about six and a half to when I was twelve. And she just does not remember those six years. I don’t remember most of college because of the level of depression, and depression will cause memory loss, that I had there. And people will be like, Oh, remember when?

And I’m like, wow, this is all new to me. Tell me, please if there’s a memory I want to bounce it up. Did anything bad happen in college? No, but because of childhood trauma, triggering depression, it continues to affect in small ways that, that it takes you years to discover happening, if you even ever discover that it’s happening.

So there’s such a wide range of how trauma can present, where it comes from, but I think it’s the backbone to most characters changing and most character’s growth. I tease JP because he loves big trauma and dark emotions. And I like people dealing with past trauma. I think that’s the difference.

I’m like, I don’t want to participate in them getting hurt again. Or getting themselves to the point where they get hurt or traumatized. I just want to see them rising. I want to see the rise, not the fall.

JP: That’s fair. I think the comment from Margaret Atwood that I saw, I think that really reflects with me.

I almost use that as the starting off point to how they grow. Maybe one day I won’t hurt them. I’ll have a history of them being hurt, which is also you hurting them because you created them. But yeah…

Crys: I don’t have to think through it. Yeah. Honestly, no, but this is actually one of my weaknesses as an author is I do have a hard time torturing my characters. And that is where emotion comes from is pain. Lots of pain.

So it is something that I try to do. And I showed you all the notes I have for this long ass story that I’m going to write. And I do have to make notes of all of the ways that I can F this character’s life up so that I make sure that I do it and they just don’t go from like making friends to success, to making friends because that’s what I want my life to be.

And even though I love, you love stories where… love stories where people can continually fail, because it makes so much more satisfying when they succeed. And I’m just not one of those people who relishes torturing my characters. Maybe I’ll get to that point. Goals. But not there yet.

JP: But maybe the mindset you should have, if you don’t, I’m sure you already do, when doing this traumatic events, is that you are writing this so that when they get there, their due, when they get what they’re deserved, it’s all the better.

Crys: And yes, absolutely. I just have to get to the point where I’m actively thinking of ways to screw with them. I have to make it a practice. It doesn’t come naturally. I don’t sit around like thinking how I can screw up my family’s life so that they’ll have a better hero’s arc. And I don’t do that to my characters either. I should do it with my characters, but not my family.

Actually. I do it with my son.

JP: I think as an author you’re not allowed to just be a benevolent God. I think that’s the learnings for trauma.

Crys: All right. Is there a question for our dear listeners?

Do you find it easy to traumatize your characters and what kind of trauma do you lean towards, big or little?

Excellent. If you would like any further notes on this episode, we will have an email that comes out the day after this episode releases on writeaway.substack.com. So come join us over there, where we also have special episodes about how we’re planning our year with tarot this year.

And we hope to see you next week. I think we’ll do an actual celebration episode one year after JP joined, because that’s when we started doing weekly episodes. So we’ll do something special for the one year at that point, which gives us a couple of months. Something! Anyways, Alrighty, friends. Don’t forget to check out our next month book club choice, which is Your Brand Should Be Gay, Even if You Are Not. Link will be in the show notes and we’ll see you next week.

JP: See you later.