When you’re writing a character, it’s important to know why she is the way she is. Knowing her backstory is important to achieving this end, and one of the most impactful pieces of a character’s backstory is her emotional wound. This negative experience from the past is so intense that a character will go to great lengths to avoid experiencing that kind of pain and negative emotion again. As a result, certain behaviors, beliefs, and character traits will emerge.
Characters, like real people, are unique, and will respond to wounding events differently. The vast array of possible emotional wounds combined with each character’s personality gives you many options in terms of how your character will turn out. With the right amount of exploration, you should be able to come up with a character whose past appropriately affects her present, resulting in a realistic character that will ring true with readers. Understanding what wounds a protagonist bears will also help you plot out her arc, creating a compelling journey of change that will satisfy readers.
We hope the sample list of ideas below will help you see how emotional trauma will influence your character’s behavior and mindset. For the full entry of this and over 100 other emotional wounds, check into our bestselling resource, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression.
HOUSE FIRE
Examples: One’s home and belongings being destroyed due to
- faulty wiring
- a lightning strike
- a grease fire in the kitchen
- unattended food on the stove…
Basic Needs Often Compromised By This Wound: physiological needs, safety and security
False Beliefs That May Be Embraced As a Result of This Wound:
- I can’t be trusted with anything important. (If the character blames himself)
- I can’t trust the important things to anyone but me. (If someone else is to blame)
- Don’t get too attached to anyone or anything, because they can disappear at any time…
Positive Attributes That May Result: alert, cautious, grateful, meticulous, nurturing, simple, thrifty
Negative Traits That May Result: apathetic, callous, fussy, humorless, morbid, needy, obsessive, pessimistic, possessive, stingy, ungrateful, withdrawn, worrywart
Resulting Fears:
- Fear of fire
- Fear of losing one’s material things
- Fear of losing irreplaceable heirlooms or sentimental items…
Possible Habits That May Emerge:
- Obsessively checking one’s new residence for anything that could cause another fire to start
- Moving often, so as not to become attached to any dwelling place
- Renting rather than owning
- Becoming stingy with one’s money; not purchasing unnecessary items as a way of not becoming attached to them
- Becoming disdainful of materialism…
TIP: If you need help understanding the impact of these factors, please read our introductory post on the Emotional Wound Thesaurus. And for a boatload of practical information on how to incorporate wounds into your story, see our collection of posts on this topic.
For other Descriptive Thesaurus Collections, go here.
Which emotional wounds are haunting your characters?
Emotional wounds are incredibly formative, changing how a character views the world, causing trust issues, damaging their self-worth, dictating how they will interact with other people, and making it harder for them to achieve their goals. As such, understanding your character’s wound is vitally important to your overall story.
To learn more, we recommend The Emotional Wound Thesaurus. This writing guide explores emotional trauma and what it will look like for your character and their journey in the story. It highlights 120+ possible wounding events and helps you brainstorm how each might play out in your story so you can write your character’s behaviors, attitudes, fears, and insecurities with authenticity.
Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and bestselling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and its sequels. Her books are available in five languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers—a powerhouse online library created to help writers elevate their storytelling.
This is fantastic, and well-researched. Is there going to be an “Emotional Wounds Thesaurus” published? I didn’t see it on Amazon. And I want it!
So glad you’re enjoying it, Sharon. We’ve just introduced this thesaurus at the blog and only have 3 entries so far. So if we do decide to publish this content, it will be quite a ways down the road. We’ll have to wait and see!
I’m liking these entries, Becca!! They’re food for thought!!
Thanks, Traci! I admit that it makes me a little nervous, writing some of them, because these are real experiences that real people have gone through. I don’t want to sensationalize them or misrepresent them. But the information can be really useful to writers, so I’m trying to be as sensitive as possible with them.
Posted this on Facebook link that Angela/Becca shared, figured someone might see this and might be interested in more information:
Hey, I figured I would add my story and thoughts quick as someone who has been through this sort of ordeal, it might give you a little something to think about.
My house burned down in 1993, I was a wee lad when that happened. We went on vacation and a train that had tracks behind our house started a grass fire that took out our home and several other homes.
The main thought we had was how lucky we were. First off, to not be home. Second off, we had recently gotten rid of all our pets. We had a dog that was a bit destructive and too much for us to handle. We also had a bunny that had been killed a year earlier. She was an outdoor bunny and some wild dogs had gotten into her cage. frown emoticon
It was tough because we lost pretty much everything. We had about 3 days worth of clothes on our back and lost everything else.
As a young child it did have some large impacts on my life. First off, almost everything was gone and for a while I was living with second hand belongings which, when you’re a child, isn’t the best thing because kids can be cruel about what you’re wearing and when you’re wearing old stuff and you’re clothes don’t fit right don’t match well, look old and ratty, you get made fun of.
It took the insurance company a while to sort through everything else and in the meantime we had to move with my grandparents and then we eventually moved into a house not too far from them.
This also required switching schools. I had a lot of good friends and I was really looking forward to a specific teacher I got along with really well for the 4th grade but then I had to go to an entirely different school with different people and it was a major thing for someone my age to have to completely transplant their lives (I feel really bad for military brats who are constantly on the move).
Then, there was the issue of the kids that lived around my grandparents. They were all a couple years older than e so I started hanging around an older crowd which wasn’t the best thing.
Thank you for your input, Ben. I’ve never gone through this personally, and first-hand experience is always going to be the most authentic, so thank you for sharing yours.