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WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®

WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®

Helping writers become bestselling authors

Emotional Wounds Thesaurus: Physical Disfigurement

October 17, 2015 by BECCA PUGLISI

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.

NOTE: We realize that sometimes a wound we profile may have personal meaning, stirring up the past for some of our readers. It is not our intent to create emotional turmoil. Please know that we research each wounding topic carefully to treat it with the utmost respect. 

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.

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Courtesy: JacksonCam at Creative Commons

Examples:

  • being burned in a fire or with chemicals
  • bearing visible scars (from knife wounds, gunshots, an animal attack, a car accident, surgery, etc.)
  • missing a body part (an eye, ear, nose, finger, etc.)…

Basic Needs Often Compromised By This Wound: physiological needs, safety and security, love and belonging, esteem and recognition, self-actualization

False Beliefs That May Be Embraced As a Result of This Wound:

  • No one will ever love someone like me.
  • They’re looking at me because of my disfigurement.
  • This is a form of punishment…

Positive Attributes That May Result: cautious, courteous, creative, discreet, empathetic, focused, gentle, imaginative, introverted, loyal, merciful, obedient, patient…

Negative Traits That May Result: abrasive, callous, childish, confrontational, cynical, evasive, grumpy, gullible, hostile, humorless, inhibited, insecure, jealous, martyr…

Resulting Fears:

  • fear of intimacy
  • fear of whatever caused the disfigurement (fire, hospitals, etc.)
  • fear of public places…

Possible Habits That May Emerge: 

  • Never leaving one’s home; becoming a hermit
  • Wearing clothing, accessories, or makeup that minimize one’s disfigurement
  • Gravitating toward online activities where one can create whatever persona one desires
  • Avoiding situations where new people will be encountered
  • Not opening up to others…

TIP: If you need help understanding the impact of these factors, please read our introductory post on the Emotional Wound Thesaurus. For our current list of Emotional Wound Entries, go here.

For other Descriptive Thesaurus Collections, go here.

Which emotional wounds are haunting your characters and keeping them from being whole and fulfilled?

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 help with this, we have integrated this thesaurus into our online library at One Stop For Writers.

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Each entry has been enhanced and expanded to provide even more helpful information about your character’s wounds and is cross-referenced with our other thesauruses for easy searchability. We’ve also included a must-see tutorial on this topic—a crash-course on how a wound impacts the affected character and the role wounds play in his or her arc over the course of a story. Interested in seeing a sampling of our completed wound thesaurus entries?  Head on over and register for free!

On the other hand, if you prefer your references in book form, we’ve got you covered, too, because this thesaurus is now available for purchase in both digital and print form. In addition to the 120+ entries, each book contains instructional front matter to help you understand wounds and how they’ll affect your character and story. With chapters about the wound’s aftereffects and how the event ties in to the character arc, along with ideas on brainstorming your character’s wound and how to best reveal the trauma to readers, this book will be your go-to resource for connecting the backstory dots and coming up with characters who are well-rounded and realistic.

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BECCA PUGLISI
BECCA PUGLISI

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.

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Stephanie Faris says

    October 17, 2015 at 7:44 pm

    I watched a report about a model who had acid thrown on her face. Despite all the surgeries, the scars still showed pretty clearly. She handled it well…I just hope in future years, they’ll come up with a way for people to get face transplants. Having a visible deformity does tend to drive someone into his/her shell, I would think.

  2. ANGELA ACKERMAN says

    October 17, 2015 at 4:08 pm

    Hi FCS,

    Right now Becca and I are still developing this thesaurus, but it appears to be very popular, so it will either be developed further at One Stop For Writers, turned into a book, or both! (just not yet–we need to work on it a bit further here first and have two other books on setting to release first (Spring 2016).

    • FCS says

      October 19, 2015 at 10:42 am

      Okay, thanks for letting me know! 🙂

  3. FCS says

    October 17, 2015 at 9:26 am

    Thank you for such a great post! Extremely helpful! I’m curious to know: Will there be an Emotional Wound Thesaurus book available for purchase? Thanks, again for having such a great website 🙂

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