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.
Examples:
- Being unable to deter a friend from driving while impaired
- One’s mother dying in childbirth
- Having a disagreement with someone right before they commit suicide…
Basic Needs Often Compromised By This Wound: safety and security, love and belonging, esteem and recognition, self-actualization
False Beliefs That May Be Embraced As a Result of This Wound:
- I should have died instead of ___
- My life is not my own; I need to live life the way (the deceased) would have had he lived
- I will never be able to make it up to (the person who holds blame and the deceased)…
Positive Attributes That May Result: appreciative, centered, courteous, disciplined, honorable, introverted, just, merciful, nurturing, private, protective, responsible…
Negative Traits That May Result: addictive, compulsive, defensive, evasive, inhibited, insecure, morbid, nervous, pessimistic, resentful, self-destructive, uncommunicative…
Resulting Fears:
- fear of relationships and being responsible for others
- fear of vulnerability
- fear of persecution…
Possible Habits That May Emerge:
- walking on eggshells around those who are voicing blame
- difficulty with trust and relationships
- shifting between confusion and anger at being persecuted
- feeling one must justify oneself or explain
- being unable to move forward in a healthy way (relationships, following one’s passions and dreams, etc.)…
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. 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.
Angela is a writing coach, international speaker, and bestselling author who loves to travel, teach, empower writers, and pay-it-forward. She also is a founder of One Stop For Writers, a portal to powerful, innovative tools to help writers elevate their storytelling.
One potential correction, I think you meant “fear of relationships and being *responsible* for others” (not responsive).
Also a question, when you say “walking on eggshells around those who are the source of blame”, by “source of blame” do you mean the people who blame the character?
Ah! Thanks for the heads up. And in this situation, the source would be those who are doing the blaming, not the victim of the ire, so yes, the people who blame the character. 🙂
Thanks so much for the quick response and fix.
I forgot to mention how awesome this resource is! It’s really helping me because I find character questionnaires to shut off my creativity, even the interesting ones like KM Weiland’s “questions to ask about the Lie”. But these examples are really helping me address those things. They help validate my ideas and inspire me with new ones. Kudos to you and Becca!
Thanks so much Mike!
This was very helpful and made me think more deeply about how my characters grandmothers would have reacted to the death of someone who was important to both of them–thus impacting the present. You know, that backstory stuff. Thanks!
Congrats to the winners. Woohoo, Natalie. YEAH!
Building a character is hard. But once we have that whole person the story is just so much better. The thing that gets me is when I buy a book, and the characters are stale and cardboard. And here I am trying to make my characters into REAL human beings. How do these books get published?
Thanks for all you do. xoxo