• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
    • About WHW
    • Press Kit
    • Resident Writing Coaches
    • Contact Us
    • Podcasts & Interviews
    • Master Storytelling Newsletter
    • Guest Post Guidelines
    • Privacy Policy
    • Charities & Support
  • Bookstore
    • Bookstore
    • Foreign Editions
    • Book Reviews
    • Free Thesaurus Sampler
  • Blog
  • Software
  • Workshops
  • Resources
    • List of Resources
    • Recommended Writing Books
    • WHW Descriptive Thesaurus Collection
    • Free Tools & Worksheets
    • Grab A Free Show-Dont-Tell Pro Pack
  • WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®
  • Nav Social Menu

    • Email
    • Facebook
    • Instagram
    • Pinterest
    • Twitter
WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®

WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®

Helping writers become bestselling authors

Emotional Wounds Thesaurus Entry: Wrongful Imprisonment

February 13, 2016 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.

4698707308_44a29bb4c8_z
Courtesy: miss_millions @ CreativeCommons

Examples: 

  • Being deliberately framed
  • Being mistaken for the criminal because of similar physical features, race, etc.
  • Someone committing perjury and setting one up to save someone else…

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:

  • I will never be free again.
  • God must be punishing me for something I’ve done.
  • I’m partly to blame for what happened; if I hadn’t been in that place, at that time, doing what I was doing…

Positive Attributes That May Result: ambitious, cautious, independent, industrious, just, persistent, private, proactive, resourceful, thrifty, tolerant

Negative Traits That May Result: abrasive, addictive, antisocial, apathetic, callous, confrontational, controlling, cynical, defensive, hostile, humorless, inflexible, inhibited…

Resulting Fears:

  • Fear of never getting out of jail
  • Fear of losing one’s family or loved ones
  • Fear that people will think badly of one…

Possible Habits That May Emerge: 

  • Being suspicious of and distrusting those in authority
  • Flouting the rules, since following them never did one any good anyway
  • Hating and acting out against the people/group/organization responsible for one’s imprisonment
  • Turning away from one’s faith
  • Clinging to one’s faith…

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.

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.

Logo-OneStop-For-Writers-25-small

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.

Save

Save

Save

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.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Mart Ramirez says

    February 15, 2016 at 1:31 am

    What a great list! Thank you for the reminder and the examples. Always helpful <3

  2. Beverly Campbell says

    February 14, 2016 at 11:04 am

    My main antagonist is very self absorbed, eccentric and narrow minded. I need to be able to clarify his traits better and to elaborate on them with his actions. Would I be able to do this easier using one of your trait thesauruses? If so which one in particular?

    • ANGELA ACKERMAN says

      February 14, 2016 at 11:37 am

      Yes you can, and the one you would want is The Negative Trait Thesaurus. You can find the book here: https://writershelpingwriters.net/negative-trait-thesaurus/ or if you like it is also all listed online at One Stop For Writers. https://onestopforwriters.com/ This is a subscription site, but all our books and full thesaurus collections are available there so you see your story from every angle and have everything you need to describe it.

      The important thing is to not only get the behaviors and actions that will show these traits, but to also explore the reasons for why they came into being. 😉

Trackbacks

  1. Monday Must-Reads [02.15.16] says:
    February 15, 2016 at 9:07 pm

    […] Emotional Wounds Thesaurus Entry: Wrongful Imprisonment – WRITERS HELPING WRITERS™ […]

Primary Sidebar


Welcome!

Writing is hard. Angela & Becca make it easier. Get ready to level up your fiction with game-changing tools, resources, and advice.

Follow Us

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter

Subscribe to the Blog

Check your inbox to confirm! If gremlins tried to eat it, you might have to check your spam folder.

Read by Category

Grab Our Button

Writers Helping Writers

Software that Will Change the Writing Game

One Stop for Writers

WRITERS HELPING WRITERS® · Copyright © 2023 · WEBSITE DESIGN BY LAUGH EAT LEARN

Cookies are delicious and ours help make your experience here better. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with our cookie use. Cookie settingsGOT IT
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience. More on our Privacy Policy here.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT
 

Loading Comments...