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 raised by parents or caregivers who…
- rarely let one experience freedom apart from them
- worried constantly about one’s safety
- enforced confining rules out of a desire to keep one safe or within their sights (early curfews, approving or denying the child’s choice of friends, not allowing dating, etc.)…
Basic Needs Often Compromised By This Wound: love and belonging, esteem and recognition, self-actualization
False Beliefs That May Be Embraced As a Result of This Wound:
- I’m incapable of making my own decisions.
- They don’t trust me to do the right thing.
- The world is a terrible place where bad things are likely to happen to me…
Positive Attributes That May Result: adaptable, cautious, easygoing, innocent, introverted, loyal, obedient, pensive, protective, traditional
Negative Traits That May Result: childish, controlling, cynical, devious, dishonest, evasive, gullible, ignorant, indecisive, inhibited, insecure, irresponsible, lazy, needy…
Resulting Fears:
- Fear of failure or making mistakes
- Fear of risks
- Fear of making decisions…
Possible Habits That May Emerge:
- Experiencing difficulty making decisions
- Relying on others to make important decisions
- Blindly trusting those in authority
- Rebelling against those who would enforce rules or offer advice
- Becoming sneaky or devious as a way of getting around the rules…
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.
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.
I love these entries- thank you so much! This is one that I possibly disagree with, though. Or maybe just have an alternate theory. I think that for some personalities, being raised by overprotective parents could cause impulsivity and recklessness. Being given a general sheltered existence may give rise to naivety and the desire to prove oneself that could become dangerous. And possibly come with an inability to understand personal responsibility, having never been allowed to experience serious consequences.
I’m not sure, though. Thoughts?
Kay, I think you’re right on here. With these wounds, there are so many ways a person could go, depending on his personality. This is why it’s so important to know our characters inside and out, so we will know how they’ll respond to a given wound. Thanks for reiterating this point :).
Another post to save! Thanks.