Hope you're having a lovely day! 🤗
I have a question about writing, specially with how visceral your scenes are: how do you approach how your characters feel and deal with pain? How to make them feel more "real"?
Thank you in advance!
Hi anon!
It's been a good evening, actually, have been having a Community rewatch with someone I care about and man, that show has aged well.
how do you approach how your characters feel and deal with pain? How to make them feel more "real"?
So, firstly, TMI for a whole breadth of trauma experiences including a fairly flippant description of personally experienced interpersonal violence.
Skip to the end for the TL;DR summary because everything else is far too long.
This is not something I think about, probably because I've had so much practice doing it, but I do think there's some core things I've gotten used to folding into this.
The first is that, unfortunately, I have a great deal of experience with a genuinely stupid amount of personal pain. Whether it's cancer, cancer of a family member, death of a family member, ongoing child sexual assault from multiple people (whee), degenerative illness of a close family member, family estrangement, general sexual assault, medical abuse, domestic violence, chronic illness, exposure to criminal activity, eating disorder nonsense, acute illness, bullying, emotional abuse, extreme poverty, etc. An ACE Questionnaire loves/hates to see me coming.
And while I don't think that's a requirement to writing all of these subjects, it definitely gave me a level of familiarity with a lot of things that I have ended up writing about, even if I'm not writing about the exact same experience (I'm not interested in autobiography lol). It is, tbh, pretty easy to write about someone getting their head slammed against a wall if that is an experience you've had, and remember having, and you're the kind of person to sit down and self-reflect about that miserably later. If anything, writing about that + trauma recovery becomes pretty cathartic.
Reading narratives - both fictional and nonfictional - as well as watching narratives or just experiencing narratives around trauma and personal pain can help give you windows into how other people experience and process their pain. I spent a long time in my life reading health narratives and abuse narratives both in fiction and non-fiction as a way of finding something to relate to, and while I didn't always find that, I did find that there was a hugely diverse way that people experience pain, and also a huge array of ways to describe it.
In terms of the nitty gritty:
Don't be afraid to get visceral, as in, engage the senses. What is a character seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing, feeling. And it's okay to go lateral. Maybe they're seeing white spots, or grey edges around their vision. Maybe they're smelling something that reminds them of a traumatic memory in the past. Maybe they're hearing the weirdest details in sharp relief (characteristic of trauma forming due to dissocation, which brings me to my next point;)
Get familiar with the mechanisms of how trauma forms. This means, truly, researching things like the HPA, the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems, fight/flight/freeze/fawn/etc. and how they operate on us in times of trauma, and what dissociation can look and feel like, things like depersonalisation, derealisation, all of these things have Wiki pages that will explain what's going on, the disorders they can cause, the symptoms, and sometimes even helpful treatments. I honestly think anyone who wants to write trauma (which is personal pain generally) should familiarise themselves with the building blocks of trauma, not least because like, everyone has been through at least something traumatic once in their life and it's good for just...understanding the self. While it's a title trotted out a lot, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk is good for many reasons! He also does a great job of contextualising historical approaches to trauma for anyone who is looking at setting a story in the last few decades.
It's good to think about how pain processing makes sense for a character. Researching the above and thinking about how that applies to your character will help a lot! Let's take Faber from Underline the Red as a case study. Faber has an extensive history of childhood family domestic violence, in a family that was very disconnected and unloving towards him. Alienated and feeling like he doesn't belong (with unnamed nascent trans identity formation keeping him well and truly isolated from everyone around him, with no one he could relate to) - he sought attachment to strangers through underage same sex relations, and despite his own sexual aggression, was ultimately taken advantage of as a teenager, which created additional unseen trauma that was still vastly preferable to going home and being beaten, and had the added benefit that his father hated it because he was a homophobe, which provided a negative attention that unconsciously reinforced Faber's own opinion of himself (the thing is, when you're raised to hate yourself, you often end up doing things that reinforce that you are deserving of punishment, because you literally don't know any different: This is where researching childhood trauma and how it influences the self is important, anon, researching C-PTSD will be your best friend here) As a result of needing to hook up frequently for false intimacy, Faber became overwhelmingly concerned with surface appearance over internal health or wellbeing. Likewise, he started working as a teenager to get out of an abusive home, and learned quickly he could get his first experiences of praise outside of sex through working way way too hard. The more he went above and beyond, the more he was praised. Hey presto! You have a people pleasing overachiever. This is all you need to burn someone out and create all the pain this person will need for the rest of their lives. (Hi my fellow people pleasing overachievers, how's that fast track to burnout going?) (This is also not the only path to this, it's just one of the manyyyy). You end up with an adult who is: Vain and self-interested in his appearance while having literally no capacity to make friendships or deep relationships with anyone, who is hostile to everyone because adults took advantage of him to fuck as a teenager OR beat him as a family member OR neglected him as a family member, so his template for connecting to others is broken from the outset. He hates himself, but desperately wants praise, so he destroys himself through work. His biggest fear is being seen or known, because his father taught him that at his core, he is loathsome. But he's still human, he still seeks connection, so he still puts himself in situations where he is sometimes seen or known, but at this point on his life, weaponises that against himself. He also has a HUGE amount of unbridled rage at like, his entire life, that he directs at himself right now. He was raised by a man who thought hitting his child was incredibly normal, Faber is not afraid to hurt others when he feels threatened. Lashing out is an acceptable thing to do for him - at least he's not being violent like his father! And finally, you have an adult who will threaten others if they make him feel like he won't have any control over being seen or known (his greatest fear). Therefore, his primary manifestations of pain are going to be around: Self-sabotage leading to: a cycle of self-neglect, self-harm and a heavy, heavy resistance to people reaching out to him (risks being seen/known) and/or reaching out and then ignoring/rejecting (avoidant attachment patterns / mixed attachment). He'll also find it very easy to have meaningless sex.
You don't have to go this deep! I LIKE going this deep. This is why I write! It's my favourite thing to come up with a bottom-up structure for a character like this and come up with their name, appearance, job, etc. later. Other people go top-down and come up with the surface details first and come to the bottom-up details later. But you can do this with any one of your characters at any time. In fact, you can start with characters you have now, and start writing out a loose template that explains their more irrational decisions, their pain (that you know of), their motivations to protect themselves from more of that pain (or why they might cause themselves more of that pain). And then from there...the descriptions veer towards what that suits. Faber is dissociative, so as much as possible, he distances himself from his pain by focusing on random things. But he's also got PTSD, so he will have flashbacks later that will make him have very disproprotionately strong reactions to things that don't make much sense (like threatening Enris' job) - because he's just been reminded of his father.
Ultimately, a person's pain experience is logical to their internal understanding of the world, and that includes the things that are irrational and illogical. Once you know that, and sort of know the building blocks of trauma and how that manifests, a lot of things about characters, characters you see in TV, and honestly yourself and the people around you, start to make a lot more sense. It also becomes a huge driver of plot, because the reality is the incompatibilities and compatibilities of how we deal with and process our pain and trauma honestly is the driver of how almost the whole world functions. Especially the unknowing ways people harm each other with their own unprocessed crap. And from there, you can spin out literally ever story that exists, just about, so imho it's just one way to learn how to write, and it's a way I enjoy!
Er yeah so TL;DR - Research trauma and the science of trauma. Watch a lot of shows/movies/read books that make you feel a character's pain and pay attention to what the author is doing in the moment. Pay attention to the sentences, the dialogue, and how "logical" the pain seems to the character in question. Also just see what you like about it! What you'd want to find in your own characters! And I sincerely apologise if none of this helped. I am...very accustomed to doing this now, but I have also read a metric fuckton of books on trauma and attachment and dissociation, and I really believe that helped. May you find all the good words in the word mines. :D
