The Wounded – Revealing Your Character’s Emotional Wound
By Cindy Layton
Every character has a mountain to climb, a river to cross, a journey of a thousand miles that begins with their first step.
Each faces adversity.
Elizabeth Zott overcomes institutional sexism to become a chemist in the sixties.
Harry Potter is an orphan living with his hostile extended family - the Dursleys.
An isolated man named Ove’s orderly world is disrupted by new neighbors.
Adversity is a circumstance.
How our characters deal with adversity is another story. In fact, it’s the basis for their hidden story, unearthed over time, that reveals what it is that holds them back, often referred to as their emotional wound or the wounding event.
As a character attempts to overcome adversity, the wound is the thing that stops her in her tracks. Issues of self-doubt, self-image, worthiness, the internalizing of exterior judgements burrowed deep within, will sabotage the character’s ability to overcome the obstacles before her.
Her wounds reveal her blind spots, her character flaws, her weaknesses. It’s the apparatus that sets up the coming clash - will the character’s deep-seated wound prevent them from overcoming their adversity?
As writers we need to separate out our characters circumstances from their wounds. Adversity is a plot-point, the wound is the basis for the character’s internal story arc. Combined with the choices we make for our characters, they are all tightly woven together, one dependent on another, to create a whole character and a seamless story.
The blog Writers Helping Writers is a treasure trove of information on revealing our character’s wounds, so much so, they’ve written an Emotional Wound Thesaurus. That will pretty much establish them as the experts on this subject.
Here are links to some I found helpful, but search their site for “wound” and several pages of content will be listed, some of them connected specifically to certain types of traumatic wounds.
Five Reasons to Identify Your Characters Wounding Event
Dropping Breadcrumbs: How to Show a Character’s Emotional Wound Through Behavior
In case there was any doubt, Writers Helping Writers is a favorite of AoR, having been mentioned in three other posts:
Nancy Sackheim’s Spotlight on Writers Helping Writers
Elizabeth Solar’s One Missed Deadline – Five Great Writing Blogs
My own experience with One Stop for Writers
