When we create characters for our fiction, we bring aspects of ourselves into their personalities. That may include emotional wounds, flaws, false beliefs and biases.
In the real world, we’re all products of our pasts. Good and bad, the people, events, and situations we’ve encountered have influenced us in profound ways, impacting our morals and beliefs, our day-to-day habits, our personal preferences, even our personality traits.
This should be as true for our characters as it is for us.
Wounding events are particularly insidious because the harm they cause isn’t limited to the event itself; it’s often the first of many toppling dominoes that alter the character in alarming ways, molding her into who she’ll be at the start of your story.
Her wound, and the emotional shielding that follows will contribute to her personality, beliefs and morals, story goals, and more.
It’s important to understand those aftereffects and what they’ll mean for your character so you can write her in an authentic and consistent way that will resonate with readers.
What is Emotional Shielding?
The aftermath of a wounding event is a chaotic time full of questions with no easy answers.
- How did this happen?
- Why me?
- And the most critical one: How do I make sure it doesn’t happen again?
Out of a desperate need to safeguard herself from further pain, the character knowingly or subconsciously deploys her emotional shielding—protections meant to keep her safe.
These are universal to the human experience and come in a number of forms that can be applied to your character after a traumatic experience.
Flaws
Many times, a character will seek to keep trauma from recurring by adopting new traits that she believes will make her stronger or more impervious to harm.
- A woman who has escaped domestic abuse may think that the key to avoiding further mistreatment is in controlling every part of her life — and maybe the lives of those around her.
- The teenager who told the truth about a crime but wasn’t believed may become apathetic.
- An employee whose work was stolen by his boss could easily become uncooperative, believing that keeping his ideas to himself is the best way to protect them.
On the surface, these new traits seem to be a good way to ward off danger. In reality, they cause ancillary problems that make it difficult for the characters to succeed in many areas of life.
Dysfunctional Behaviors
The habits that grow out of a character’s flaws are typically damaging, destroying relationships and making it difficult for them to achieve story goals.
False Beliefs
When trauma occurs, one of the first things we do is examine what happened, mentally replaying it to see how it could have been avoided. We want to identify who was at fault so we know who to blame and where to direct our negative emotions.
Very often, we end up pointing the finger at ourselves. If I hadn’t been so self-involved, I would’ve seen the warning signs; if I’d been more obedient, my parents wouldn’t have divorced.
The lies that result lead to a form of self-blame or the belief that had the character been more worthy, chosen differently, trusted someone else, paid more attention, safeguarded herself, etc., a different outcome would have resulted.
Lies like these undermine the character’s confidence, making it virtually impossible for her to reach her dreams and find fullness and contentment.
Biases
In some cases, the victim of a trauma may find blame elsewhere: the government, a corporation, God, “those people.” When this happens, it’s easy for a wider sense of disillusionment to take shape in the form of biases.
The abuse victim may come to believe that all men are violent. The teen who told the truth and wasn’t believed may decide that no adult truly listens to or respects children.
As you can see, characters, like real people, adopt emotional shielding as a way of protecting themselves. But this shielding actually does the opposite. It creates dysfunction in relationships and undermines the character’s ability to succeed at work and in her passions.
The emotional shielding resulting from a wound can actually impact her basic human needs, creating a void: new flaws rob her of love and belonging as her relationships are compromised; the false belief takes aim at her esteem, destroying her self-worth; growth and self-actualization screech to a halt because the character is so focused on what happened in the past that she’s unable to move forward into the future.
This is why it’s so important to know your character’s wound and what kinds of shielding have resulted from it. This information will tell you exactly who your character is in your story, what beliefs or habits are holding her back from achieving her goal, and what she’ll have to do to overcome the trauma and take steps toward wholeness.
So once you’ve identified your character’s wounding event, ask yourself:
- What flaws might my character adopt as a way of keeping the event from occurring again? On the flip side, which positive traits might she downplay or reject because she believes they contributed to what happened (kindness, generosity, obedience, being trusting, etc.)?
- What dysfunctional behaviors could flow out of these changes in her personality traits?
- What lie might the character believe about herself in the wake of her wounding experience?
- Are there any biases about other people or groups that might arise because of what happened to her? How might those biases affect her life?
Wounding events and their aftershocks are as relevant for our characters as they are for us in the real world. This is why Angela and I wrote The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma, to explore the various events that might afflict our characters so we can know how they might respond.
It’s our hope that this information can help you better understand your own characters, enabling you to write them realistically in a way that reads true-to-life for your audience.
How do you think your characters' emotional wounds affect their behaviour, and therefore your stories? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.
View Comments (8)
Thanks for having Becca on today, Joanna! :)
With the current project I am working on I examined a similar situation that I experienced and the mistakes I made. I found my lead character following the same path of destruction. Lets face it, in story telling destruction is fun. I gave him a foundation of misbelief causing him to follow the wrong path. My goal has always been to have the reader scream at the page, warning the protagonist of things to come as he blindingly reaches to the edge. Creating broken characters is a huge plus in story telling. It gives us writers the challenge to put the pieces back together. Thank you for the article. Good Stuff!!!!
We do love to torture them, don't we? ;) Those misbeliefs are so damaging yet so effective because they're REAL; we do this all the time, letting our misperceptions and biases and denial-based beliefs take us down the wrong paths. So when our characters do it, it definitely enhances the reader's experience. Good luck with your story, Bryan.
Gosh I just realised that this acting out, the coping/shielding strategies etc are not necessarily always stemming from the past.
I can see that happening in my own home where I have limited control over my family members’ choices and actions. I overcompensate by trying to gain control on how things are done in the house - where I have a small foothold at the possibility of minor wins.
Lucky I can achieve self actualisation elsewhere - by the pursuit of my writing and active learning to enrich that experience.
Yes, definitely, acting out isn't always due to a wounding event. We see this so often with small children who are just struggling to express their feelings and don't know how to do it yet in an appropriate way.
Love this post. I needed this so much. But my protagonists have negative character arc. So in that case, how will the emotional wound, the shield, the lie and the false belief play their roles in bringing the character's downfall?
Maria, it really all works the same way with both negative and change arcs: the wounding event produces that shielding in both cases. In both situations, the shielding, the lie, the false belief all are supposed to protect the character, but they end up hamstringing him, causing other complications and keeping him from facing that past hurt, which in turn makes it difficult of him to achieve the story goal that will fulfill him.
The main difference is that while the character in a change arc is eventually able to face that wounding event and pull himself out of the whole he's inadvertently dug, the character in a negative arc is unable to do that. Either he tries and fails (possibly repeatedly) and decides that living as he is is better than trying to face the old pain again, or he's so afraid of facing it that he never tries to. In a change arc, there's a turning point for the character, where they turn away from the shielding and embrace positive coping strategies to heal. In the negative arc, there's a different moment, where the character decides to stop fighting and instead fully embraces his flaws and negative coping mechanisms. Does this make sense?
We cover this scenario more in-depth in the book, in the section on The Villain's Journey—not that a change arc protagonist is necessarily the bad guy. But there are some similarities that might be of help to you. :)
Thank you for your post. This is a good thing to remember when creating and writing a character.