Characters have wounds - painful past experiences that stay in their memory. A failure, betrayal, injustice, loss, rejection, or disillusionment. Due to their wound, characters develop maladaptive beliefs and behaviors, aka flaws. At the core of a story, the protagonist must face her wound and overcome her flaw to achieve her goal. If successful, this emotional journey creates a gift, which is often the antithesis of the wound.
For example, in facing a lifetime of class discrimination and pressure to save her family through marriage, Elizabeth Bennet develops an exaggerated amount of discrimination against a wealthy and prideful man, Mr. Darcy. By recognizing her wound and flaw, Ms. Bennet finally achieves the coexistence of romantic love and personal freedom.
Like our characters, writers have wounds too. We face harsh and personal critiques, discouragement from family and friends, shitty writing conference experiences, and countless rejections. We enter this journey with wounds and pick up more along the way. These wounds then influence our behaviors. For example, if a writer faced flippant criticism by a trusted person early in her writing career, she may feel very reluctant to seek feedback again or try to make everything perfect before getting help on her work in the future. So, asking for a friend, what do we do?
It’s hard to see ourselves as clearly as our characters. Novels are neat and immediate, but lives are long and messy. So if we get inexplicably blocked at particular points in our process, these sticking points might be helpful flags that something hurts inside.
Understanding how the brain stores and recalls memories can help. Implicit memory is automatic recollection in which we use past experiences without thinking about it. We don’t need to consciously remember how to tie our shoe - we just do it. Explicit memory is when we intentionally remember something using long-term recollection. “Oh remember the first story I ever wrote in third grade about a banana who learned to ride a motorcycle.”
Things get tricky when painful memories get stuffed into our implicit memory and we automatically recollect them and respond to them in our daily lives without even realizing it, then our wounds become flaws. If we can catch this, we can move memories from implicit into explicit memory by thinking, feeling, and talking about them. In examining our wounds and acknowledging their cascade through our lives, we have a shot at healing the hurt and receiving the wound’s transformative gift.
While this is simple to say, it is not easy to do. Our characters take entire novels to do this and often require dramatic plot twists to recognize and accept themselves. Lucky for us, we don’t require the torture we inflict on our characters. I found a self-reflection process to be really helpful in bringing implicit memories into explicit territory.
I stumbled into one of my own writing wounds recently. After completing a manuscript, I hesitated in contacting some professional editors to take it to the next level. It’s always a vulnerable act to share our art, but it still felt inexplicably hard to draft that email, so I went looking for the wound. In a quiet space, I recognized and allowed my fear. I felt it rather than judged it. Then I investigated my memories and found the experiences that needed to move out of the unseen space inside of me.
Growing up as the youngest kid in the house, I got the message that no one wanted to hear what I had to say. I collected experiences in my academic and writing career that reinforced this belief. I tend towards perfectionism and feel anxious about sharing my work as a result. But I don’t want to move through life as the wounded little sister. So I’ve been comforting the ignored girl and the hurt young woman from my past and recognizing the lie which I came to believe that my voice isn’t valuable. I imagine that if I keep doing this work, the gift of prolific and authentic writing awaits me. That’s quite the incentive.
If we can walk our characters through this transformation, then don’t we deserve a shot at it too? Big hugs for our writing wounds everyone.