It’s easy to start the novel with a character already badly damaged from a traumatic life. They hate the world. They’re jaded. They’re cynical. You have so many trauma triggers that just having them watch a Disney movie can send them into fits. Look, isn’t it interesting what trauma does to a character? Isn’t it grand, taking a broken mess and stitching it back together and revitalizing it, creating your own Frankenstein’s Monster? And anyway, isn’t it easier to relate to a character that is lamenting about the hardships they’ve undergone? You can really understand, because they take the time to remind you, every three sentences, that they’re traumatized. And isn’t that great? Isn’t that fun? Isn’t everyone defined as a person by the worst thing that ever happened to them?
Plus, writers, lets’ face it. It’s also easier than developing a real character, one not defined by this moment of trauma, one that lives in the now and tackles their problems because they want to do good in the world, or because they are bored with how nice things are, or because they have a moral duty to go about it.
It’s a lot more difficult to create a fully-fleshed character, living in the now, working through issues they’re only just now beginning to face. Characters who have a traumatic present, who start out with a somewhat solid sense of self and slowly have more and more stress heaped upon them until they are about to break, require more work. You have to come up with a bad situation for them. Give them a reason to be in it. Build things up until it looks like the character might break. And then you have to force the character through it, to drag them out to the other side.
Think Frodo from Lord of the Rings. He’s got dead parents, sure, but not much by way of trauma until after he leaves for his adventure. Think Scarlett O’Hara. Her mother is dead, but she’s had such a pretty little lifestyle, until the war. Then the trauma came, and she bluffed, bullied, and blackmailed her way through it. Think Harry Potter, even. He has trauma in his past, but until book 4 (which is arguably the weakest book in the series) the trauma that defines him is the trauma of the present—Lord Voldemort in the Forbidden Forest, The Basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets, the Dementors and Sirius Black in book three. He may have moments of trauma in his past, but they aren’t interfering with his fight against the Dark Lord, or even his fights with Dudley. They’re in the past, where they belong, and he’s worrying about the time he can change, the time that he can act in.
To traumatize them as the story goes, and heap upon them more and more, until you think they’re going to break, that’s the greater challenge. To make them struggle on, to give them reasons to despair and to have them rise above, or to be dragged above it, that’s magic. That’s the sort of story that can enchant a reader. Mere revenge plots, with broken characters, who get their revenge and live a shaky blend of self-pity and trauma? That’s nothing. That’s a dime a dozen.
Regular people can have the grandest adventures, and in the very fact that they are such regular people, such insignificant creatures as hobbits and ordinary men, makes their story all the more significant, don’t you think?
Why substitute in a traumatic past, when you can instead give the characters a traumatic present? Why have a character whose capacities are already taxed, when you can work with someone who still sees every color, still feels everything, still has a sense of wonder?
Explain it to me, if you can, because I see it again and again, and everyone tells me it’s more interesting, more exciting.
I just don’t see it.
-Brttany Maresh
