Rearview Mirror: What’s a Backstory
Janet:
The opening scene of my short story fiction piece is a slow motion automobile accident that kills a teenage girl and her mother. The father, the driver, survives. While writing it, I felt more emotional reaction than I normally feel writing. I wanted to skip over parts and gloss over details. I noticed how soulless my story was and got curious. I looked into what happens when you write a back story that is close to a personal experience.
One of my favorite writing bloggers, Lisa Hall-Wilson wrote:
Giving a character a backstory that includes trauma is a great device to create inner tension, and often leads to conflict.
5 Tips On Writing A Trauma Backstory – Lisa Hall-Wilson
But what if I don’t want to dip into the exact traumatic event and get triggered when I write about subjects my character is experiencing? What if the story I want to write, is mine but it sounds better happening to a fictional character with more detail?
Lisa says in her blog that “Writers can get triggered by secondary emotions that can hit us like an emotional tsunami.” I want that? When I wrote the scene of the car accident, it took me back to a car accident I was in when I was 14 years old. I was hurt but my grandparents were worse and I was ignored by the side of the car until the police took me in for questioning.
I want my character, the girl who drinks too much and stays late at a party with the wrong guy, to be so much more than her past. Even though she’s experienced some trauma as a child I want her to already be complex when she makes the mistake of her life. Her wound will shape her life, like all our lives if our experience is traumatic.
I was upset with myself when tears threatened to take up the time I’d allotted to write. But I knew, what happened to me and my emotional engagement in my own experience could be the rich, meaty base of a pretty good story. In fact I could make it more dramatic and tense if I tapped into my shame, fear, guilt, anger and powerlessness.
I decided to move away from my computer, grab a pen, a pad of paper and list. I started with what I remembered seeing, what the day was like, and how the breeze smelled. As I started to write, details emerged, then physical and emotional memories started to crowd onto my list. Suddenly I had access to write a character with more emotion and experience; a character with no voice until I gave her one.
Lisa writes:
Don’t be lazy. As a writer, you need to dive deep... so the reader can experience the loss, anxiety and trauma with your character.
5 Tips On Writing A Trauma Backstory – Lisa Hall-Wilson
I know the writers who have submitted their work to Our Silent Voice are brave. They feel all aspects of the original trauma as they delve into the human experience to describe a rich and layered character. Even if that character is themselves.
Marie:
I am ashamed of my body. Yes, I said it. Not because I am heavy – although, like almost every other woman in existence I wish I was thinner. No, I am not over weight. And yes, there is skinny shaming too, for those of you who have never thought about that. However, that is another story. I am ashamed of my body on another level.
When I first got my period, I was told that I would now start seeing things differently, that I would begin to see things the way a woman sees them.
In my family, that meant I would start to notice when the carpet needed to be vacuumed or when the beds needed to be made. I would become a better helpmate for my mother. Finally! A woman, but more importantly, a woman like her!
Never was I told that this new monthly occurrence might be painful, or that the flow might last longer than a day. I was completely unprepared for what menstruation really was. So when it didn’t occur to me to pick up my brother’s sneakers, it was like a failure at some very basic, essential level of womanhood.
My mother’s voice said, “You can ask me anything.” And her eyes said: PLEASE DON’T.
I was never told sex could be wonderful. It was like not telling a child that chocolate exists! And why wasn’t I told? Because my mother did not know.
At one point, I owned a book called “Our Bodies, Our Selves”, written by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. This book provides a road map to what it means physically to be a woman. It is forthright and unapologetic. For bringing such a thing into the house, I was lectured and punished when my mother discovered it in the bedroom I shared with my little sister. The book went into the garbage. The shame just kept coming.
Why am I telling you all this? Because it all threads together and makes up the fabric of who I am today. Because I have learned and grown and faced down shame in some of its many forms. Because now, when I hear a story of pain or shame around the body, I know how it feels when those threads knot and repeatedly tangle up decisions, thoughts and feelings about yourself repeatedly. It’s part of my backstory. I have my quirks and my triggers, and I know the only way out is through. I know, too, that we get through it better together. Will you join me?
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