Thank you, Christine! With your explanation, I can see how to use a “wounding event” for a main character in a story developing. Now is is starting to make sense.

Debby, For me writing historical fiction, the story’s main character goal is linked to the “wounding event.” Her story character arc shows how she slips back into those feelings and tries to get out of them with the help of a love interest secondary character that she married. However your main character’s story goal is set will help you with the main character’s “wounding event.” Readers must relate emotionally and intelligently to the main character. 📚 Christine

Thank you! This is going to be very helpful. The idea of a “wounding event” is new to me, and I am looking forward to learning more about it.

Debby

Thank you, Becca. I also thank you for your comments to the first commenter’s questions. I won’t elaborate on my thoughts. They would be the same as yours. 📚🎶 Christine

Well, at the heart of most compelling stories is a character who is broken in some way; they’re stuck in life or are headed the wrong direction, and the only way for them to achieve healing and fulfillment is for them to recognize the personal faults that are holding them back and keeping them from wholeness. Faults and weaknesses don’t develop in a vacuum; they’re born from adversity, negative experiences, and sometimes traumatic events. Something bad happens, and the character doesn’t want to experience it or the negative feelings associated with it again, so they adopt new habits, develop new attitudes, and take action (often on a subconscious level) to protect themselves. But instead of protecting them, these dysfunctional behaviors and ideas inhibit the character because they come from a place of fear and keep them from personal growth. To overcome their faults, they have to come to grips with their past and change their responses. Only then can they achieve success.

This is a summary of a Change Arc. Because this process of internal growth and improvement is based in psychology, it resonates with readers, and that’s why so many stories include this arc. So if you’re writing a change arc, your character needs a past negative experience or trauma to inform who they are at the start of the story and provide something they’re going to have to deal with at some point if they want to move forward into the future.

If you’re not writing this kind of story, one could argue that a wounding event isn’t necessary because the character isn’t working toward personal growth. And we’ve seen successful characters like this (early Indiana Jones and James Bond, for instance). But even those characters have since been given backstories to better explain who they are and where they struggle——because this is part of the human experience. Wounding events are a part of real life, so including them for a character is a good way to humanize them and make them more relatable and empathetic to readers.

So, to answer your first question, not every character has to have a wounding event. But any character traversing a change arc in the story will need one.

As to your second question, I used the “she” pronoun because the character I referenced as an example throughout the post (Natalie) was female. If you look back through other posts and the content for our books, we use a variety of pronouns. In this case, “she” was a match for the character I had created.

I hope this answers your questions. Thanks for reading!

It sounds like you’ve put a lot of time and thought into your character’s backstory, which is going to really help make her authentic and relatable for readers. Keep up the good work!

1/ Why must every character have a wound? It’s like victimizing them before the story even gets started.

2/ Why is the wounded character referred to in the feminine? To some readers, this could be considered sexist.

Thank you in advance for your answers