Saving The Trauma For Your Drama

THE DRAMA OF TRAUMA

Can you write about the trauma in your life?  Are you too close to it to be able to step back and see it for what it really is?  Most of us are to a certain extent, but we tend to use some of it in our writing whether we realize it or not.

Think about a tragedy that you experienced.  It could be the death of a family member or close friend, even a beloved pet.  What about that auto accident you had or almost had that you still think about when you get in a similar situation?  If your character needs to be in an auto accident, you recall what you felt and give it to the character.  That’s using the drama of the trauma.

Look at it from the other side.  How do you treat the trauma you caused for someone else?  What?  Of course, we’ve all cause some trauma in other people’s lives whether we know it or accept it or not.  Remember those classic lines your mother or father said? “This is going to hurt me more than it is you.”  In reality it probably did, but not at the time.  Have you repeated them to someone else, probably your children?’

How many writers are now, or were police officers, fire fighters, first responders or military?  For many of them, and I include myself in that group, writing about the trauma we’ve seen is something that we can’t avoid.  How can a police officer who has seen many fatal auto accidents, domestic violence situations or other horrible things that people do to each other just push those memories aside and not write about them?

I know a former helicopter pilot who flew in Viet Nam who upon retiring from the Army had a second career as a writer.  He wrote romance novels under an assumed name, of course.  I read a couple of them and in each one I could tell when he was reaching back and bringing up something that had happened when he was on active duty.  It was not blood and guts, but it was reality and it fit the scenario of his romance novels.

In reality, trauma, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.  How many times has someone sent you a link to a five-minute compilation of people doing really stupid things and paying the price for it?  Admit it, you laughed at their situation.  It was funny to you and to me, because it was not us who fell off the roof, or slid down the river bank when the rope broke or did a double back flip when the bicycle trip went south on us.  It’s much easier to write about their trauma than ours.

I did a workshop at a writer’s conference once on this subject and I asked the participants if someone would like to tell of a particular tragedy that they experienced.  I was completely unprepared for two of the response I got.  One lady said her husband’s picture was featured one night on America’s Most Wanted.  They had been married for several years and lived a normal life. He left the next day and has never been seen since.  Another person informed the assembled group that his grandfather had killed his grandmother as an act of love.  Both were in their 80’s and she was in very bad health and he did not want to see her suffer any longer. 

Both these people said they planned to use the situations in their writing.