If Stories Were Your First Safe Place, This Is For You
Stories are a sanctuary to those who need it most.
For many of us, reading was our first escape from a cruel and hostile world. Later, we started writing, just so we could build our own sanctuaries from words.
If it hadn’t been for the endless volumes of ghost stories I devoured in the corner of my school library, I don’t know if I’d be here. But this path into writing comes with a dreadful cost.
It meant that all of my early stories had the same fatal, unsolvable flaw at their heart.
Solving that (and actually connecting with my readers) is one of the most painful and challenging things I’ve ever had to do. I learned a lot of things the hard way, and now that I edit stories for a living, I get to help other writers follow the same path I hacked through the weeds.
That’s what we’ll be doing today, and while this post won’t be useful to everyone, if you started writing to escape from your life (or even yourself) and kept going so you could help others who felt the same way, this is for you.
Here are all the things I wish someone had told me when I was wounded, lost, and clinging onto writing with everything I had.
“Stories can be healing. But the kind we feel most drawn to write are often not what others want to read.”
The Stories We Most Need to Write Aren’t the Ones That Reach Others
My early stories all played out the same way: an endless loop of hurt-comfort, where terrible things happened to the main character, they were powerless to stop it, and the only relief came when someone else stepped in to put them back together.
As a traumatised person, it felt like a warm blanket. Like the most natural thing in the world. Because when real people live through terrible things, we live that same desperate cycle. Our reactions become frozen, passive, or avoidant, and we desperately crave the support of someone who loves us—of anyone who will love us, and give us the care and compassion we’ve been starved of.
But here’s the heartbreaking truth about those stories: they make for terrible reading.
To create meaning (and ultimately, stories only exist to make meaning), readers need the main character to have agency. The protagonist doesn’t need to be the most powerful person in the room, but their actions need to matter.
The main character has to drive every moment forward with the ferocity of their goal. It’s the only thing that creates the vital, life-giving tension we need. It drives the whole engine of story, and when our protagonist is passive and powerless, it brings everything to a dead halt.
To make things even worse, every time a character cries, rages, or vents their emotions, we let a little more air out of the balloon—allowing more and more tension to vanish away. Most of the time, stories only come alive when emotions are expressed through action. Often while the character is fighting not to speak them out loud.
My stories were the exact opposite of this. They were rooted in passivity, venting pain and raw emotion, fixated on some saviour character who was there to give comfort. It was like plunging a knife into the balloon of the story: all the tension poured out immediately.
I was asking readers to simply witness suffering, and that sort of prolonged powerlessness can become overwhelming for our audience. Because when nothing the character does matters, and horrible things keep happening, it drains the story of meaning. Worst of all, it feels hopeless. And if we’re hoping to reach wounded readers (and offer a helping hand) then we’re doomed to fail from the start.
Because those people are reading to get away from those feelings.
There’s Nothing Wrong with You, Or Your Stories
It took me a long time to understand my writing could never reach others, and it hurt.
Accepting that my stories weren’t working was traumatic in itself. Like being told that my writing was wrong, that I was wrong, and the things I needed most were shameful and bad.
For someone who felt like I didn’t have a right to exist in the first place (let alone be myself), it was devastating.
The kind of agency I was being asked to write—where characters know what they want, take action, and persist no matter what—was completely alien to me. I had no agency or control over my own life. I’d only survived by collapsing, making myself small, and giving up. So of course I wrote characters who functioned the same way.
It was a while before I pulled myself out of that mire, but there was nothing wrong with the stories I was writing back then.
I just hadn’t decided who they were for.
Three Paths Diverge in the Forest, and You Must Choose Your Way
If we’ve been wounded in the past, or we want to write wounded characters, we have to start by deciding what we want.
Are we writing for others?
For people who are wounded like us?
Or just for ourselves?
While none of these choices are wrong, they all head in separate directions and require different skills.
The First Path: Writing for Yourself
There is something sacred about stories where a character suffers, feels powerless, and is rescued by someone else.
Writing these hurt-comfort stories is beyond validating. It’s personal survival work.
They help us to regulate our nervous system—creating (maybe for the first time) a feeling of safety. These stories exist to make us feel held. So we can be loved and nurtured in the way we always deserved.
Stories like that need to be written. They exist not to reach others, but to save the life of the writer, and there are few things more powerful than that.
So, if you feel the need to write these stories, follow that call. They have vital medicine to give. And when they’re finished, hold them close to your heart. If you have a therapist, or a trusted person who cares about you, then share these stories with them if you’d like. It can help them to understand you, and help you to feel seen.
Just don’t pressure these stories to be something they’re not. Don’t force them to change to meet the expectations of others. Accept that writing stories for an audience requires a different set of skills, and you can learn those skills whenever you’d like.
Write stories for others when you’re not actively drowning, fighting just to keep your head above water.
Or else, never write them at all. Keep your stories as something sacred and private: a map of your own inner psyche and your personal guidebook to healing.
The Second Path: Writing for Others
While writing loops of hurt-comfort can bring relief and healing to the writer, readers require a different approach.
To reach others, we have to create meaning, and in speculative fiction meaning always springs from the same source: the goal of our main character, and their agency in fighting towards it.
The protagonist doesn’t have to be all-powerful. Even bound and gagged in a pitch-black room, a character can have agency—so long as they have something to fight for, and so long as they never give up.
They don’t even need to reach their goal, or win every battle they fight. In fact, it’s often better if they don’t. Failure and setbacks are like the accelerator pedal of our story, adding tension and increasing the pace.
But whatever the case, the reader needs to feel like our protagonist’s actions mean something. That everything only happens because of what that character wants, and the things they do to get it.
The Third Path: Writing for Wounded Readers
If we’re writing for readers who have suffered too, we need to kindle a light in the darkness. And stories where harm is constant, agency lacking, and relief only comes from external caretakers often do the opposite. Unless we’re actively participating in the creation of those stories, they can feel hopeless.
Worse, stories of powerlessness can reinforce the idea that only someone else can save us. That puts the responsibility for healing onto others, and while magic can happen in stories, real-world saviours are few and far between.
Because of that, stories where the wounded protagonist is saved by someone else has two key effects on traumatised people:
It leaves them thinking, “Why has no one turned up to save me? It must be because I’m doomed. Or because there’s something wrong with me.”
It pushes them into a lifetime of seeking out love at all costs, opening the door to co-dependence and domestic abuse.
How do I know this? It’s because I was that traumatised reader. I spent decades lost and afraid, in brutal and abusive relationships, waiting for a saviour who never came for me.
To avoid doing this kind of harm, we need to witness and validate the pain of the wounded, while also throwing down a rescue line of agency to help them pull themselves out.
After years of trying, failing, and trying again, here’s how I’d do that.
Externalise the fight
All stories (and speculative fiction especially) thrive by transforming inner obstacles into external ones. As writers, this presents us with a whole host of glorious opportunities.
For example, instead of returning repeatedly to memories of a character’s violent alcoholic father, what if:
The father, or someone who fulfils the same role, comes into the story’s present moment with an agenda of their own?
The protagonist is tormented by a demon, ghost, or other supernatural creature that has many of the same behaviours, and hits the protagonist’s triggers in the same way?
We use the character’s traumatic reactions to create obstacles that actively get in the way of their goal?
By turning intangible forces into tangible or physical threats, we make the struggle more real.
And by having the character continue to fight towards their goal at every turn, we add vital tension and forward momentum.
Show imperfect agency
More than any other type of character, a traumatised protagonist’s goal must be infused with deep personal meaning.
It’s their light in the darkness: the one thing that’s worth fighting for, even when the world is unbearable. And even when things keep getting worse.
To make sure they have agency, the character needs a powerful, personal goal. After that, it doesn’t matter if they win or lose, so long as we make sure that:
Their goal is everything.
They never, ever give up.
Allow failure without collapse
It’s not that wounded characters can never cry or fall apart. But every time there’s a big release of emotion, it vents all the tension out of our story. And most of the time, that’s the opposite of what we want.
Bottling feelings up, trying to ignore them, then letting those emotions burst out sideways (through what the character does and the bad decisions they make) can be an important technique in achieving that, but it isn’t the whole picture.
Almost all traumatised people have a variety of coping mechanisms. And these might be constructive and helpful, or unhealthy and even destructive.
At the start of the story, the character might rely on their healthy strategies to deal with any problems. They might go for a run, use a mantra, or spend time in nature. But as the tension mounts and things get worse, those techniques can start to fail. That’s when we show the character spiralling into progressively more unhealthy coping mechanisms: relapsing into drug or alcohol addiction, disassociating, isolating themselves, or exploding in fits of rage.
If we want to create healing and resilience, we can even show them pulling themselves out of that nosedive, returning to their healthier strategies, and starting again.
When done right, this is an effective way of showing psychological stress while still building vital tension and keeping the character fixed on their goal.
Remove external salvation
This is the one that hurts.
But while our characters can find deep meaning, solace, and companionship in others, we cannot allow those other characters to be their constant safety net, providing unconditional comfort whenever the protagonist needs it.
The painful truth is that trauma causes profound and long-lasting difficulties in relationships—compromising our very ability to get the love and acceptance we need from other people.
“Hurt people hurt people,” as the saying goes, and traumatised people often act in ways that others find challenging, infuriating, upsetting, and even damaging.
Don’t be afraid to show that: how the wounded character acts in unacceptable ways, lashes out, or clings to others beyond the point of suffocation. The Emotional Wound Thesaurus can be extremely helpful in this work.
Whatever resources you use, remember that the goal is to show the reader three things:
Relationships are especially hard for traumatised people, and often cause pain to both sides.
Other people cannot save the character, or give the unconditional love they should have (but didn’t) receive when they needed it.
Relationships are still worth fighting for despite this. They’re worth enduring the difficulties and pain, worth working at, and finding a way through.
Let meaning shine
What good things exist in the character’s life? What can they salvage out of the awfulness? And what is still worth fighting for?
This can be the protagonist’s goal, their relationships with others, and a wide range of other things. Their values. The places they find beauty and purpose.
Character arcs are a vital piece of this puzzle. How does the character grow and heal, or regress, over the course of the book? And how can we dramatise that change through the obstacles they face, and the challenges they overcome?
How are they rewarded at the end for all their hard work? Or else, how are they punished for taking the wrong path and becoming the very thing they were fighting against?
I cannot recommend K.M. Weiland’s Creating Character Arcs highly enough for more on this!
There Are No Easy Answers
Nothing about trauma is ever straightforward, and that applies to writing about it.
Stories can be healing. But the kind we feel most drawn to write are often not what others want to read.
This forms a dreadful feedback loop with the traumatic experience: where we always feel like we’re doing something wrong, rejected in everything we do. It can trigger deep feelings that we aren’t good enough. That we have to change ourselves to fit the expectations of others.
It’s hard. It’s horrifically, intolerably hard. And deciding to write for ourselves is a totally reasonable response to that. Raging at the world, because the stories we most need to tell are the ones least likely to reach others, or getting upset about that fact, is a reasonable response.
I wish I had some way to fix that—an answer that would make the problem go away.
All I can say is that you’re not alone.
And that, if you keep treating yourself with compassion, keep writing your stories, and keep moving forward, then one day you’ll turn around and be in awe of how far you have come.
I promise.
Further Reading
If you’re interested in stories that “do trauma well,” here are some of the best that I’ve found over the years.
With the TV shows in particular, watch with care. I’ve provided a quick summary of content warnings, but you may want to investigate the subject matters further before throwing yourself in.
The Nightrunner Books
(Fantasy Novel Series)
Lynn Flewelling
Lynn Flewelling is both an author and a psychotherapist, and it shows. While trauma is mostly in the background of this series, Seregil is profoundly wounded and his relationship with Alec is complex—sometimes obsessive, sometimes difficult and painful, but always worth every moment.
Valhalla Murders
(TV Series, 2019)
CWs: Religious trauma, CSA, implied homophobia, violence, and alcohol use
I’ve talked about this show before, and for good reason: it’s one of the best examples of writing a traumatised character I’ve ever seen. A masterpiece of showing over telling, by the end we know exactly what Arnar went through in his past, without ever being told a single word.
Jessica Jones
(TV Series, 2015)
CWs: Domestic abuse, coercive control, alcohol abuse, violence
The first season of this show is a masterpiece of writing the traumatic experience. Jessica is a hot mess, the perfect example of a broken and traumatised protagonist, but the story is extremely active, focused, and healing. Jessica is extremely driven and never loses her agency, despite the awful things that happen to her.
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Cae Hawksmoor out here saving lives, both real and fictional. This article explains why the stories we write with traumatized MCs fall flat; because they don't have a sense of agency. They're just going with the flow, being led along by circumstances, because that's what we know as authors. I plan to use this information going forward. Thank you so much for this. 💜
Agree with this so much. Yes yes yes! I’m writing a main character (not sure if I’m doing it the best way!) that as a child is determined to save her mom and sister. She finds an inner strength to face her world (and stand up to an abuser) even though there are hints of domestic abuse and supernatural things happening. When we fast forward in her life, we’ll see how her past shaped her, and will better understand why she makes the choices she does.
Your article also gave me clarity. Helped me to check my story and hopefully, include the elements you have here. And it helped me to decide the ending of this serialized clean supernatural fiction that I’ve been writing. I was torn between a couple of endings. So thanks!