: Re: Writing about extreme trauma I've just written a chapter in which one of my protagonists witnesses her entire family massacred during an invasion of her home city. This is obviously an extremely

@Karen856

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This is an old question, but for future interest, the first novel of the Kingkiller trilogy has an excellent example of this. As a child, the protagonist experiences a huge family trauma, and then almost immediately heads into the woods and lives there for half a year playing his father’s lute until the strings break and he is forced to return to the real world. It’s bizarre – but it works.

Another example off the top of my head is from a comic called Killing Stalking. The antagonist manipulates the unstable protagonist into murdering someone. Afterwards, the protagonist sits there and says, “What if she calls the police? Oh, but she can’t, can she, because she’s dead … But what if she does?”

Denial is a common coping mechanism. At an extreme level, this can be entirely unconscious, as the brain is simply incapable of processing the information of the scene it just witnessed. So it distracts itself. As said above, the character might focus on strange details of the event, or maybe they dissociate entirely and afterwards can’t remember a thing. Maybe they act in an unnervingly normal way because they can’t comprehend what the situation means. Or, as said by One Monkey above, the fight or flight reaction kicks in. I would avoid focussing on the character in question and keep it short and analytical. They describe what they see, but they can’t get a hold on their own state of mind or the emotions that go along with it.

If this is the route you take you then have to consider when the emotional reaction will hit. Maybe it’s weeks, or months, or even years later. Maybe after all that time it’s all slightly easier to come to terms with. Maybe it's harder. Or maybe they never quite deal with it, or it has become so repressed that they can’t even remember it. You can show how that eats away at the character, maybe bringing about their downfall as they become self-destructive. I wrote a story recently where the entire plot was a character discovering he had a repressed memory, and what it took to uncover it. The source of the trauma was short and descriptive, and afterwards he was simply somewhat relieved that he had somewhere to start as he began his recovery.

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