September 5, 2024 • 51 mins
The speculative element of Fantasy and SciFi makes them a remarkable medium to portray a variety of trauma. In this episode, I'm joined by authors Joshua Walker, B.S.H. Garcia (Bethany), and Calum Lott, alongside reviewer Kristen Shaffer to discuss a range of topics within this theme.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello everyone and welcome to Books Undone. I'm your host, Livia J. Elliot, and today
(00:16):
we are back with a guest talk. This is another meta discussion in which we will delve into
the theme of the pictures of trauma in fantasy books. Today we have several new guests, so
let me introduce you to them. Hi, I'm Josh Walker. I'm a relatively new fantasy author
who debuted this year with my book, The Rest to the Gods, and my debut novel, An Exile
(00:39):
of Water and Gold, comes out on September 3rd. Hi, I'm Bethany Garcia. I write under
B.S.H. Garcia. I am currently publishing an epic fantasy series called The Heart of Quinaria.
The first book, Of Thieves and Shadows, came out last June. I also have two novellas, From
the Ashes and From the Depths, with the second book in the series set to release this September.
(01:00):
Hey, yeah, my name's Callum Lott. I just published my debut novel, A Dirge for Cascius. It is
the first part of a science fantasy duology epic space opera with a detective murder mystery.
Hi, I'm Kristen. I'm not an author per se, but I am a reviewer and part of the science
fiction fantasy insiders team on social media. You can probably find me under the book hermit
(01:24):
on other locations. Before we start, let me tackle some disclaimers. First, this is a
meta discussion, and also we will mention different books, our own or from other authors.
We will try to keep it a spoiler light. Second, we are discussing quite a charged topic and
listening about it may not be easy for everyone. Also, we will aim to not be explicit. The
(01:49):
topic itself may be a huge trigger for some. Feel free to stop listening at any time. Third
and finally, what you will hear is our subjective opinion about this topic and at this particular
moment in our lives. You may disagree and that's fine. Now, let me finally start with
a short question that is not as easy to answer. What has been the most heavy hitting, deep
(02:14):
and personal representation of trauma in either fantasy or sci-fi that you have read so far
and why?
I think for me, it would have to be, there's probably a few good ones, but it would have
to be either quote in The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothbush. I'm talking about him
in his older years looking back on his life or possibly the members of Bridge 4 from the
(02:37):
Stormlight Archive. They're the ones that stand out to me the most.
Definitely, Kalidine's journey through depression is one of the best things that I have read.
I agree with you. I think Shalan as well from the Stormlight Archive, it's just an impressive
character. For me in particular, I will say Flowers for Algernon. I had to read half of
that book with tissue paper at hand because it was just so up and close and personal.
(03:01):
Yeah, that's a beautiful book. I haven't read that in a long time, but it's a beautiful
book.
Mine's going to be my second favorite story of all time. It's a manga called Berserk.
I don't know if anyone's heard of Berserk. This was like Grim Dark before Game of Thrones
or anything was even really a thing. But being a manga, it has the artwork with the dialogue,
so you get to see the drawings of everything. Fighting these ways through hordes of demons,
(03:24):
it's just absolutely brutal, but it also shows terrible things that other human beings can
do.
Some people think that it's done gratuitously, and a lot of it is incredibly difficult and
confronting to read. But many others think that it accurately portrays the violence of
one of the worst things that a human being can do. I've read accounts from people on
both sides of this, so they're all valid because everything's subjective in the end. But I
(03:48):
tend to agree with the latter in that the story of Berserk reflects the struggle of
trauma and the attempt to overcome it. Art can be triggering or therapeutic to the reader.
The character of Guts is always struggling, he's always persevering, but he's never seeking
self-sympathy or fitting himself, he's just doing it. And a lot of people can learn through
(04:09):
that story about how to deal with their own trauma. I have.
You guys are giving me a lot more of my TBR because I have not read any of these so far.
On the shelf they go. I tend to read a lot of, I guess, more trauma-driven stories, just
darker, more depressing themes in most of my media. But one that's stuck with me ever
(04:31):
since I've read it is the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. The opening pages, I know
of the first book, lose a lot of readers right off the bat because it dives into trauma just
from the get-go. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler because it's right there in the
opening pages, but she starts the book, Issun, the main character, by dealing with witnessing
(04:53):
the death of her toddler at the hands of her husband because of the magic that he carries.
But N.K. Jemisin's a brilliant writer for so many reasons, but I think she really handles
trauma well while simultaneously empowering her characters. The books are definitely not
for the faint of heart, but I don't think I've seen a lot of people handle it quite
(05:13):
as masterfully as she does.
I have. There's three books that immediately come to mind, and all of them are dark fantasy,
which is my preferred genre in reading, the first one being A Memory of Song by Scott
Palmer. He has written a genuinely dark fantasy tale that is full of trauma and revenge and
(05:40):
the things that he puts some of those characters through. It was definitely a bit more on the
darker side, and I deeply enjoyed it. And then he carried that over into his novella,
The Sound of Starfall, which in my opinion, if you read A Memory of Song first and then
Starfall second, the impact of the novella is just tenfold.
(06:03):
Another author that a lot of people have heard me talk about and recommend is another one
of our Australian indie authors, and that is Damian Francis. And he wrote The Tome of
Heron, and that is another very dark tale where the characters in there, not so much
as like mental trauma, but more physical trauma that they're experiencing and they're going
(06:24):
through as they embark on this epic journey to secure a very magical artifact that an
enemy is also seeking after. And just some of the descriptions in his writing of death
and trauma is very jaw dropping and definitely not for the faint of heart, but it just it
(06:46):
blows you away. And one of the last ones that I really enjoyed that also focuses on physical
and emotional trauma is Renia by Karl Forshaw. He has another fantastic way of writing, and
so his main characters, not only is she going through physical trauma, so to say, she's
trying to rebuild relationships, she's trying to discover herself and what she's good at,
(07:13):
kind of in the story that he's created. And he has a couple chapters in there that are
pretty dark and very well written, very, very well written. I know he had a lot of trigger
warnings and we did a buddy read of it in the SFFI Discord. And there was a lot of people
that were really, you know, just blown away by his writing. But whenever I hear, you know,
(07:36):
trauma and dark fantasy, those are so far my main, you know, three authors that really
come to mind.
Absolutely. And when I was listening to you, I think that something that struck me is that
it can be very confronting to read, but as well, we all mentioned different stories that
they are all featuring trauma in one way or another, but the trauma they feature is different
(08:00):
because we mentioned the loss of children or depression or overcoming the loss of the
parents in the case of Rhenia. And all of them are things that end up marking the characters.
It's not only an event that takes place and that's it. It's something that the characters
carry through. So that's my question for you. In particular, something as deep as trauma,
(08:25):
it's very difficult to convey and to convey the extent of it as the years go by because
it may change how the character sees the world, how they interpret events in a way that it
could be very different to what the reader is expecting the character to do. So my question
is how do you handle trying to explain that mindset of the traumatized character to the
(08:50):
reader?
I think that's a really good question. Part of it, I would say, and I think probably a
lot of us would relate to this, but part of it would be semi-subconscious because obviously
every character includes a part of us. And so I think there's a lot of subconscious fueling
their actions, their decision-making, how they come across and how they interact with
one another and a lot of how they might interact with one another in a book, for me at least,
(09:14):
resembles the way that I have these different parts of myself that conflict, that come to
a head. But I also think another thing that I always try to do is to accentuate micro-behaviors.
So to basically take a set of micro-behaviors that look one way for one character and have
them appear completely differently for another. And that usually gives the reader an in to
(09:36):
explore a little bit more about where they might have come from or what their story is.
So there's a lot of things you can do with subtext. I would say that's the key to something
like this. We're talking about trauma, it manifests in so many different ways. So subtext tends
to be the answer for me.
I think for me, sometimes it's hard to kind of put into words how I approach my writing.
At least when I'm trying to step into my characters, I apply a lot of my former acting background.
(10:02):
So before I was a writer, I did a lot of plays and theater and commercials and things. And
when I approach writing, it's always from that character first mindset. And like I take
a minute before I'm in a scene or in anything and I just really try to immerse myself in
that character because once I'm in their skin, I don't think about it as it's happening,
really, it just kind of like Josh was saying, it kind of just it's just there in your subconscious
(10:26):
and you start thinking as a character and you start reacting as they would in that circumstance.
So I feel like a lot of it comes organically in the editing phase. There's always a chance
to go through and see, you know, if it's coming back clear enough to the readers, because
sometimes something might be so obvious to you, but maybe it was too subtle and you need
(10:46):
to make it a little more obvious for people. But I also think there's a fine line between
conveying the trauma skillfully and subtly without beating people over the head with
it, because I've definitely read some books where it's like every page is the trauma almost
to the point where it's been lost and it doesn't carry like the emotional punches when you
need it to because it was just been dumped nonstop. So I feel like it's an art, but it's
(11:08):
kind of something you do just you feel out and I think you know when it's right and when
it's bringing through.
Definitely. And I think you both did the same on your novellas to also present the trauma
differently depending on the age of the character. Like, for example, Josh, Nisha thinks about
it very differently when she's young versus when she's older. And Bethany, on From the
(11:32):
Depths, you have your children characters that they also think of what's happening in
a childlike way. To me, at least, it's also about the stage of the trauma. It's not the
same as depicting the situation as it happens, as I did in Dance with Me or Years After the
Fact because the character may think differently. When things are happening, one may not necessarily
(11:59):
reason or understand that it is a traumatic event. But somebody who has survived for 20
years after the fact, they may look at it in a different way. They may see themselves
differently. And that's also part of how the story is presented. I agree with you, Bethany.
It has to be done in a very elegant way without hammering over and over because it loses an
(12:22):
impact.
Yeah, I definitely agree with that not going overboard. But you also want to show honesty.
I think honesty is the goal to strive for. I think I learned that from Joe Alacombe.
You want it to be true to the real world. You can't be too afraid to shy away from anything.
The real world is cruel. And to not try and show that would be disingenuous, I guess.
(12:49):
But it's all dependent on the type of story you want to write. Yes, that honesty can come
from your own trauma or through the experience of others.
So yeah, kind of a little bit different, you know, because I'm not a writer or an author.
I would say that having events that take place in the book, even if it's just like flashbacks
(13:10):
or snippets, Carl's really good at doing that in his book, that just kind of give the reader
that sense of where the trauma has taken place. And then just having it be more natural and
not too overbearing, because that's where, at least as me as a reader, if it's constant
trauma and death and violence, and you know, whatever it may be in the dark fantasy setting,
(13:35):
and there's no break or reprieve from that, then it does affect the story in that way.
It's just exhausting to read. So, you know, having everything build naturally, and in
a sense of, you know, kind of understanding characters' trauma, I mean, you know, some
people can relate their own experiences to experiences that characters are going in a
(13:57):
book. So in a sense, drawing on anything that maybe you've experienced in your life that
can help you better understand what they are going through, because every trauma experience
is the same. You know, one reader can interpret it one way, one reader can interpret it another
way, but just having, you know, everything, you know, as Callum said, just be very natural,
(14:20):
flowing and more like real world, down to earth, that's in the sense that when I enjoy
reading that genre, some of it is that I do pay attention to.
What you mentioned is actually quite an interesting point. If you are able to show the origin
of a trauma or what caused the trigger, then it's also easier for the reader to understand.
I don't like to use the word relatability, but when we have been through specific things
(14:45):
in our life, it's easier to pick when those things or those traits are appearing in characters,
regardless of how the writer may have put it up. When you have stories that are very
dependent on what happened to the character, when the trauma that they have been through
are the triggers they are suffering right now, I think that, Kristen, you are correct
(15:06):
in saying that you also need to have the source of it to help the reader understand what's
causing that trauma, perhaps in a way that's not explicit, because it doesn't have to
be explicit to make a point.
I like what you said about not needing to be explicit. One book that I think about a
lot, I read it a while ago, but I don't know if anyone's read Prince of Thorns and the
(15:27):
subsequent sequels by Mark Lawrence. So I think Bethany, you'd probably love it. It's
super dark. Something that I think he flips on its head is that idea of implied trauma.
There's an element of that, but he also throws it in your face quite overtly. In fact, the
main character, Jörg, he's basically fueled by trauma incessantly and everything he does
(15:49):
is commandeered by trauma, as though it's hanging over him like some kind of captain
of the ship. He sails through an interesting journey from, I won't spoil too much, but
he rises into the position of being an emperor and that whole journey. Usually what you'd
expect to see is a character growing and changing in order to achieve something like that. But
(16:10):
with Jörg, he just gets more decrepit and dark and angry. And somehow there's that contrast
where you've got these two things coming to a head that shouldn't be correlated, but they
are. So that's another really powerful way, I think, to actually write trauma into a story,
is to really look at how the wrong way to respond to trauma can still ultimately change
(16:31):
your path or your destiny. That's super interesting to me as well. So oftentimes with my own writing,
I tend to think more dentively, shall we say, and I really want the characters to feel like
they can come back from whatever they've been affected by. But in my reading experience,
the stuff that's stuck out to me more are these characters who really aren't redeemed
at all and looking at exactly how much trauma affects them and how it exponentially continues
(16:54):
to destroy them over time.
That's actually quite a great point. I think Glockta in Eberkrum's first law is the same
example. Yeah. He acts in a way, like he embraced everything that happened to him and he acts
in a way that somehow reinforces his trauma. I'm trying to be a spoiler light, but the
way he tortures people and he thinks about that profession as an inquisitor he has, it's
(17:21):
completely correlated about the trauma. He knows about it. There is a very explicit conversation
about it. Yet at the same time, Glockta is never trying to fix it or to replace it. And
I think that's also perhaps something that the depictions of trauma in books cannot achieve.
The fact that you have a character that embraces what happened to them and doesn't want to
(17:44):
heal, or you may have characters that understand what happened to them, may want to heal, may
not heal, but don't know how to. But there are also characters who don't understand that
they went through a traumatic event, characters who simply believe life has been shit and
that's it. And they are weak and they are, and they put up all these self-deprecating
(18:08):
words towards themselves when they are actually victims and survivors of that event. And I
think it's also different ways of coming to the same point. And they are diverse as well,
because we people see the world in a different way. Not every survivor is going to react
in the same way to a traumatic event, even when the traumatic event may be of the same
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nature.
On that note, I was going to say that, I don't know if it's a trope so much, but one of my
favorite things is when we follow two characters who come from very similar circumstances,
whether it was a school program or siblings or soldiers, whatever it might be. And then
you watch their paths, like, you know, completely split vector from each other. And I think
(18:52):
the reason it rings so true is because it is so common. You can have two people growing
up in an identical circumstance and then the way that they acknowledge or refuse to acknowledge
and then handle that trauma going forward is sometimes what creates the villain versus
the hero. You know, I feel like a lot of superhero films use that. It's just such an interesting,
like a case study of people and how we all react. You know, you see generational trauma
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all the time, even in parenting styles, and you'll see people who hated how they were
raised, but then they can't help but repeat it with their own children or, you know, people
who do everything they can to be the opposite. And they go so far in the other direction
that they end up causing just a different trauma. And yeah, it's all really fascinating.
And I think when you when explored in books, it can be done in a substantial way that we
(19:37):
can't get the same look at that as we can like in film or something.
To me, at least it can be more personal in books because we end up having the POV of
a character, we end up having their thoughts, which sometimes can be very scrambled and
hoping from one topic to another because that's something that the pairs of trauma, which
(19:57):
are generally anxiety and depression will cause that you will end up hoping from one
idea to the other. And in a way that sometimes may feel quote unquote illogical for a reader
because I think that the way anxiety or depression may steer someone's thoughts may seem illogical
or unreasonable to someone who never experienced it. So that's the question. How do you recognize
(20:23):
that as a reader? And how do you attempt to explain that as a writer?
That's a really good question. The book that comes to mind for me that I really thought
about when I was writing my novella was Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson. I don't know if anyone's
read that, but the cool thing about that book is that it's a really interesting premise,
(20:44):
but essentially you've got two sisters, both the daughters of King and one of them gets
married off to a God King in another kingdom and she wasn't actually meant to be the one
that went. So there's kind of like this dichotomy from the start about who should have gone
and who shouldn't have. But the thing I love about that, it kind of goes back to what Bethany
was saying before, that contrast between two characters who they've been raised the same
(21:06):
way, they're both fundamentally different people with unique qualities. The way that
it ends up going is that the sister who probably went there experiences trauma in a radically
different way to the sister that should have gone there. And so you end up seeing these
kind of completely different growth and development arcs over time. And when you get to the end
of the book, it's quite like it's stuck the way that the two sisters have changed fundamentally
(21:29):
from who they were from page one. I don't want to spoil anything, which is why I'm
not over explaining this, but that's something that I really wanted to try and do with my
novella. And with my novella, there's not two characters, there's one, but I tried to
use time to accentuate that instead. So in that book, my main character exists in the
current timeline and then we see her past timeline and the chapters kind of alternate.
(21:53):
And those two timelines actually kind of, the climaxes of both those stories happen
at the same time. They're not necessarily correlated events, but it gives us a look into
how she experiences traumatic events at different ages and how that reflects into her experience
as she grows older. So yeah, I really liked the idea of how circumstance plays a big role
(22:13):
in trauma and also how the temperament of the person can radically change the way that
you might respond to it. That's super interesting to me.
Just again, I think it just comes back to honesty for me and my classic advice of showing,
you want to show the reader that they can pick up whatever lesson from the story themselves.
(22:36):
Like they got to do the work themselves.
Interesting. And picking up on what you said, Josh, before you mentioned Guaz and from The
Name of the Wind, I think it has a very interesting blend of both approaches because in the past
timeline, especially when he's on Tarvian, we can see events that happened and we get
(22:59):
some events hinted in a very subtle way, but then Guaz makes the comments when he's older.
Like he goes, for example, through extreme poverty. And I think that's also a type of
trauma. There is a scene in which he says to Chronicle, I have two pairs of shoes, two
(23:19):
pairs of shoes, and finally four shirts. And it seems so silly. But when you put it in
the context of what he went through, of how he had just crumbled for the bare minimum
to go by, it takes a completely different meaning. It's not about only showing the event
(23:40):
or the effects of it. To me, it's also showing the context and how that changed the meaning
of what happened to a character.
Yeah. And there's another interesting thing I think that comes from that in that book
especially, which is that because Guaz is an unreliable narrator, the way that trauma
might have affected his life is somewhat indeterminable to us as readers as well. So we're going on
(24:03):
the journey with him and we only get glimpses into how he really feels about his life when
he's talking to the chronicler in the current timeline. And there's not much of that, obviously,
as we know in the story, it's more of a narration of his past, but he doesn't let us in much
even though we're seeing the events, we're not getting the attached emotions to that.
So that's something that's really well done. And I think it's another cool way to show
(24:26):
how someone might suppress parts of themselves, right?
Picking on that, something that Rodfuss did to me magnificently is to show the shame of
it. People react to trauma in different ways. We can have, for example, Glockdach who reacts
in a very bitter way. He's angry about it and he takes it another, but Guaz is ashamed
(24:48):
of his past. He's ashamed of having been poor of things that happened to him. I'm not saying
that one thing is correct or not. I'm just saying that it's very common for survivors
to feel ashamed and to feel that to some extent they were to blame. That's also that may happen
even when logically I'm from the outside, we can see that the blame lies on the person
(25:14):
inflicting it on the abuser.
I was just going to say, kind of on that note, something that's always fascinated me too
are the people and characters who almost take pride in their trauma in the sense that it
like, oh, wow, I'm grateful this happened to me. It made me this way. It made me stronger.
And how that almost makes them feel good about inflicting the same trauma on someone else.
(25:34):
I think especially in physical abuse situations, that that can just create this really horrible
ripple effect of somebody thinking that they very well may have grown stronger through
the trials and become more resilient. But maybe that character then doesn't see that
there could have been other ways to gain that strength or that they don't need to recreate
(25:56):
that for other people to have them be that way. And I think I see that more, especially
in themes of toxic masculinity and where certain characters are trying to live up to other
character standards and earn their respect. But that's been something that's fascinated
me just in terms of trauma and how people react to it.
I was thinking about actually one of your books, which is Dance With Me, one of your
(26:19):
interactive stories. And I think something that works very well in that story is the
way that the main character does feel that shame. And I think the shame kind of nearly
holds more weight over them than the trauma itself. And at the end of that story, what
particularly struck me about it was the way that shame translates into guilt and into
(26:41):
kind of feeling like you become a prisoner of your own mind. But that's something that
I think is super dangerous for anybody to experience. But also, I think it points at
the deeper ways that certain people relate to traumatic experiences.
Yeah. In Dance With Me in particular, what I wanted to capture is the resistance sometimes
(27:06):
the victim may have about the changes that the trauma inflicted. You may want to remain
as you were because the person that you become, it's not you, it's someone else. And I think
that's what Lyra goes through in that story combined with the fact that she doesn't understand
that she's being bullied and abused. And that also can change how the character reacts.
(27:30):
Because if you cannot understand that the other person is an abuser, then you cannot
stand up against them. That also chips away at someone's ability to defend themselves.
That's why Lyra ends up falling in that circle of, I should be able to do this when she's
literally in that story falling apart. So yeah. Thank you, Yosh.
(27:53):
Some of the other aspects of trauma, just in the way of processing it. And Josh, I'm
going to use your novella as an example. But in the early stages, your main character then,
kind of like experiencing the five stages of grief a little bit. When she finds out
that she is a sleeper, kind of processing going from losing everything, all the life
(28:16):
that she knew and she had, going through those five stages of grief, becoming she's in denial,
and then she's becoming angry. She's bargaining with her mentor. She's slowly adjusting to
this. But kind of in the end, especially as the two timelines are kind of running right
side by side of each other, you've seen that she has already accepted it. But you didn't
(28:38):
know that unless you were in her younger timeline, kind of understanding all the things that
she went through and then all the things that she had seen. Especially that one specific
climax on the younger timeline, just kind of seeing what all she went through and she processed.
So I feel like, I don't know if that was a correct interpretation, but I felt like it
was done really well. And you could kind of see how her trauma went, developed, and how
(29:03):
she eventually accepted it and became where she was.
Appreciate that. I think you hit the nail on the head. The idea that, and this is what
I was talking about before, with anything, the way that I approached it was using time,
but other people might approach it through different avenues. But take a character like
Shalan from the Stormlight Archive and the way that she responds to what's happened in
her past, it's actually quite similar. So we see a younger version of her kind of heathered
(29:25):
throughout the story and it's very occasional. And as we see her main storyline kind of come
to a head at the end of the book, that is when we kind of get this deliverance of like,
okay, this is what it means. This is why she is where she is. And this is also why people
begrudgingly accept what becomes of them. Right? Like that's something that's super
interesting. And it goes back to what I was saying about subtext. So I think a lot of
(29:47):
this could be implied, but if you want to tell it overtly, then you got to be careful
because you need to do it in a way that sustains the richness of the narrative while also not
making the trauma appear like it's nothing, if that makes sense. I think it's very easy
to downplay. Look, if you think about just common story structure, at the end of the
day, every story kind of begins with this inciting incident where a character will get
(30:10):
pulled away from their normal life and flung into a whole new world. And their primary
struggle is how do I cope with this massive change? I mean, effectively, if you think
about it like that, there is a traumatic event at the heart of the beginning of every single
narrative. The question is, how much are we actually considering the impact of this on
our characters? Because it's very easy to kind of, you know, I always use Toy Story
(30:32):
as an example, but you know, look at Toy Story, right? Like you got Buzz and Woody and the
way that those two characters are formed by completely different past experiences and
the way that they both get taken out of kind of standard life. Both of those things are
completely kind of contrasted the whole way through, you know, Woody's kind of standard
life in Andy's room versus Buzz Lightyear's standard life, so to speak, of him considering
(30:55):
his past kind of lore and his role in space and stuff like that. And the way that they
come to a realization of, oh, no, this is what the world actually is. And this is why
we shouldn't try to run from what we already have. That's super interesting to me.
With that theory of like trauma as you're like the inciting event being trauma, which
I do like and I think I agree with. In that sense, you can almost look at every story
(31:18):
for being plot driven versus character driven is maybe how much that inciting event's trauma
like impacts the character over the course of the narrative. And I think maybe how much
that's shown that the change on the characters over the story is what makes it feel more
character driven versus when you feel less of the effects of the trauma, then that's
maybe what people classify as more of a plot driven.
Yeah, that's really interesting. I'm trying to think of an example of a story that we
(31:42):
would all consider to be plot driven so that we can kind of pull it apart a bit more because
I think you kind of, yeah, you've got something there. It's really interesting.
One that comes to mind with that approach to me is World War Z. If you saw the movie,
forget it because it's nothing like the book, but that book appears to be very plot driven
in the sense that you get different interviews with too many people and through what they
(32:05):
tell you, you end up picking up what happened with the zombies, which are just a MacGuffin,
not really the point of the story. But if you pay attention to every one of the interviews,
you can see the effect the zombie war had on the people and what they had to do. So
there is, for example, a girl that is a stock, she's 25, but her mind is a stock as if she
(32:27):
was six years old the moment that everything happened. And you have a politician who is
wearing a lot of regret because of the decisions he had to make. It's what Bettany said, if
you look at it as a whole, it's plot driven. If you look at every narrative, every chapter
as a short story, then it becomes very character driven. But at the same time, it's very implicit
(32:48):
because you need the whole context to understand the effect it had in the individuals. It's
a great point, honestly.
On that note, there was something that I wanted to bring up. I think, Yoshua, you mentioned
that the circumstance changes the character. And then, Bettany, you also mentioned the
two characters with the same thing that divert. And I think that you actually managed that
(33:11):
from the depths because we have all siblings that are going through the same family trauma.
They react completely different, but also the secondary characters expect different
things from them. And that's also what, in my opinion, ended up making the trauma and
the situation they were going through have a different impact on them. I think that when
(33:33):
you are depicting trauma, it goes beyond the main character or the victim to also be a
matter of how that affects the secondary characters, whether they reinforce it, saying like, it's
not such a big deal. Or if they have attitudes of, you should stand up for yourself, you
should defend yourself. Or if they step up and defend the character, or if they are oblivious
(33:54):
to it, I think that also contributes to how the situation is seen.
Yeah, on the one hand, you can have characters in the same type of trauma, in the same position,
but societal or familial expectations that are thrust upon them are going to completely
change how they react. Like for me, I'm an oldest sibling in real life, so, you know,
there was a circumstance with my three younger siblings and it was related to punishment
(34:18):
or anything else. You know, my take on the situation was different. My outlook was different.
The expectations on me were different. Yeah. And from the depths, having, you know, the
traumatic semi-abusive situation in the home with the parents of the two main characters,
Conor and Carlaya, you're watching them react to the trauma, but then you've got the slight
age gap, you've got different genders, and then you've got how each parent sees each
(34:43):
child and it kind of plays into what they view as traumatic, what they tolerate from
each other, what they tolerate from each parental figure, and it creates this really messy situation
for them that sets them on very different trajectories as they grow.
Yeah, definitely. And they also think very differently. In your novella, what really
(35:03):
struck me was that they had those childlike thoughts that at the same time were very mature
because the trauma forces a character, especially children, to grow up. And that's something
that I also saw in Josje's novella that Nisha sometimes thinks like an adult, even on the
past timeline. That's basically because I honestly think that childhood trauma in particular
(35:29):
ends up forcing children to grow up. And if a reader doesn't really catch that, they may
think that the child character is not acting like a child when they are actually acting
like a traumatized child.
Yeah, childhood is the most formative of years. So it's just natural that you grow into what
happens to you as a child and you get to always confront that, what you happened. Some people
(35:53):
go their whole lives without confronting the traumatic thing that happens. So I think that's
something to strive towards.
I have a lot of feelings on this. One of my pet peeves is when people kind of dumb down
children, especially children characters. And I think there's a disconnect that happens
as we grow or we get children less credit for how they process how aware they are of
(36:15):
the world. And I've talked with you about this before, Olivia, but if you add in that
trauma, kids are just, they're forced to mature. You think back to most countries and cultures,
even a hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago, kids were forced to become adults at
such a young age. So for the modern reader, looking at just most modern day kids, they
might not see that kids could have that emotional maturity or like those complex feelings and
(36:38):
thoughts and almost adult thoughts at times, but there's definitely space for it given
certain circumstances and trauma. And one series that this makes me think of is Game
of Thrones, you know, Saga Fire and Ice, because a lot of people can't like grapple with how
young George RR Martin's actually written most of the characters, especially if you
watch the show, they've aged them up for a lot of reasons and controversies, which
(36:59):
is valid, but a lot of those characters are super young. Like I think Danny's like 12
in the first book and John and all of them and Ari is like eight and they come off a
lot more mature on the page, but I don't think it's disingenuine to children of that age
at all. And I think that's something that just not all readers might not grasp. And
(37:20):
I think you have to be okay with that as they get in favor of authenticity.
Why has society like, yeah, sort of just protecting our children a lot more now, like they can
be quite mature at a young age and like smart like they're sponges, they absorb everything,
like they're really onto it. But now it feels like we're really like just protecting them,
like keeping them shielded from the bad, like the terrible things in the world.
(37:45):
Big bad world. Yeah. I think that's a natural inclination for us to feel the risk in sabotaging
like a child's innocence. And I think that's a good, that's a good thing to feel resistant
towards, but I do agree. And I think like, especially as a teacher, something I've noticed
a lot is how astute like, you know, even like younger year three kids can be about the world
(38:06):
around them based on their given situations and circumstances at home. And you kind of
just hear, you know, kids will just tell you stuff during the day at school. And a lot
of times I'm usually taken aback by how well they understand the complexities of things
in their life that other kids might not be experiencing. And I think the child often
doesn't realize how well they understand the complexity as well. So I think there's a bit
(38:27):
of like, there's a human aspect there that I think we do forget about. Kids are a lot
stronger and more aware than any of us think. But I also think as an adult now, it's super
overt to me as a teacher, what childhood is like, and it's a feeling that you can't really
get back as an adult. Like I see glimpses of it every day and I'm like privileged to
see that, but I can never really relive the feeling of being a kid again. And so I think
(38:52):
that does mean that it's easy for us to impart a sense of expectation or lack thereof on
children as adults because we somehow in our growth and development, we lose the ability
to look back on exactly how childhood was for us. And so the only way to live that experience
again is to see it through other children, but you can't really like it. You can't grasp
it. So actually that in and of itself to me is somewhat of a small kind of trauma. I think
(39:19):
that can affect all of us. I think it's very reasonable to miss the simplicity of childhood
life. And I find it interesting how we tell stories and things, we're all readers or writers
here and we tell stories and we appreciate stories. And I think a lot of times that's
because we want to get something back from where we came from, right? Or like that sense
of imagination or wonder about the world that we now lack in our current point in life.
(39:45):
I also work in the education field. So, I mean, I used to be a teacher. I'm not anymore.
I'm now an assistant director of a school and just being around, you know, kids who
are five to six years old. No, I agree a lot with what Josh said. It's a tough topic to
talk about. And just in my opinion, talking about trauma is 10 times easier than talking
(40:07):
about children trauma, just because if you are an educator, you know, you're around kids
all day, you've probably seen things. So it's not something that I probably dealt too deep
into personally, just because, yeah, I don't know, I just work with kids. So it's a tough
topic.
On that note, I think it always comes to mind, the flower for Algernon to me, and specifically
(40:30):
because of one point of how we perceive the survivors to be. We expect sometimes unconsciously
or because we are preset by society, we expect that survivors are cowering or afraid of what
happened or always living under a shadow. But on that book on flowers for Algernon,
(40:50):
after everything that happens to Charlie, he's very vocal about what happened, while
at the same time being very traumatized and afraid, and suffering flashbacks. As a reader,
I have gone to, could read sometimes, not only on these books, but in other books, notice
reviews that said, that's not how a survivor acts. And there are as many ways as a survivor
(41:14):
can react after the fact than a type of trauma there can be. It's not a prescription, it's
as we said before, it's something completely different for every character, for every person.
I think it's more of how we present it. If we give a reader enough clues to actually
guess what's happening and understand it or develop empathy through the understanding
(41:41):
of that character. In terms of that, how will you approach it and what advice will you give
to someone wanting to write something like that?
That whole topic is kind of a hot button issue for sure, because you've got people who have
maybe experienced the trauma that's being discussed in the book. And like you said,
(42:04):
they said that's not an accurate representation because that wasn't how it happened for them.
And then on the flip side, I have a lot of authors that I know just behind the scenes
who write about certain types of trauma, but they're not public with it because that's
their trauma and they shouldn't have to justify their experiences. It's their right to keep
that private. And so they might be bringing something very personal to the page. And then
(42:29):
you might have a readership that is tearing it apart because they don't think the author
is coming from that. So I don't know. I think at least for me as a reader and a writer,
I try to take everything with a grain of salt and understand that we are all very different
people with very different perspectives. And you don't know somebody's background, especially
(42:52):
the person writing it. But I think the main thing to watch out for is when it's done to
glorify the trauma. And I think we see a huge issue with this with rape trauma specifically.
It's been done in a way, especially by some notable authors in the past where it's glorified.
And it's not even, we don't even see the fall or the trauma of the character. It's just
(43:13):
done for shock value. And so I think anybody who's writing trauma needs to be coming from
a good place ultimately and writing it because it's true to the character, demanded of the
character and then handled in the most tasteful way. And for some people that might require
getting sensitivity readers if it is something that is completely unknown to them. And then
of course, if you're writing from a personal experience, I tend to think that's usually
(43:35):
done from the best place. But I think that's my biggest issue with trauma is just that
rape is just a really overdone trope that's been just done for shock and awe again and
again. And I think that's why a lot of people are really weary of it and rightfully so because
it's been handled poorly so many times, especially to add character development to female characters.
Completely. I think that's one of the worst things that can happen because it also cheapens
(44:03):
it out for the people in the real world. Besides that doesn't need to happen for a female character
to actually have development. People can evolve without having to go through hardship. That's
a truth. It's not something that you need to put in a book to make a character deep.
You can achieve depth in a character without any type of trauma as well. I completely agree
(44:26):
with you, Bestanie. I think it's overdone to some extent. Anything that is, even if
it is approached with good intention, it can also be overdone.
Yeah. I also think that like generally speaking, if you can't write from something in your
very vast selection of experiences, then there is a high risk that that's going to come across
inaccurately or lacking sensitivity. For me, I've just got a personal rule that I'm not
(44:52):
going to explore traumas that I can't relate to necessarily unless maybe a person close
to me in my life that I know has experienced this trauma, I can have a closer level of
sympathy. At the end of the day, I think if you can't have empathy for someone in an experience,
then it's very hard to actually be able to relate that with justice. I think a lot of
(45:12):
the times I agree with what Bestanie said. I think it's an overused way to kind of write
trauma. I think it's a little bit of a cop out. I think it's quite common in fantasy
to use it as a bit of a cop out. And that's bad because I mean, think about really what
you're writing about. You're writing about quite a severe thing that affects people much
more than it should. When we're telling stories of trauma, we really need to draw from experience
(45:35):
to be genuine in our writing.
Another thing actually that I was thinking about while you were both talking was the
idea of perspective. So I don't know if anyone's seen the movie or read the book Atonement
by Ian McEwan. It's a really good way to investigate trauma and perspectives to read that book
because it's essentially about a character who is gaslit and essentially the way that
(45:55):
misperception can change the truth and how that is then shown to other people and how
they choose to believe it. I find that interesting because I mean, I'm a firm believer, philosophically
speaking, in objective truth rather than relative truth. But I think relative truth is intrinsic
to being human because we have perspectives that form and shape us. So another thing you
(46:16):
can do when you're trying to write trauma is to really consider how perspective is going
to alter a given scenario. That's another tip I would probably give writers.
I think perspective can change a lot the meaning of the events. Someone may be witnessing a
traumatic event and think it's not that much, not that deep. And the victim may see it completely
(46:38):
differently. It's a great point.
I think you just need to understand that there's a risk going into whatever you tackle that
someone is obviously not going to agree with it. And that's just what it is. But you just
need to do it the best you can. Like in my book, I tackle addiction and suicide or like
suicide at age, you know what? So I was always just trying to think about if someone that
(47:05):
was struggling with those topics read this, is it going to do more harm than good? Yeah,
that's just what I always try to think about.
I think yours is actually a really interesting example though, Calum, because your main character
actually relives these kind of addictions constantly as part of the story. So there's
a fundamental aspect of the character there that would probably be something you would
(47:27):
have had to consider even more during the writing process, right?
Yeah. So his whole thing is he's 200 years old. So in a futuristic society, he's addicted
to reliving the sorrows of his past. And it's not just one traumatic thing that defines
him. It's a long life of all these horrible things that have happened. And I kind of wanted
it to be like a, because he's a detective, like a spin on it, a different detective trope,
(47:51):
you know, detectives always, alcoholics or something like that. But again, yeah, I just
wanted that to be from my own experiences and experiences and family to be accurate
to the representation of addicts. Like they relapse, they have all that shame and guilt
that comes with it. And so trick is to always have that sort of hope for the village under
it. So the reader who's struggling with that can actually see that there is a brighter
(48:16):
future ahead. There's something worth fighting for.
That's a nice outcome to always see. I don't think that we can heal from trauma, but definitely
learn to live with it and mend in some how. Yeah.
I mean, I'm not sure everyone's made a lot of really good points on Bethany, especially
when she, you're mentioning, you know, when writing trauma, not to just write trauma for
(48:39):
the shock value to actually, you know, if you are writing something and at least coming
from the correct mindset instead of just wanting it to be trauma for the sake of trauma. Because
personally I've read books like that and that's not what I like to read. So then Josh, you
know, mentioning that, you know, having some way to like connect through what with what
(49:01):
you're writing instead of just writing something that you're not familiar with, you know, even
if it's something that, you know, you've had experience with personally, or if you know,
in a family, you know, to just kind of make it so that you're being, I don't want to say
as accurate as possible, but like, you know, where you're coming from in your writing.
Thank you everyone for joining me in this discussion. It was a pleasure exchanging ideas
(49:24):
with you all and I definitely learned quite a bit. So let's do a round of photos so that
the listeners know where to find you. Awesome. Yeah. So you can find me at joshuawalkerauthor.com
or jaywalkerwrites on Instagram, same thing on X. I've got my new book coming out in September
and Exile of Water and Gold. And there are still some limited, not many, some limited
(49:47):
sign and numbered additions available on my website as well. So definitely check that
out if you're interested. It's a great book. So check it out. And Bethany, you also have
a release coming. Yes. So my second full length book in my series, The Heart of Ponaria of
Love and Loss is coming out September 28th. You can find me on my website bshgarcia.com
(50:08):
and then I am bshgarcia across all social media, though I'm most active on Twitter and
Instagram. Yeah, you can just Google Kalimor and you'll find me anyway. My book, A Touch
for Cascus is out now. You can check it out. And I have a, I do a free short story every
month on my website. So just search my name, you'll find it. Yeah, you can find me on
(50:31):
ex and Instagram at the bookhermit. You can also find any of my previous reviews on the
SFF Insiders website. So it's just sffinsiders.com. That team is also active on Twitter and ex
(50:52):
and Instagram under the same handle. Perfect. Thank you everyone. And if you like the episode,
please like and subscribe and let's continue the discussion in the comments. Also, you
may want to check my interviews with Joshua and Bethany since we talked about their books
and the themes that were not so dissimilar to these episodes. Also, if you want to get
(51:14):
buy size, deep dives, prose analysis, another bookish discussions, then subscribe to my
newsletter. You will also get a free book for my novella, The Genesis of Change. I will
leave the link in the episode's description alongside the links of all the authors and
reviewers you heard before. Thanks for listening and happy reading.
Hello everyone and welcome to Books Undone. I'm your host, Livia J. Elliot, and today
(00:16):
we are back with a guest talk. This is another meta discussion in which we will delve into
the theme of the pictures of trauma in fantasy books. Today we have several new guests, so
let me introduce you to them. Hi, I'm Josh Walker. I'm a relatively new fantasy author
who debuted this year with my book, The Rest to the Gods, and my debut novel, An Exile
(00:39):
of Water and Gold, comes out on September 3rd. Hi, I'm Bethany Garcia. I write under
B.S.H. Garcia. I am currently publishing an epic fantasy series called The Heart of Quinaria.
The first book, Of Thieves and Shadows, came out last June. I also have two novellas, From
the Ashes and From the Depths, with the second book in the series set to release this September.
(01:00):
Hey, yeah, my name's Callum Lott. I just published my debut novel, A Dirge for Cascius. It is
the first part of a science fantasy duology epic space opera with a detective murder mystery.
Hi, I'm Kristen. I'm not an author per se, but I am a reviewer and part of the science
fiction fantasy insiders team on social media. You can probably find me under the book hermit
(01:24):
on other locations. Before we start, let me tackle some disclaimers. First, this is a
meta discussion, and also we will mention different books, our own or from other authors.
We will try to keep it a spoiler light. Second, we are discussing quite a charged topic and
listening about it may not be easy for everyone. Also, we will aim to not be explicit. The
(01:49):
topic itself may be a huge trigger for some. Feel free to stop listening at any time. Third
and finally, what you will hear is our subjective opinion about this topic and at this particular
moment in our lives. You may disagree and that's fine. Now, let me finally start with
a short question that is not as easy to answer. What has been the most heavy hitting, deep
(02:14):
and personal representation of trauma in either fantasy or sci-fi that you have read so far
and why?
I think for me, it would have to be, there's probably a few good ones, but it would have
to be either quote in The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothbush. I'm talking about him
in his older years looking back on his life or possibly the members of Bridge 4 from the
(02:37):
Stormlight Archive. They're the ones that stand out to me the most.
Definitely, Kalidine's journey through depression is one of the best things that I have read.
I agree with you. I think Shalan as well from the Stormlight Archive, it's just an impressive
character. For me in particular, I will say Flowers for Algernon. I had to read half of
that book with tissue paper at hand because it was just so up and close and personal.
(03:01):
Yeah, that's a beautiful book. I haven't read that in a long time, but it's a beautiful
book.
Mine's going to be my second favorite story of all time. It's a manga called Berserk.
I don't know if anyone's heard of Berserk. This was like Grim Dark before Game of Thrones
or anything was even really a thing. But being a manga, it has the artwork with the dialogue,
so you get to see the drawings of everything. Fighting these ways through hordes of demons,
(03:24):
it's just absolutely brutal, but it also shows terrible things that other human beings can
do.
Some people think that it's done gratuitously, and a lot of it is incredibly difficult and
confronting to read. But many others think that it accurately portrays the violence of
one of the worst things that a human being can do. I've read accounts from people on
both sides of this, so they're all valid because everything's subjective in the end. But I
(03:48):
tend to agree with the latter in that the story of Berserk reflects the struggle of
trauma and the attempt to overcome it. Art can be triggering or therapeutic to the reader.
The character of Guts is always struggling, he's always persevering, but he's never seeking
self-sympathy or fitting himself, he's just doing it. And a lot of people can learn through
(04:09):
that story about how to deal with their own trauma. I have.
You guys are giving me a lot more of my TBR because I have not read any of these so far.
On the shelf they go. I tend to read a lot of, I guess, more trauma-driven stories, just
darker, more depressing themes in most of my media. But one that's stuck with me ever
(04:31):
since I've read it is the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. The opening pages, I know
of the first book, lose a lot of readers right off the bat because it dives into trauma just
from the get-go. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler because it's right there in the
opening pages, but she starts the book, Issun, the main character, by dealing with witnessing
(04:53):
the death of her toddler at the hands of her husband because of the magic that he carries.
But N.K. Jemisin's a brilliant writer for so many reasons, but I think she really handles
trauma well while simultaneously empowering her characters. The books are definitely not
for the faint of heart, but I don't think I've seen a lot of people handle it quite
(05:13):
as masterfully as she does.
I have. There's three books that immediately come to mind, and all of them are dark fantasy,
which is my preferred genre in reading, the first one being A Memory of Song by Scott
Palmer. He has written a genuinely dark fantasy tale that is full of trauma and revenge and
(05:40):
the things that he puts some of those characters through. It was definitely a bit more on the
darker side, and I deeply enjoyed it. And then he carried that over into his novella,
The Sound of Starfall, which in my opinion, if you read A Memory of Song first and then
Starfall second, the impact of the novella is just tenfold.
(06:03):
Another author that a lot of people have heard me talk about and recommend is another one
of our Australian indie authors, and that is Damian Francis. And he wrote The Tome of
Heron, and that is another very dark tale where the characters in there, not so much
as like mental trauma, but more physical trauma that they're experiencing and they're going
(06:24):
through as they embark on this epic journey to secure a very magical artifact that an
enemy is also seeking after. And just some of the descriptions in his writing of death
and trauma is very jaw dropping and definitely not for the faint of heart, but it just it
(06:46):
blows you away. And one of the last ones that I really enjoyed that also focuses on physical
and emotional trauma is Renia by Karl Forshaw. He has another fantastic way of writing, and
so his main characters, not only is she going through physical trauma, so to say, she's
trying to rebuild relationships, she's trying to discover herself and what she's good at,
(07:13):
kind of in the story that he's created. And he has a couple chapters in there that are
pretty dark and very well written, very, very well written. I know he had a lot of trigger
warnings and we did a buddy read of it in the SFFI Discord. And there was a lot of people
that were really, you know, just blown away by his writing. But whenever I hear, you know,
(07:36):
trauma and dark fantasy, those are so far my main, you know, three authors that really
come to mind.
Absolutely. And when I was listening to you, I think that something that struck me is that
it can be very confronting to read, but as well, we all mentioned different stories that
they are all featuring trauma in one way or another, but the trauma they feature is different
(08:00):
because we mentioned the loss of children or depression or overcoming the loss of the
parents in the case of Rhenia. And all of them are things that end up marking the characters.
It's not only an event that takes place and that's it. It's something that the characters
carry through. So that's my question for you. In particular, something as deep as trauma,
(08:25):
it's very difficult to convey and to convey the extent of it as the years go by because
it may change how the character sees the world, how they interpret events in a way that it
could be very different to what the reader is expecting the character to do. So my question
is how do you handle trying to explain that mindset of the traumatized character to the
(08:50):
reader?
I think that's a really good question. Part of it, I would say, and I think probably a
lot of us would relate to this, but part of it would be semi-subconscious because obviously
every character includes a part of us. And so I think there's a lot of subconscious fueling
their actions, their decision-making, how they come across and how they interact with
one another and a lot of how they might interact with one another in a book, for me at least,
(09:14):
resembles the way that I have these different parts of myself that conflict, that come to
a head. But I also think another thing that I always try to do is to accentuate micro-behaviors.
So to basically take a set of micro-behaviors that look one way for one character and have
them appear completely differently for another. And that usually gives the reader an in to
(09:36):
explore a little bit more about where they might have come from or what their story is.
So there's a lot of things you can do with subtext. I would say that's the key to something
like this. We're talking about trauma, it manifests in so many different ways. So subtext tends
to be the answer for me.
I think for me, sometimes it's hard to kind of put into words how I approach my writing.
At least when I'm trying to step into my characters, I apply a lot of my former acting background.
(10:02):
So before I was a writer, I did a lot of plays and theater and commercials and things. And
when I approach writing, it's always from that character first mindset. And like I take
a minute before I'm in a scene or in anything and I just really try to immerse myself in
that character because once I'm in their skin, I don't think about it as it's happening,
really, it just kind of like Josh was saying, it kind of just it's just there in your subconscious
(10:26):
and you start thinking as a character and you start reacting as they would in that circumstance.
So I feel like a lot of it comes organically in the editing phase. There's always a chance
to go through and see, you know, if it's coming back clear enough to the readers, because
sometimes something might be so obvious to you, but maybe it was too subtle and you need
(10:46):
to make it a little more obvious for people. But I also think there's a fine line between
conveying the trauma skillfully and subtly without beating people over the head with
it, because I've definitely read some books where it's like every page is the trauma almost
to the point where it's been lost and it doesn't carry like the emotional punches when you
need it to because it was just been dumped nonstop. So I feel like it's an art, but it's
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kind of something you do just you feel out and I think you know when it's right and when
it's bringing through.
Definitely. And I think you both did the same on your novellas to also present the trauma
differently depending on the age of the character. Like, for example, Josh, Nisha thinks about
it very differently when she's young versus when she's older. And Bethany, on From the
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Depths, you have your children characters that they also think of what's happening in
a childlike way. To me, at least, it's also about the stage of the trauma. It's not the
same as depicting the situation as it happens, as I did in Dance with Me or Years After the
Fact because the character may think differently. When things are happening, one may not necessarily
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reason or understand that it is a traumatic event. But somebody who has survived for 20
years after the fact, they may look at it in a different way. They may see themselves
differently. And that's also part of how the story is presented. I agree with you, Bethany.
It has to be done in a very elegant way without hammering over and over because it loses an
(12:22):
impact.
Yeah, I definitely agree with that not going overboard. But you also want to show honesty.
I think honesty is the goal to strive for. I think I learned that from Joe Alacombe.
You want it to be true to the real world. You can't be too afraid to shy away from anything.
The real world is cruel. And to not try and show that would be disingenuous, I guess.
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But it's all dependent on the type of story you want to write. Yes, that honesty can come
from your own trauma or through the experience of others.
So yeah, kind of a little bit different, you know, because I'm not a writer or an author.
I would say that having events that take place in the book, even if it's just like flashbacks
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or snippets, Carl's really good at doing that in his book, that just kind of give the reader
that sense of where the trauma has taken place. And then just having it be more natural and
not too overbearing, because that's where, at least as me as a reader, if it's constant
trauma and death and violence, and you know, whatever it may be in the dark fantasy setting,
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and there's no break or reprieve from that, then it does affect the story in that way.
It's just exhausting to read. So, you know, having everything build naturally, and in
a sense of, you know, kind of understanding characters' trauma, I mean, you know, some
people can relate their own experiences to experiences that characters are going in a
(13:57):
book. So in a sense, drawing on anything that maybe you've experienced in your life that
can help you better understand what they are going through, because every trauma experience
is the same. You know, one reader can interpret it one way, one reader can interpret it another
way, but just having, you know, everything, you know, as Callum said, just be very natural,
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flowing and more like real world, down to earth, that's in the sense that when I enjoy
reading that genre, some of it is that I do pay attention to.
What you mentioned is actually quite an interesting point. If you are able to show the origin
of a trauma or what caused the trigger, then it's also easier for the reader to understand.
I don't like to use the word relatability, but when we have been through specific things
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in our life, it's easier to pick when those things or those traits are appearing in characters,
regardless of how the writer may have put it up. When you have stories that are very
dependent on what happened to the character, when the trauma that they have been through
are the triggers they are suffering right now, I think that, Kristen, you are correct
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in saying that you also need to have the source of it to help the reader understand what's
causing that trauma, perhaps in a way that's not explicit, because it doesn't have to
be explicit to make a point.
I like what you said about not needing to be explicit. One book that I think about a
lot, I read it a while ago, but I don't know if anyone's read Prince of Thorns and the
(15:27):
subsequent sequels by Mark Lawrence. So I think Bethany, you'd probably love it. It's
super dark. Something that I think he flips on its head is that idea of implied trauma.
There's an element of that, but he also throws it in your face quite overtly. In fact, the
main character, Jörg, he's basically fueled by trauma incessantly and everything he does
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is commandeered by trauma, as though it's hanging over him like some kind of captain
of the ship. He sails through an interesting journey from, I won't spoil too much, but
he rises into the position of being an emperor and that whole journey. Usually what you'd
expect to see is a character growing and changing in order to achieve something like that. But
(16:10):
with Jörg, he just gets more decrepit and dark and angry. And somehow there's that contrast
where you've got these two things coming to a head that shouldn't be correlated, but they
are. So that's another really powerful way, I think, to actually write trauma into a story,
is to really look at how the wrong way to respond to trauma can still ultimately change
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your path or your destiny. That's super interesting to me as well. So oftentimes with my own writing,
I tend to think more dentively, shall we say, and I really want the characters to feel like
they can come back from whatever they've been affected by. But in my reading experience,
the stuff that's stuck out to me more are these characters who really aren't redeemed
at all and looking at exactly how much trauma affects them and how it exponentially continues
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to destroy them over time.
That's actually quite a great point. I think Glockta in Eberkrum's first law is the same
example. Yeah. He acts in a way, like he embraced everything that happened to him and he acts
in a way that somehow reinforces his trauma. I'm trying to be a spoiler light, but the
way he tortures people and he thinks about that profession as an inquisitor he has, it's
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completely correlated about the trauma. He knows about it. There is a very explicit conversation
about it. Yet at the same time, Glockta is never trying to fix it or to replace it. And
I think that's also perhaps something that the depictions of trauma in books cannot achieve.
The fact that you have a character that embraces what happened to them and doesn't want to
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heal, or you may have characters that understand what happened to them, may want to heal, may
not heal, but don't know how to. But there are also characters who don't understand that
they went through a traumatic event, characters who simply believe life has been shit and
that's it. And they are weak and they are, and they put up all these self-deprecating
(18:08):
words towards themselves when they are actually victims and survivors of that event. And I
think it's also different ways of coming to the same point. And they are diverse as well,
because we people see the world in a different way. Not every survivor is going to react
in the same way to a traumatic event, even when the traumatic event may be of the same
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nature.
On that note, I was going to say that, I don't know if it's a trope so much, but one of my
favorite things is when we follow two characters who come from very similar circumstances,
whether it was a school program or siblings or soldiers, whatever it might be. And then
you watch their paths, like, you know, completely split vector from each other. And I think
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the reason it rings so true is because it is so common. You can have two people growing
up in an identical circumstance and then the way that they acknowledge or refuse to acknowledge
and then handle that trauma going forward is sometimes what creates the villain versus
the hero. You know, I feel like a lot of superhero films use that. It's just such an interesting,
like a case study of people and how we all react. You know, you see generational trauma
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all the time, even in parenting styles, and you'll see people who hated how they were
raised, but then they can't help but repeat it with their own children or, you know, people
who do everything they can to be the opposite. And they go so far in the other direction
that they end up causing just a different trauma. And yeah, it's all really fascinating.
And I think when you when explored in books, it can be done in a substantial way that we
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can't get the same look at that as we can like in film or something.
To me, at least it can be more personal in books because we end up having the POV of
a character, we end up having their thoughts, which sometimes can be very scrambled and
hoping from one topic to another because that's something that the pairs of trauma, which
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are generally anxiety and depression will cause that you will end up hoping from one
idea to the other. And in a way that sometimes may feel quote unquote illogical for a reader
because I think that the way anxiety or depression may steer someone's thoughts may seem illogical
or unreasonable to someone who never experienced it. So that's the question. How do you recognize
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that as a reader? And how do you attempt to explain that as a writer?
That's a really good question. The book that comes to mind for me that I really thought
about when I was writing my novella was Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson. I don't know if anyone's
read that, but the cool thing about that book is that it's a really interesting premise,
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but essentially you've got two sisters, both the daughters of King and one of them gets
married off to a God King in another kingdom and she wasn't actually meant to be the one
that went. So there's kind of like this dichotomy from the start about who should have gone
and who shouldn't have. But the thing I love about that, it kind of goes back to what Bethany
was saying before, that contrast between two characters who they've been raised the same
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way, they're both fundamentally different people with unique qualities. The way that
it ends up going is that the sister who probably went there experiences trauma in a radically
different way to the sister that should have gone there. And so you end up seeing these
kind of completely different growth and development arcs over time. And when you get to the end
of the book, it's quite like it's stuck the way that the two sisters have changed fundamentally
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from who they were from page one. I don't want to spoil anything, which is why I'm
not over explaining this, but that's something that I really wanted to try and do with my
novella. And with my novella, there's not two characters, there's one, but I tried to
use time to accentuate that instead. So in that book, my main character exists in the
current timeline and then we see her past timeline and the chapters kind of alternate.
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And those two timelines actually kind of, the climaxes of both those stories happen
at the same time. They're not necessarily correlated events, but it gives us a look into
how she experiences traumatic events at different ages and how that reflects into her experience
as she grows older. So yeah, I really liked the idea of how circumstance plays a big role
(22:13):
in trauma and also how the temperament of the person can radically change the way that
you might respond to it. That's super interesting to me.
Just again, I think it just comes back to honesty for me and my classic advice of showing,
you want to show the reader that they can pick up whatever lesson from the story themselves.
(22:36):
Like they got to do the work themselves.
Interesting. And picking up on what you said, Josh, before you mentioned Guaz and from The
Name of the Wind, I think it has a very interesting blend of both approaches because in the past
timeline, especially when he's on Tarvian, we can see events that happened and we get
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some events hinted in a very subtle way, but then Guaz makes the comments when he's older.
Like he goes, for example, through extreme poverty. And I think that's also a type of
trauma. There is a scene in which he says to Chronicle, I have two pairs of shoes, two
(23:19):
pairs of shoes, and finally four shirts. And it seems so silly. But when you put it in
the context of what he went through, of how he had just crumbled for the bare minimum
to go by, it takes a completely different meaning. It's not about only showing the event
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or the effects of it. To me, it's also showing the context and how that changed the meaning
of what happened to a character.
Yeah. And there's another interesting thing I think that comes from that in that book
especially, which is that because Guaz is an unreliable narrator, the way that trauma
might have affected his life is somewhat indeterminable to us as readers as well. So we're going on
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the journey with him and we only get glimpses into how he really feels about his life when
he's talking to the chronicler in the current timeline. And there's not much of that, obviously,
as we know in the story, it's more of a narration of his past, but he doesn't let us in much
even though we're seeing the events, we're not getting the attached emotions to that.
So that's something that's really well done. And I think it's another cool way to show
(24:26):
how someone might suppress parts of themselves, right?
Picking on that, something that Rodfuss did to me magnificently is to show the shame of
it. People react to trauma in different ways. We can have, for example, Glockdach who reacts
in a very bitter way. He's angry about it and he takes it another, but Guaz is ashamed
(24:48):
of his past. He's ashamed of having been poor of things that happened to him. I'm not saying
that one thing is correct or not. I'm just saying that it's very common for survivors
to feel ashamed and to feel that to some extent they were to blame. That's also that may happen
even when logically I'm from the outside, we can see that the blame lies on the person
(25:14):
inflicting it on the abuser.
I was just going to say, kind of on that note, something that's always fascinated me too
are the people and characters who almost take pride in their trauma in the sense that it
like, oh, wow, I'm grateful this happened to me. It made me this way. It made me stronger.
And how that almost makes them feel good about inflicting the same trauma on someone else.
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I think especially in physical abuse situations, that that can just create this really horrible
ripple effect of somebody thinking that they very well may have grown stronger through
the trials and become more resilient. But maybe that character then doesn't see that
there could have been other ways to gain that strength or that they don't need to recreate
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that for other people to have them be that way. And I think I see that more, especially
in themes of toxic masculinity and where certain characters are trying to live up to other
character standards and earn their respect. But that's been something that's fascinated
me just in terms of trauma and how people react to it.
I was thinking about actually one of your books, which is Dance With Me, one of your
(26:19):
interactive stories. And I think something that works very well in that story is the
way that the main character does feel that shame. And I think the shame kind of nearly
holds more weight over them than the trauma itself. And at the end of that story, what
particularly struck me about it was the way that shame translates into guilt and into
(26:41):
kind of feeling like you become a prisoner of your own mind. But that's something that
I think is super dangerous for anybody to experience. But also, I think it points at
the deeper ways that certain people relate to traumatic experiences.
Yeah. In Dance With Me in particular, what I wanted to capture is the resistance sometimes
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the victim may have about the changes that the trauma inflicted. You may want to remain
as you were because the person that you become, it's not you, it's someone else. And I think
that's what Lyra goes through in that story combined with the fact that she doesn't understand
that she's being bullied and abused. And that also can change how the character reacts.
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Because if you cannot understand that the other person is an abuser, then you cannot
stand up against them. That also chips away at someone's ability to defend themselves.
That's why Lyra ends up falling in that circle of, I should be able to do this when she's
literally in that story falling apart. So yeah. Thank you, Yosh.
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Some of the other aspects of trauma, just in the way of processing it. And Josh, I'm
going to use your novella as an example. But in the early stages, your main character then,
kind of like experiencing the five stages of grief a little bit. When she finds out
that she is a sleeper, kind of processing going from losing everything, all the life
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that she knew and she had, going through those five stages of grief, becoming she's in denial,
and then she's becoming angry. She's bargaining with her mentor. She's slowly adjusting to
this. But kind of in the end, especially as the two timelines are kind of running right
side by side of each other, you've seen that she has already accepted it. But you didn't
(28:38):
know that unless you were in her younger timeline, kind of understanding all the things that
she went through and then all the things that she had seen. Especially that one specific
climax on the younger timeline, just kind of seeing what all she went through and she processed.
So I feel like, I don't know if that was a correct interpretation, but I felt like it
was done really well. And you could kind of see how her trauma went, developed, and how
(29:03):
she eventually accepted it and became where she was.
Appreciate that. I think you hit the nail on the head. The idea that, and this is what
I was talking about before, with anything, the way that I approached it was using time,
but other people might approach it through different avenues. But take a character like
Shalan from the Stormlight Archive and the way that she responds to what's happened in
her past, it's actually quite similar. So we see a younger version of her kind of heathered
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throughout the story and it's very occasional. And as we see her main storyline kind of come
to a head at the end of the book, that is when we kind of get this deliverance of like,
okay, this is what it means. This is why she is where she is. And this is also why people
begrudgingly accept what becomes of them. Right? Like that's something that's super
interesting. And it goes back to what I was saying about subtext. So I think a lot of
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this could be implied, but if you want to tell it overtly, then you got to be careful
because you need to do it in a way that sustains the richness of the narrative while also not
making the trauma appear like it's nothing, if that makes sense. I think it's very easy
to downplay. Look, if you think about just common story structure, at the end of the
day, every story kind of begins with this inciting incident where a character will get
(30:10):
pulled away from their normal life and flung into a whole new world. And their primary
struggle is how do I cope with this massive change? I mean, effectively, if you think
about it like that, there is a traumatic event at the heart of the beginning of every single
narrative. The question is, how much are we actually considering the impact of this on
our characters? Because it's very easy to kind of, you know, I always use Toy Story
(30:32):
as an example, but you know, look at Toy Story, right? Like you got Buzz and Woody and the
way that those two characters are formed by completely different past experiences and
the way that they both get taken out of kind of standard life. Both of those things are
completely kind of contrasted the whole way through, you know, Woody's kind of standard
life in Andy's room versus Buzz Lightyear's standard life, so to speak, of him considering
(30:55):
his past kind of lore and his role in space and stuff like that. And the way that they
come to a realization of, oh, no, this is what the world actually is. And this is why
we shouldn't try to run from what we already have. That's super interesting to me.
With that theory of like trauma as you're like the inciting event being trauma, which
I do like and I think I agree with. In that sense, you can almost look at every story
(31:18):
for being plot driven versus character driven is maybe how much that inciting event's trauma
like impacts the character over the course of the narrative. And I think maybe how much
that's shown that the change on the characters over the story is what makes it feel more
character driven versus when you feel less of the effects of the trauma, then that's
maybe what people classify as more of a plot driven.
Yeah, that's really interesting. I'm trying to think of an example of a story that we
(31:42):
would all consider to be plot driven so that we can kind of pull it apart a bit more because
I think you kind of, yeah, you've got something there. It's really interesting.
One that comes to mind with that approach to me is World War Z. If you saw the movie,
forget it because it's nothing like the book, but that book appears to be very plot driven
in the sense that you get different interviews with too many people and through what they
(32:05):
tell you, you end up picking up what happened with the zombies, which are just a MacGuffin,
not really the point of the story. But if you pay attention to every one of the interviews,
you can see the effect the zombie war had on the people and what they had to do. So
there is, for example, a girl that is a stock, she's 25, but her mind is a stock as if she
(32:27):
was six years old the moment that everything happened. And you have a politician who is
wearing a lot of regret because of the decisions he had to make. It's what Bettany said, if
you look at it as a whole, it's plot driven. If you look at every narrative, every chapter
as a short story, then it becomes very character driven. But at the same time, it's very implicit
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because you need the whole context to understand the effect it had in the individuals. It's
a great point, honestly.
On that note, there was something that I wanted to bring up. I think, Yoshua, you mentioned
that the circumstance changes the character. And then, Bettany, you also mentioned the
two characters with the same thing that divert. And I think that you actually managed that
(33:11):
from the depths because we have all siblings that are going through the same family trauma.
They react completely different, but also the secondary characters expect different
things from them. And that's also what, in my opinion, ended up making the trauma and
the situation they were going through have a different impact on them. I think that when
(33:33):
you are depicting trauma, it goes beyond the main character or the victim to also be a
matter of how that affects the secondary characters, whether they reinforce it, saying like, it's
not such a big deal. Or if they have attitudes of, you should stand up for yourself, you
should defend yourself. Or if they step up and defend the character, or if they are oblivious
(33:54):
to it, I think that also contributes to how the situation is seen.
Yeah, on the one hand, you can have characters in the same type of trauma, in the same position,
but societal or familial expectations that are thrust upon them are going to completely
change how they react. Like for me, I'm an oldest sibling in real life, so, you know,
there was a circumstance with my three younger siblings and it was related to punishment
(34:18):
or anything else. You know, my take on the situation was different. My outlook was different.
The expectations on me were different. Yeah. And from the depths, having, you know, the
traumatic semi-abusive situation in the home with the parents of the two main characters,
Conor and Carlaya, you're watching them react to the trauma, but then you've got the slight
age gap, you've got different genders, and then you've got how each parent sees each
(34:43):
child and it kind of plays into what they view as traumatic, what they tolerate from
each other, what they tolerate from each parental figure, and it creates this really messy situation
for them that sets them on very different trajectories as they grow.
Yeah, definitely. And they also think very differently. In your novella, what really
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struck me was that they had those childlike thoughts that at the same time were very mature
because the trauma forces a character, especially children, to grow up. And that's something
that I also saw in Josje's novella that Nisha sometimes thinks like an adult, even on the
past timeline. That's basically because I honestly think that childhood trauma in particular
(35:29):
ends up forcing children to grow up. And if a reader doesn't really catch that, they may
think that the child character is not acting like a child when they are actually acting
like a traumatized child.
Yeah, childhood is the most formative of years. So it's just natural that you grow into what
happens to you as a child and you get to always confront that, what you happened. Some people
(35:53):
go their whole lives without confronting the traumatic thing that happens. So I think that's
something to strive towards.
I have a lot of feelings on this. One of my pet peeves is when people kind of dumb down
children, especially children characters. And I think there's a disconnect that happens
as we grow or we get children less credit for how they process how aware they are of
(36:15):
the world. And I've talked with you about this before, Olivia, but if you add in that
trauma, kids are just, they're forced to mature. You think back to most countries and cultures,
even a hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago, kids were forced to become adults at
such a young age. So for the modern reader, looking at just most modern day kids, they
might not see that kids could have that emotional maturity or like those complex feelings and
(36:38):
thoughts and almost adult thoughts at times, but there's definitely space for it given
certain circumstances and trauma. And one series that this makes me think of is Game
of Thrones, you know, Saga Fire and Ice, because a lot of people can't like grapple with how
young George RR Martin's actually written most of the characters, especially if you
watch the show, they've aged them up for a lot of reasons and controversies, which
(36:59):
is valid, but a lot of those characters are super young. Like I think Danny's like 12
in the first book and John and all of them and Ari is like eight and they come off a
lot more mature on the page, but I don't think it's disingenuine to children of that age
at all. And I think that's something that just not all readers might not grasp. And
(37:20):
I think you have to be okay with that as they get in favor of authenticity.
Why has society like, yeah, sort of just protecting our children a lot more now, like they can
be quite mature at a young age and like smart like they're sponges, they absorb everything,
like they're really onto it. But now it feels like we're really like just protecting them,
like keeping them shielded from the bad, like the terrible things in the world.
(37:45):
Big bad world. Yeah. I think that's a natural inclination for us to feel the risk in sabotaging
like a child's innocence. And I think that's a good, that's a good thing to feel resistant
towards, but I do agree. And I think like, especially as a teacher, something I've noticed
a lot is how astute like, you know, even like younger year three kids can be about the world
(38:06):
around them based on their given situations and circumstances at home. And you kind of
just hear, you know, kids will just tell you stuff during the day at school. And a lot
of times I'm usually taken aback by how well they understand the complexities of things
in their life that other kids might not be experiencing. And I think the child often
doesn't realize how well they understand the complexity as well. So I think there's a bit
(38:27):
of like, there's a human aspect there that I think we do forget about. Kids are a lot
stronger and more aware than any of us think. But I also think as an adult now, it's super
overt to me as a teacher, what childhood is like, and it's a feeling that you can't really
get back as an adult. Like I see glimpses of it every day and I'm like privileged to
see that, but I can never really relive the feeling of being a kid again. And so I think
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that does mean that it's easy for us to impart a sense of expectation or lack thereof on
children as adults because we somehow in our growth and development, we lose the ability
to look back on exactly how childhood was for us. And so the only way to live that experience
again is to see it through other children, but you can't really like it. You can't grasp
it. So actually that in and of itself to me is somewhat of a small kind of trauma. I think
(39:19):
that can affect all of us. I think it's very reasonable to miss the simplicity of childhood
life. And I find it interesting how we tell stories and things, we're all readers or writers
here and we tell stories and we appreciate stories. And I think a lot of times that's
because we want to get something back from where we came from, right? Or like that sense
of imagination or wonder about the world that we now lack in our current point in life.
(39:45):
I also work in the education field. So, I mean, I used to be a teacher. I'm not anymore.
I'm now an assistant director of a school and just being around, you know, kids who
are five to six years old. No, I agree a lot with what Josh said. It's a tough topic to
talk about. And just in my opinion, talking about trauma is 10 times easier than talking
(40:07):
about children trauma, just because if you are an educator, you know, you're around kids
all day, you've probably seen things. So it's not something that I probably dealt too deep
into personally, just because, yeah, I don't know, I just work with kids. So it's a tough
topic.
On that note, I think it always comes to mind, the flower for Algernon to me, and specifically
(40:30):
because of one point of how we perceive the survivors to be. We expect sometimes unconsciously
or because we are preset by society, we expect that survivors are cowering or afraid of what
happened or always living under a shadow. But on that book on flowers for Algernon,
(40:50):
after everything that happens to Charlie, he's very vocal about what happened, while
at the same time being very traumatized and afraid, and suffering flashbacks. As a reader,
I have gone to, could read sometimes, not only on these books, but in other books, notice
reviews that said, that's not how a survivor acts. And there are as many ways as a survivor
(41:14):
can react after the fact than a type of trauma there can be. It's not a prescription, it's
as we said before, it's something completely different for every character, for every person.
I think it's more of how we present it. If we give a reader enough clues to actually
guess what's happening and understand it or develop empathy through the understanding
(41:41):
of that character. In terms of that, how will you approach it and what advice will you give
to someone wanting to write something like that?
That whole topic is kind of a hot button issue for sure, because you've got people who have
maybe experienced the trauma that's being discussed in the book. And like you said,
(42:04):
they said that's not an accurate representation because that wasn't how it happened for them.
And then on the flip side, I have a lot of authors that I know just behind the scenes
who write about certain types of trauma, but they're not public with it because that's
their trauma and they shouldn't have to justify their experiences. It's their right to keep
that private. And so they might be bringing something very personal to the page. And then
(42:29):
you might have a readership that is tearing it apart because they don't think the author
is coming from that. So I don't know. I think at least for me as a reader and a writer,
I try to take everything with a grain of salt and understand that we are all very different
people with very different perspectives. And you don't know somebody's background, especially
(42:52):
the person writing it. But I think the main thing to watch out for is when it's done to
glorify the trauma. And I think we see a huge issue with this with rape trauma specifically.
It's been done in a way, especially by some notable authors in the past where it's glorified.
And it's not even, we don't even see the fall or the trauma of the character. It's just
(43:13):
done for shock value. And so I think anybody who's writing trauma needs to be coming from
a good place ultimately and writing it because it's true to the character, demanded of the
character and then handled in the most tasteful way. And for some people that might require
getting sensitivity readers if it is something that is completely unknown to them. And then
of course, if you're writing from a personal experience, I tend to think that's usually
(43:35):
done from the best place. But I think that's my biggest issue with trauma is just that
rape is just a really overdone trope that's been just done for shock and awe again and
again. And I think that's why a lot of people are really weary of it and rightfully so because
it's been handled poorly so many times, especially to add character development to female characters.
Completely. I think that's one of the worst things that can happen because it also cheapens
(44:03):
it out for the people in the real world. Besides that doesn't need to happen for a female character
to actually have development. People can evolve without having to go through hardship. That's
a truth. It's not something that you need to put in a book to make a character deep.
You can achieve depth in a character without any type of trauma as well. I completely agree
(44:26):
with you, Bestanie. I think it's overdone to some extent. Anything that is, even if
it is approached with good intention, it can also be overdone.
Yeah. I also think that like generally speaking, if you can't write from something in your
very vast selection of experiences, then there is a high risk that that's going to come across
inaccurately or lacking sensitivity. For me, I've just got a personal rule that I'm not
(44:52):
going to explore traumas that I can't relate to necessarily unless maybe a person close
to me in my life that I know has experienced this trauma, I can have a closer level of
sympathy. At the end of the day, I think if you can't have empathy for someone in an experience,
then it's very hard to actually be able to relate that with justice. I think a lot of
(45:12):
the times I agree with what Bestanie said. I think it's an overused way to kind of write
trauma. I think it's a little bit of a cop out. I think it's quite common in fantasy
to use it as a bit of a cop out. And that's bad because I mean, think about really what
you're writing about. You're writing about quite a severe thing that affects people much
more than it should. When we're telling stories of trauma, we really need to draw from experience
(45:35):
to be genuine in our writing.
Another thing actually that I was thinking about while you were both talking was the
idea of perspective. So I don't know if anyone's seen the movie or read the book Atonement
by Ian McEwan. It's a really good way to investigate trauma and perspectives to read that book
because it's essentially about a character who is gaslit and essentially the way that
(45:55):
misperception can change the truth and how that is then shown to other people and how
they choose to believe it. I find that interesting because I mean, I'm a firm believer, philosophically
speaking, in objective truth rather than relative truth. But I think relative truth is intrinsic
to being human because we have perspectives that form and shape us. So another thing you
(46:16):
can do when you're trying to write trauma is to really consider how perspective is going
to alter a given scenario. That's another tip I would probably give writers.
I think perspective can change a lot the meaning of the events. Someone may be witnessing a
traumatic event and think it's not that much, not that deep. And the victim may see it completely
(46:38):
differently. It's a great point.
I think you just need to understand that there's a risk going into whatever you tackle that
someone is obviously not going to agree with it. And that's just what it is. But you just
need to do it the best you can. Like in my book, I tackle addiction and suicide or like
suicide at age, you know what? So I was always just trying to think about if someone that
(47:05):
was struggling with those topics read this, is it going to do more harm than good? Yeah,
that's just what I always try to think about.
I think yours is actually a really interesting example though, Calum, because your main character
actually relives these kind of addictions constantly as part of the story. So there's
a fundamental aspect of the character there that would probably be something you would
(47:27):
have had to consider even more during the writing process, right?
Yeah. So his whole thing is he's 200 years old. So in a futuristic society, he's addicted
to reliving the sorrows of his past. And it's not just one traumatic thing that defines
him. It's a long life of all these horrible things that have happened. And I kind of wanted
it to be like a, because he's a detective, like a spin on it, a different detective trope,
(47:51):
you know, detectives always, alcoholics or something like that. But again, yeah, I just
wanted that to be from my own experiences and experiences and family to be accurate
to the representation of addicts. Like they relapse, they have all that shame and guilt
that comes with it. And so trick is to always have that sort of hope for the village under
it. So the reader who's struggling with that can actually see that there is a brighter
(48:16):
future ahead. There's something worth fighting for.
That's a nice outcome to always see. I don't think that we can heal from trauma, but definitely
learn to live with it and mend in some how. Yeah.
I mean, I'm not sure everyone's made a lot of really good points on Bethany, especially
when she, you're mentioning, you know, when writing trauma, not to just write trauma for
(48:39):
the shock value to actually, you know, if you are writing something and at least coming
from the correct mindset instead of just wanting it to be trauma for the sake of trauma. Because
personally I've read books like that and that's not what I like to read. So then Josh, you
know, mentioning that, you know, having some way to like connect through what with what
(49:01):
you're writing instead of just writing something that you're not familiar with, you know, even
if it's something that, you know, you've had experience with personally, or if you know,
in a family, you know, to just kind of make it so that you're being, I don't want to say
as accurate as possible, but like, you know, where you're coming from in your writing.
Thank you everyone for joining me in this discussion. It was a pleasure exchanging ideas
(49:24):
with you all and I definitely learned quite a bit. So let's do a round of photos so that
the listeners know where to find you. Awesome. Yeah. So you can find me at joshuawalkerauthor.com
or jaywalkerwrites on Instagram, same thing on X. I've got my new book coming out in September
and Exile of Water and Gold. And there are still some limited, not many, some limited
(49:47):
sign and numbered additions available on my website as well. So definitely check that
out if you're interested. It's a great book. So check it out. And Bethany, you also have
a release coming. Yes. So my second full length book in my series, The Heart of Ponaria of
Love and Loss is coming out September 28th. You can find me on my website bshgarcia.com
(50:08):
and then I am bshgarcia across all social media, though I'm most active on Twitter and
Instagram. Yeah, you can just Google Kalimor and you'll find me anyway. My book, A Touch
for Cascus is out now. You can check it out. And I have a, I do a free short story every
month on my website. So just search my name, you'll find it. Yeah, you can find me on
(50:31):
ex and Instagram at the bookhermit. You can also find any of my previous reviews on the
SFF Insiders website. So it's just sffinsiders.com. That team is also active on Twitter and ex
(50:52):
and Instagram under the same handle. Perfect. Thank you everyone. And if you like the episode,
please like and subscribe and let's continue the discussion in the comments. Also, you
may want to check my interviews with Joshua and Bethany since we talked about their books
and the themes that were not so dissimilar to these episodes. Also, if you want to get
(51:14):
buy size, deep dives, prose analysis, another bookish discussions, then subscribe to my
newsletter. You will also get a free book for my novella, The Genesis of Change. I will
leave the link in the episode's description alongside the links of all the authors and
reviewers you heard before. Thanks for listening and happy reading.
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