“ ‘Torture your protagonist’ urges novelist and creative
writing tutor, Janet Fitch. The more sadistically you torture them ‘along the
lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story.’ “ So says
Mslexia’s ’10 Commandments’ for writers (issue 57). If, like me, you are
writing a psychological thriller, there is all the more need to put your
characters through intense, believable trauma. I found a huge source of information
and insight in Laurence Gonzales’ book: Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience.
Gonzales recounts in
a readable, novelistic style the survival stories of thirteen people who have
been through extraordinary traumas, and have reacted and recovered in different
ways. The stories themselves are jaw-dropping: Lisette was shot by her husband;
Eileen was attacked by a crocodile; Aron (of 27 Hours fame) cut off his own arm to escape from a canyon; US
Marine Chris lost a leg in an explosion in Iraq; Ann’s five-year-old daughter
suddenly died; Kathy survived cancer; Patricia and Trevor were attacked by a
bear; Don’s ship was torpedoed; Leon survived a Nazi concentration camp.
Gonzales dips into psychology and neuroscience to explain
the effects of trauma and the ways in which the body and mind survive it,
suffer from it, react to it in later life and recover from it. The science is
accessible and highly illuminating for anyone fascinated by the variety of
human experience, from the function of rage in survival, to the neural pathways
created by loving and caring for a child; from the exhilarating effect of going
on holiday, to the scientific reason for that ‘sixth sense’ that warns us of danger
in a way we cannot rationally explain.
This is one of those books that you can’t stop talking
about, and when you have recommended it to someone, you can’t rest until they
have read it. But how did it benefit my writing? Since I am writing a
psychological thriller, Unspeakable
Things, I need to put my heroine through extraordinary trauma, yet make
both this and her reaction to it believable. There is nothing worse than
reading an account of something that should be remarkable, and thinking, ‘Hm,
that’s probably how I would describe that if I tried, not particularly hard, to
think what it would be like.’ Experience is real, vivid and unexpected, and our
writing about extraordinary events should be fresh and surprising, but have
that ring of truth that sparks recognition in the reader. This is where
Gonzales’ novelistic accounts of trauma come in. They gain from both his
scientific studies of the brain’s reaction to trauma, and the first-hand
accounts of the survivors. The accounts are very rarely what you would come up
with if you sat down to write such a scene from a brief scan of your imagination,
in the way that lazy writing is done.
After Lisette’s
husband shot her, she ran from the house. ‘She heard another shot but felt
nothing,. Then, all at once, she knew what he had done. That last shot had been
for him. She put it from her mind. She had a single purpose now. Survive.’
After escaping the crocodile’s jaws and diving down to the
sea bed, Eileen ‘became sharply aware that she might die down there. All that
she loved... snatched away from her in the single appalling act of a mindless
creature... that thought made her angry.’
When Aron Ralston (of 27 Hours fame) found that his arm was
crushed, trapping him in a canyon, having told no one where he was going, ‘He
felt a rush of sadness and remorse for the thing he’d done.’
When Micki Glenn was attacked by a shark, which bit down to
her spine, time appeared to slow down and she felt no pain, only pressure, ‘like
I was in a vise.’ She could perceive the most minute details of what the shark
was doing as it bit off chunks of her.
As doctors fought to save her five-year-old daughter, who
had been perfectly healthy only hours before, Ann “looked up and saw that both
her husband and Dr. Green were weeping. This made no sense. It made even less
sense when the attending physican turned to Ann and said, ‘Your daughter is not
going to make it’. It made so little sense that Ann laughed out loud.”
It is not the fact that these accounts are graphic that makes
them excellent reading for writers of trauma, it is that they are surprising.
It is the unexpected nature of the experiences described that convinces us that
they are true. Even though the events we describe in fiction are not true, we can
borrow from the vivid strangeness of these accounts and our writing can become
shot through with the unexpected and elevated beyond a mundane imagining of
what trauma might be like.
