How our Core Wounds Shape our Narrative

and create empathetic character arcs

Every Tuesday this spring, I have been teaching a class through Literary Cleveland , “Story Elements for Revising Novelists.” The other night, several students struggled with their character arcs, specifically with how backstory shapes their current narrative.

It’s a common writerly conundrum. I, too, struggle with backstory, to the point that I read psychology books, looking for patterns in human behavior. The problem with both reality and stories is that we must know from whence we came to understand where we are now; yet, the past is both complex and murky, weighing us down in the present. How can we possibly identify what shaped our (mis)understanding of the world?

Even more complex is how to wrangle that life into a nice, neat, cohesive story, showing how a character permanently changed by facing that past. As writers, how do we use backstory, both within the shape of the story itself and in building a character from page one? If we must start at a story in medias res, how do we also assume that character’s backstory?

Photo by Gabrielle Wright on Unsplash

Often, I refer my students to a character’s core wound, a single past incident that shaped their character’s identity, a concept that assumes past trauma. The theory behind a core wound is that one event, such as a father leaving his family in the middle of the night, determines a character’s future mindset. In this example, the abandoned child might either veer toward a life of acting out or conversely overachieving to prove his worth. Afraid of being abandoned, that child might either never try to form relationships or work twice as hard at pleasing others, wanting to impress them so much that they never leave.

Identifying one’s core wound is helpful in recovery, but for writers, it’s essential to understanding what motivates characters’ decisions, actions, and fears. From that origin, a writer might show how related events trigger the character in his present storyline. Thus, conflict is born.

Trauma need not only create villains; a core wound can work for and against a character throughout his story. Often, trauma shapes us into selfless, outward thinking humanitarians, as in the case of Raymond Brechard, whose quest to save people from human trafficking was born from an emptiness left from his parents’ divorce, fueled by a religious community who failed him, and developed further by a vengeful politician.

To better understand how Brechard’s core wound shaped his future worldview, listen to his story here, paying close attention to how his past affected his current life:

What if you dedicated your life to ending human trafficking?

This Is Actually Happening · May 20, 2025

Can you identify how his past shaped his present? Do you see how his story almost seems inevitable, one event triggering another?

As writers, we can create the same arc for our characters. As humans, we can try to understand not only your own traumas and how they affect our actions, but empathize with others’ journeys, as well.

Back, though, to the original writing problem, which came up in class: How and when in the narrative do you develop or fully reveal the core wound?

Though you should have mentally drafted this wound scene before writing the first word, you probably won’t flesh it out until the end, toward the climax, after which that character is no longer driven by that insecurity: once he faces his trauma, he learns how it has affected him, accepts and manages his reaction to it, and then begins to heal.

In this way, a writer shows that understanding one’s core wound helps achieve acceptance and peace. The writer does this by revealing opposing worldviews from beginning to end.

If a character starts the story anxious, for example, he might address at the climax what caused his anxiety and thus learn how to let go some by the end. If he starts insecure, perhaps he gains confidence in facing those demons. When the character accepts his trauma and the world view that results from it, he will complete his story arc.

Still, on the first page and peppered throughout, you should hint at the core wound, dropping intriguing lines, like “He never liked ice cream after that day at the pool in third grade.” Doing so raises reader curiosity. A reader might ask, What happened in third grade?? How was it related to ice cream? How bad was it that it made the narrator hate ice cream?

If they ask these questions, they are intrigued. They become emotionally invested. And they will read on to find out what happened and how the narrator deals with that incident going forward. After all, we read narratives to understand the human condition, to learn about ourselves and our loved ones, to find out what actions cause what effects. We all want to know how any person might get from A to Z, because we are headed there, too.

*If this mini-lesson helped you in any way, tune in again next week for my Substack about inciting incidents.