In an article published in the New Yorker in 2022, Parul Sehgal talked about what he called the “trauma plot,” which uses the traumatic background of a character’s backstory as an integral part of the story. He didn’t like its use, and I’m not going to comment on that article any further here; rather I would like to talk more about the traumatic background of the other main character of any story, the author.
So often we hear about an author writing about their backstory, the traumatic events that shaped their childhood, their upbringing, their rearing. The trauma of their youth, or the traumatic events that befell them as young or middle-aged adults. We hear about growing up black, in the inner city, or as gender-ambivalent; or escaping from a war zone, or existing in a refugee camp, or from other stressful areas; of being bombed while serving on an aircraft carrier, of being depth charged in a submarine, surviving an IED explosion, losing arms or legs; escaping from the communists or fascists or whatnot, only to migrate to another country which doesn’t want them–all the while these torturous events imprinting on the person’s psyche the trauma of PTSD, relieved by some to one degree or another by writing and revealing. My heart goes out to these authors, of course, and many of their stories make captivating reads.
I’m not criticizing their backstory in any way, but I can’t help wondering about those of us for whom no trauma background is available. I didn’t grow up black, or homosexual, or in the inner city, or serve in the armed forces [nota bene: the US Army refused to accept me because I had a slight heart murmur]. My father was in the Army, but he came home from the war in one piece, with little evidence of PTSD; I grew up in several parts of the United States, and even got to live in Japan and Germany and got to see many interesting places within those and some neighboring countries, a childhood some might admire. I got wonderful presents for Christmas regularly, my parents paid for college, and I went on and got a PhD degree and had a reasonably content life after marriage. Yes, my wife died of chronic health issues, which was traumatic enough in itself, and it was a long time coming but it wasn’t unexpected, and life went on. Now I’m retired on a good pension, in reasonably good health but with good health insurance, so what have I got to complain about? There are those of us like that; not everyone has to have been gut shot to make a good story.
So, what do we write about? If we have little trauma in our backstory on which to draw for stories of the human condition, where do we get our ideas? I have always been an observer of others; of the other kids I played with growing up, or of others as adults, watching them in their daily routines (that helps when you’re learning new scientific techniques). I wasn’t in New York when the World Trade Centers were attacked, but that didn’t stop me from writing a poem about it*; I wasn’t on board the Titanic when it sank, but that didn’t stop me from writing a short story about someone who was [as yet unpublished]. I wasn’t in Memphis when Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot; nor was I in Dallas on November 22, 1963, or in Los Angeles when RFK was killed, but I could, if I chose, write about those, too. I did not have the opportunity to watch Apollo 11 blast off in 1969, but I’ve written several science fiction novels and short stories, based on known scientific principles. In short, the quality of the writing resides in the expertise of the writer, not the writer’s backstory. Let us not mistake the backstory of the main character for the backstory of the writer.
*New Mexico Remembers 9/11, Pat Walkow, ed. Artemesia Publishing, 2020.