4 Things I Learned About Trauma While Writing My Latest Novel
Award-winning author Carol Dunbar writes about undiagnosed PTSD—in both her main character and herself.
When I first started drafting my second novel, I had no idea I was writing a story about trauma. The plot had arrived whole and complete like an egg dropped into my head; at its center glowed the yolk of a personal experience that I was still trying to understand.
Because I didn’t have the clinical terms to diagnose what was going on, I wrote from a place of behaviors and symptoms, all of which I had experienced or witnessed, and many of which were still present in my life.
Looking back, I think that helped my process. Sometimes, when we hear a label or a term, and we think we know what it means, we stop paying attention. The word trauma turned out to be one of those terms I thought I understood. Over the course of the next several drafts, I came to understand what it really was, and the things I learned fundamentally changed the way I think about myself and the people closest to me in my life.
Writer’s Digest, September 13, 2023.