Advice/Help On Writing Abuse

[yutohase]

Hello fellow RP'ers! I am currently in the works of making a character, and I was wondering how I could effectively write abuse into the character's backstory without romanticizing that abuse?

For context, my character was born and raised in the middle of a decades-long war, and their parents trained and groomed them to become a perfect military soldier when they could be eligible to fight in the war. However, the war ended when my character was still young, so their parents saw no more use for them and gave them up for adoption.

Anything helps. Thanks everyone!

 

[Merciless Medic]

So, I made a similar character and I will be using her as an example. My character was put through some pretty hefty things that scarred her for life. I didn't do this to romanticize abuse or the loss of friends and family, or the abuse through training to become a soldier, but I did it as a way to learn how to write those characters better (since I do like a bit of action in my backstories).

There are several things you should ask yourself:
1) What do they do to rationalize what they think or do is right? Do they even know what they are doing is wrong? Where do these rationalizations come from?
2) What are their coping mechanisms and how well do they work?
3) How were they before the incident and how do the incidents shape them into who they are today? Do they have any triggers?
4) Why are the parents a problem? Why do they do what they do?
5) What viewpoints would this character have and how easily do these thoughts and views alienate them from everyone else? How does everyone else react?
6) How do they function in this new life and what do they have to change and how well does that work out for them?
7) How does the trauma/grooming lead to them to react, feel, and later rationalize into an ideal or thought process or series of actions?
8) Do your research.

---

For the purpose of this character, I made up a whole shinobi village within the Narutoverse I was RPing in. Her name is Sara Nakamura and she has a brother.

Because the shinobi village didn't have a reigning daimyo and the Ryukage - a draconic demigod - wanted to rule the lands and become the Supreme Daimyo over everyone, he needed an army. Because he had no reigning daimyo and his village was perfectly hidden away from the rest of the world, he can train as many shinobi as he wanted and nobody would be the wiser. The best startups to this army was from the children who shared his bloodline, which he gave up a portion of his godhood to share blood with a mortal generations prior to the beginning of my character's life.

Now that you have context without going too much into the Ryukage's own character, I will go over my actual character (I have reasons for why the Ryukage does what he does as he is an arrogant used-to-be-100%-god, so he thinks things will just happen if he wills it, which doesn't work and he now understands effort has to be made, but his patience is rather nonexistent, but his fear usually takes hold over his impatience).

My character, Sara, was born with the blood of the Ryukage running strong through her veins. Like her brother and cousin, they were slated to be tutored by the Ryukage and his team of sensei themselves so they may do their jobs with ease. For Sara, it was to kill quickly and efficiently, and do infiltration missions on whole shinobi villages to bring them down from the inside. Sara started her training at the age of 3. As soon as she was able to stand, she was taught bits of taijutsu here and there in a fun, gratifying lesson that kids her age would do better at remembering. For the next 2 years, she was taught not only taijutsu, but also how chakra worked and how to manipulate it. Because she was a female (as in canon, females were generally better at chakra control) and from the power she inherited from the Ryukage, her progress was astoundingly quick in all areas except taijutsu. Sara and her brother were brought up by sensible parents however, and it was no surprise that their parents were against the teachings and values of the Ryukage, who tried to pull wool over the real reasons why he preaches what he does. Thinking that the family would dissent, the Ryukage ordered for the parents' deaths but covered it up and lied to Sara and her brother to keep them from knowing the truth.

Sara woke up that morning, seeing the dead bodies of her parents and with a man standing over them. In a fit of rage and sorrow, she used the training she was given to kill the man at the age of 5, her first kill and one that would change her forever. You'd ask her what she did and she'll tell you it happened so fast that she thought it was a dream, like it was surreal. She was in shock from the sights and smells, and she only reacted out of a perceived defense of the threat to her parents, not realizing it was already too late.

Her parents were everything to her. She idolized them, wanted to be like them, took all their advice like it was gospel, wanted to train like them. She also idolized their relationship, as they were quite the power couple. Her brother was someone she also idolized, as he was older and was so much cooler than she could ever hope to be, yet she was a caring, fiery girl herself who held lots of potential. But she always took things one step at a time, always looking forward to the next best thrill and feeling one with herself as she had fun with just about anything she can find.

That all went away after her parents' death. Her brother became distant and followed the Ryukage willingly out of fear, and she considered him a failure and a coward for doing so. However, she was as afraid of death as he was. Still, the attempt at trying to hide what the Ryukage and his men did didn't work on Sara. She's always suspected something was off about the Ryukage (no doubt from her parents' help), so when they died, it set off red flags and only wanted to make her leave the village even more. But she had to learn how to fight, how to protect, but most importantly, how to kill. Though, the new training regimen left her wanting to leave even more, as she sucked at taijutsu and she ended up getting beat more than she learned anything about correct posture and the flow of kinetic energy to make strong hits land with enough force to cause pain. Their level of training was "if you don't get it right, we'll keep hitting you until you figure it out through instincts". Obviously, that doesn't work with everyone, but it at least taught her how to ignore or shrug off pain. They also taught her forbidden jutsu without telling her or anybody else who learned the jutsu that it was forbidden and looked down upon in the world around them, which would easily alienate her from the outside world until she knew better.

With nobody to gain guidance from, she reluctantly had to look up to the Ryukage. However, his influence and how great he treated Sara after it all made her give in, as stubborn as she was at first. She began to follow his teachings, which were mostly biased towards themselves. The Ryukage never told the other people, only to those with his bloodline for fear of mutiny. Sara had the abilities of a partial god-like being, giving her immense potential. Because of that, it automatically made her special and everybody else should bow down to her. Everybody else should make way for her and her teammates should lay down their life for her, with her not supposed to care because everybody who wasn't her or those who didn't share the same blood were expendable.

Imagine her confusion when she was told all of that, only to find her teammates dying in front of her when she was 6, and she felt pain and sorrow much like what she felt from her parents' deaths.

Eventually, through trial and error and more of her teammates dying, she finally understood that lives do matter. She lost the cynical arrogance and the beating down of people once she realized that, and she was sent to Konohagakure to learn more and as insurance so Konoha doesn't see the Ryukage and his village as enemies, and so his students can become official shinobi under a daimyo's and another kage's thumb (due to all shinobi in Sara's village having no daimyo above them, they are essentially illegal mercenaries with shinobi abilities).

Through her adventures in Konoha, she started to understand herself, but she struggled with her fears. She realized she gets migraines and became more irritable if she didn't feel somebody else's blood running over her hands or feeling their life essence drain from their bodies. She realized that making any friends made her petrified at losing any of them, yet she was starving for attention and validation from those she made friends from due to the lack of affectionate and attention. She started getting into trouble, stealing alcohol and drinking at the early age of 11 before she was stopped, getting into fights and pranking jonin, being in places she shouldn't be, just to feel the rush to keep the itch to kill at bay and to garner attention. Her emotions were rather stunted, as well. She understood emotions, but oftentimes got so absorbed with herself that she'll lash out when she feels too many bad emotions, and she's never had a good coping mechanism. Her only coping mechanism was either train or kill because that was what she was forced to do if she had nothing to do was constantly train.

There were no books in the village she lived in previously, no media or any of the sorts and the only source of media was propaganda tilting the favor towards the Ryukage as this savior of her people. When in reality, there was a whole life and world away from the village.

However, the constant threats of possibly losing her brother, especially after a scare that sobered her perceptions, kept her from furthering any meaningful relationships, for fear that they'll die or disappear too.

Sara as a child viewed life and death as something that could be controlled if you had the skills to do such a thing. She then later viewed them as a way of life, and death could be delayed if you were good enough, but it wasn't a guarantee. Still, she has a god complex, thinking that if she was just fast or strong enough, she can prevent someone's demise or her own. In fact, due to her resilience, she thinks she can't die at times and ends up doing something reckless and arrogant that causes her near death.

Because she had to grow up quickly, her emotional state is still stunted, even at the age of 27. She still doesn't understand that something she does can hurt someone close to her, even though that is something she wants to avoid doing. Yet, she's too naïve to have the foresight. She still acts like a kid when she can, but sometimes gets stuck in her past and becomes melancholy and depressed, losing motivation in things she normally likes, becoming pessimistic, and becoming tired all the time. When she should go to sleep, she starts going through a bout of paranoia and anxiety, as old remnants of one of her training regimens, which was to force her body to fight while unconscious by having someone attack her every night until she can do so in her sleep. But also, many of her friends died when she was asleep and she was nearby, so going to sleep is a daunting task she has to struggle with. Staying asleep is even worse as her PTSD plagues her with nightmares, causing her to attack friendlies nearby if there is a particularly bad one. Her chakra also discharges without her say so, due to the abuse she had to go through, but she turns that into a strength instead of something that she should be ashamed of. When she wakes up, her body acts like she didn't get enough sleep, so she has a hard time getting up unless combat rouses her up.

She also finds herself drinking alcohol until she blacks out, doing so because it's fun, it's thrilling, and she likes to forget her worries. She had to fight an alcohol addiction before it started to impede on her missions. She's got healthier coping habits now.

Instead of taking life as a shinobi, she preserves and teaches the next generation of children who wish to be shinobi, teaching them life lessons and giving them a parental figure that may be absent in their life or share her experiences with. Being a den mother was something she didn't expect to be, but kids took to her naturally and she took to them just as much. She learned how to embrace her inner child even more because of them and learns something from them every day. She also works on protection instead of outright killing, as one of her crushes dislikes killing for sport or gratification, so she tries to fight her migraines and does therapeutic meditation and other thrilling things like partying and being in places she shouldn't be to delay the urge before she absolutely has to kill again. And to seek that thrill, she acts rambunctious and silly in everyday life and conversations, her excitement turns into her rambling and becoming such a goofball that she usually forgets the bad parts of her life.

As a bonus, she also says that what she's gone through was bad, but she has to accept that about herself and realize Sara is Sara and not the Ryukage's pawn that she subconsciously believes to move on, otherwise she'll be stuck thinking that way and will continue to fight with a death wish and a penchant for blood, which can end her life.

---

Like a pendulum, for every bad thing that happens to them, there should be something good that they can do to either get rid of this idea, issue, or thing they do, or at least lessen the impact of how that affects them. If they aren't redeemable, then they aren't good characters. If they are redeemable but they redeem too quickly, then the abuse is made a mockery of what it actually is. For many abuse victims out there, it is a struggling venture for their entire lives, most of their lives if they're lucky. I'm still struggling with feelings of abandonment, even years after my parents' divorce. I'm still struggling with my self-worth, also from my parents' divorce. But it happened, and I must move on. I see it as a good thing, as I could have been far worse because the fighting would have gotten worse.

Seeing the good in something that has happened is something tricky to do for anybody suffering from abuse. I still don't see what I had to suffer through as a 13-year-old as a good thing (no, this isn't some deep edgy shit, this was an actual problem that I'm upset the police didn't handle it well). In fact, I'll never forgive or forget that man who did the things he did to me. But I won't hate the man. In fact, I'm glad he's gone and collection agencies are after him, and that karma is swiftly handing him a nice 'fuck you' from me on the east coast. I don't hate him for the simple fact of, it's too much of my energy to keep bothering about something that happened so long ago when the problem isn't something I'm facing now.

A character mostly can't see the good in anything unless they have another character to see that for themselves, to open their eyes and give them another viewpoint.

---

So, to recap:

• Give them rationalizations they use to ignore the bad of what they're doing.
• Give them coping mechanisms for the stuff they'll have to go through and rate how well that works for them.
• What is their usual emotional state and how quickly does that change depending on what happens? Does anything trigger them? What fears do they have and does it cripple them or make them act a certain way?
• If their parents are a problem, why are they a problem? And keep asking why to get into even more detail.
• Think of the viewpoints they'll have and how easily that can alienate them from those around them. If they view the life of something small like a dog or a cat insignificant and they aren't exactly quiet about how quickly life can be snuffed out so they shouldn't attach themselves for fear of feeling heartbreak, how well would people react to that? How depressing or intimidating are they going to sound?
• How do they function in their new life and what do they have to change and how well does that work out for them?
• Map out how the trauma/grooming led to them to react, feel, and later rationalize into an ideal or thought process for them later in life.
• Give them another character to bounce off of, whether that be a character you make or your RP partner if you're doing a 1x1.
• Do your research.

I had done some research and child soldiers do exist today. They exist somewhere in Africa or the middle east (I don't fully remember, but it's most likely Africa). They are taken and put in a small box where they are forced to consume propaganda of all horrible things that is twisted to be something good they can do, then given a gun and clothes, then trained how to shoot and kill. They promised them food, water, and shelter, which were things they were struggling to find. When interviewed, those kids sounded lifeless, monotonous, arrogant, and they said they get migraines if they don't see somebody die by their hands. Nothing excites them than potentially taking a life, which is why I had Sara try so hard to find and seek thrills, but end up falling back to killing someone because the migraines are too much. It's the lack of stimulation because lack of dopamine can cause depression and migraines.

I think that's all I can give you XD Hopefully this all helps :3

 

[GojiBean]

Greetings!

I'm not sure what you mean by "romanticizing" the abuse as it's not something that can really be romanticized. It's abuse, after all. It's ugly. It's brutal. It's unethical. It's immoral. It's disturbing. It's destructive. And it's just plain wrong.

Anyway, enough rambling.

Welcome to GojiBean's HOW TO ABUSE YOUR CHARACTER 101! I'm here to help!! (I swear this is not indicative of who I am in real life)

1. Beginnings

Abusers don't come out of thin air. There's always a reason behind the abuse. In your case, the parents wanted to turn the kid into a war machine. So this is a good start. However... Why?

Why do the parents want to turn their own child into a war machine? What made them think that was a good idea? What made them think it was ethical or moral or in any way justified to objectify their child and "turn them into" something that they were never born to be?

Human psychology is a tricky thing to navigate. Especially if you've never studied it. But what separates a strong backstory ripe with abuse from a weak one is rooted in the simple question of "Why did the abuse start?"

Did the parents become disillusioned by the horrors of war and lose their moral compass, thinking that "any means necessary" justifies the means of what they're doing?

Did they lose hope for victory, and in their desperation to find some sort of silver lining or light at the end of the tunnel they sacrificed reason and ethics and pinned everything on their newborn?

Were they already questionable people with questionable morals and senses for what's justifiable in the world, and this is just the epitome of their questionable judgement laid bare?

Or, was there some entirely different reason they became abusive and eventually just threw the kid away when the "war machine" they were cultivating couldn't be realized in their desired time frame?

2. Realism In The Abuse

The key to believable abuse victims is making the abuse feasible in reality so that it's easily imagined and understood with minimal to no mental effort on the part of the readers. If someone just reads "they were abused from childhood," there are so many ways someone could be abused that it's not worth bothering to think about. They just think "abuse victim, got it." And that's it. There's no empathy or sympathy there. Nobody is going to care about your character's abusive backstory until/unless you're able to both quantify and qualify that abuse in a way they can clearly see and understand.

For example: Let's say that my character is a victim of physical abuse. Daddy was as lucid and level-headed as anyone when it came to everything except his children. When it came to them, it was like he was a different person. He would become violent, ill-tempered, and it was like a switch was flipped and he couldn't help himself. He was compelled to seek them out and slap them as hard as he could until he broke their jaw. He was compelled to punch them if they ever raised their voices to him and shattered their cheek bone (as well as his own knuckle). He was compelled to brutalize them for failure and saw the physical lashing as "discipline" and "a lesson learned."

3. Caring For The Circumstances

You read about something like the above example and you think, damn. Dad sucked.

You almost care. But not quite... Not until I add something like this.

When my character was sixteen and coming into his own as a young man he finally had the strength to both stand up for himself and fight off his father if and when the abuse was incoming. And one fateful day it was assured. Father came at him and he defended himself. In doing so he hospitalized his father. During his stay he was given a psychiatric evaluation after the abuse was finally reported to the authorities, and it was discovered he suffered from Dissociative Identity Disorder. He has a "normal" self, and a "darker" self. His normal self is the calm, level headed and loving husband and father that they know he can be. But the darker self, born from the trigger of annoyance whenever something in life pushes him just a little too far, is the one they know as the abuser.

Suddenly, for my character, it's no longer "father" who's the abuser. It's this other personality living inside father's head.

This is something father can't help. He can't stop it. He can't just bottle it up or make it go away. This is a condition he was likely born with and that was always there, lying beneath the surface.

The abuse has a face now. And it's not the one my character, or anyone, expected. It's father, but not father at the same time. It's this "other" self.

4. Resolved, or Ongoing?

In the case of my example, it's resolved. Father is placed on medication and suddenly everything turns around and he becomes the level headed man he always was known for. As a result his relationship with my character begins to improve dramatically as the character learns to trust his dad over time. And life becomes as it always should have been.

However, that abuse is always going to linger in the back of everyone's mind. Father is ridden by guilt. And my character is ridden by fear. Fear that one day it may return. Fear that one day he may meet that same kind of abuse at the hands of another. Potentially someone he comes to love and trust. He doesn't want to relive it. But the way the world works he just might have to.

This is how you craft a story within a story. Now, the abuse which could have simply been "daddy issues" has a much deeper and stronger meaning. Anyone who reads his bio is going to know that this story will come out eventually in IC posting. And they'll be tapping their fingers on their keyboards as they read it from the character's perspective rather than a summarization from the player on a bio page. And why is that? Because they care. They want to hear this from the character. They want to see the emotional reaction they have to the recollection of the events. They want to care even more than they do now because we crave connection to the characters on the page by default. Otherwise we wouldn't be here.

But what if it wasn't resolved? What if it was ongoing?

If it was ongoing and the hospitalization wouldn't have revealed the condition father had and things would continue as they were. So, what then becomes of the son's relationship to his father? It falls further down the hole.

Father becomes a whirlwind of emotions and issues, both mental and physical. Not only is he recovering from being hospitalized, he's dealing with the emotional turmoil of knowing he was about to abuse his son again, his son is the one who put him in the hospital, he's got a lot of recovery and rehab to go through, he's probably going to miss work for a while which means no pay, and who knows what will happen if and when the abuse triggers again. How much more pain will he endure? How much will he put his son through? Is he going to be hospitalized again? If so, for how long? How much work will he miss then? What if he's fired?

All of this culminates in father's abuses becoming more subtle and less physical as it's the only way he (or, rather, his dark self) sees to adjust to the son's increased strength and ability to defend himself. He becomes distant to the son. Non-responsive, even. They eat at the dinner table and he'll only talk to his wife and never once bother looking at his son. When his son speaks, he doesn't listen or pretends not to until he's forced to look him in the eye and converse. If and when that happens, he feigns pain at his son's forceful turn of the shoulder or the head and starts barking at him becoming a brute without discipline or respect for his father's well being.

... He's turning the abused into the abuser. Or at least he's trying to. And, sadly, this works far more often than it fails.

Why?

5. Continued Weaknesses

Abuse victims are often riddled with guilt, fear, and shame. Why? Because their abusers will often instill the idea that "this is your fault." The minds of children are malleable and prone to believing whatever their parents and/or guardians and older peers tell them. Especially if it's repeated over and over and over again like a mantra and religious doctrine.

For an abuse victim to feel real and like their misery carries true weight, they have to be much more than a reserved, shy, and introverted mess lacking in self confidence.

That's too easy.

Instead, play to their abuser's strengths. In my case I would be playing to the father's successful turning of abused into abuser and my character would be constantly afraid to get upset or involved in any debates or high-intensity discussions out of fear of "abusing" someone. He wouldn't want to get the last word in at any time or in any situation. And he'd more often than not look to avoid anything if it looks even remotely negative.

Why?

Because he's looking for a safe place to stay. Somewhere the "abusive behavior" can't be let free. Somewhere he can just relax and enjoy life and conversation and fun with his friends. He doesn't want any negativity. But sadly, this world is full of it. And not just for him...

One of his best female friends gets out of an abusive relationship and asks him for some kind words to console her during her period of grief as she tries to cope with what happened, but he shies away and leaves her to deal with it on her own.

One of his other friends loses his mother to an illness and asks my character "what do I do?" My character doesn't know. How could he? His mother still lives. But because he's afraid of giving the wrong answer and afraid of this kind of negative atmosphere, he makes an excuse to run away from the situation and leaves his friend to grieve alone, lost and confused and lacking any guidance.

Another friend get beaten up by jocks, something my character could have prevented given his own physical prowess, but he chose not to step in because he was afraid of being seen as the bad guy. So his friend suffers physical trauma and abuse because he couldn't bring himself to act.

Weakness...

Conclusion

To create a realistic abuse victim takes time and careful thought.

Always ask yourself "why?" to everything you come up with. The parents wanted to create a war machine. Why? The war ended prematurely before the war machine could get involved. Why did it end prematurely? Why did it matter? They chose to give the kid up for adoption. Why?

Turn yourself into that annoying two year old who's always asking "why?" to everything.

If you can do that, you will start to find much deeper meaning in every decision you make regarding your character's backstory. And all of these discoveries and all of the information you uncover and continue building upon will help direct this character moving forward in life.

Cheers!!

 

[Coward]

The others have already contributed some useful tips on being thoughtful and considering motivation, so I'll just expand a little:

I think you've chosen the hardest possible type of abuse to avoid romanticising.

Why? Because to most people (including me) being an effective soldier has an undeniable cool factor. We also tend to consider national defense to be critically important, and we'll make moral concessions for war that we wouldn't normally make.

Example: A lot of people think Sparta was a cool society, even after learning that extreme, ritualised child abuse was a normal part of growing up as a Spartiate. Young boys were beaten by adults, raped, made to hurt younger children, forced to undertake intensive training, sometimes actually dying. Basically, it was years of hell. We saw a watered down version of this in the movie 300, and people still took away from that movie that Spartans were awesome badasses, not the victims of a deeply fucked up society.

Incidentally, the graduation ritual of Spartiate training was to go into the villages at night and slaughter random un-armed slaves. Not wolves, like in the movie, slaves. 90+% of the population of Sparta was enslaved, and the abusive training of children was mostly about being prepared to terrorise these slaves and crush rebellion. Also, most fighters in any actual battle with Spartans were slaves who were given weapons and forced to fight without training. But I digress.

There's some evidence in the historical record that a lot of Spartan men might have suffered PTSD from this entire experience, as you would expect. Yet some people can know all that and still be like 'well yeah, but, they're tough and really good at stabbing people with spear?'

You can see a milder version of the same attitude towards boot camps today, where it's seen as normal for a drill instructor to do basically anything they want to you as long as it 'makes you a warrior'. Actually, the more abusive they are the more we assume that they know what they're doing and that this must all be part of the process. We are ready and willing to rationalise abuse in the name of war and martial competence.

All these factors will combine to make your readers romanticise this abuse. You have an uphill battle here.

Basically I think you need to try really hard to keep your head above this character's cool-factor. Keep in mind that while the parents might have considered it righteous to do this, and while the character himself might even believe it was justified, this abuse was a pointless and damaging exercise. Reinforce that. Make his relationships suffer, make him experience debilitating flashbacks or substance abuse problems. Deconstruct the coolness. The real kicker here would be if he's actually bad at fighting, because of problems caused by the training.

You could also write brutally honest flashbacks that show the abuse how it really is: ugly, demeaning and unjustifiable. Show your character crying from pain or exhaustion and begging to be allowed to live a normal life. Because they're a child, not a soldier-in-waiting.

Or don't do that! Honestly, it's ok to just play a cool character, even if they were abused. You're a RPer not a movie exec or major author, your responsibility for accurate representation isn't that great. But you asked so I thought I'd give my real answer.

 

[nerdy tangents]

GojiBean Romanticized abuse is when a writer rationalizes or excuses abusive behavior as a means of heightening emotional turmoil.

It is also turning traumatic events into a gimmick that gives a character some personality.

The key is the writer does not understand certain behavior as abusive and instead treats it like a trope.

So when “my parents beat me as a child” is given the same narrative importance as “oh I’m clumsy and have nerdy glasses”.

 

[Cosmo]

Writing is complex. It's not as simple as 'tropes' or not tropes. It's not as simple as putting emphasize on something or ignoring it for the sake of the greater plot. There are no magical quotas you have to hit, or goals you must meet, in order for something to pass an imaginary test and be 'approved'.

If you want to write abuse, write something sad happening to a character, a good thing to understand is that what makes something sad, or impactful, to the reader isn't what happened so much as how they feel and react to it. For example, what kind of abuse it was doesn't matter as much as how that abuse affects the character. You can write the most horrible thing your mind can come up with, but until the reader sees how that has affected the character, or those around them, they're just words on the paper that someone had fun thinking up. Strong emotional response comes from seeing how this has hurt them. When you see someone shocked by something, someone who woke up in the middle of the night, covered in sweat, barely able to hold onto a glass as they try and drown themselves in alcohol to bury the pain, but when morning comes, are 'normal', hiding it, from those around them as they've been forced to learn that it's easier to smile then cry, this lets us know how much that abuse has hurt them, the pain they go through, without overwhelming the story or even going into the dirty details of the deed.

But even this you have to be careful with. No one likes a crybaby [Unless you are trying to make a crybaby the reader will become annoyed with]. Even if they have a reason to be, a valid reason, a reason that would make any normal person go, "Yeah, okay, that makes sense they'd be always like that," those kind of people tend to become unsympathetic. This is the reason the sad clown has such strong, and powerful, emotional imagery attached to it. The clown is sad, depressed, but the clown still spends all their time trying to make everyone else happy even if that means there will never be anyone to support the clown. This evokes a powerful response from us.

So for your character, you don't want to spend too much time dwelling on the dark, you don't want them to be so hurt that all they do is hurt and don't actually do anything. That they are no longer proactive in their own story.

Really, though, it is the very first thing I said. It's complex! The more you write, the more you learn. You will pick up your own style and what you like and don't like to write. Don't be afraid to throw yourself into the deep end and test the water.

 

[Hootle]

I would definitely do research. Put yourself in the character's shoes. If you were the character, how would something like that affect you.