BRIDGET WHELAN writer

for writers and readers….

Fiction writers and filmakers love it but do we always need to write Trauma into our stories? Parul Sehgal QUOTES FOR WRITERS

Trauma has become synonymous with backstory, but the tyranny of backstory is itself a relatively recent phenomenon—one that, like any successful convention, has a way of skirting our notice. Personality was not always rendered as the pencil-rubbing of personal history. Jane Austen’s characters are not pierced by sudden memories; they do not work to fill in the gaps of partial, haunting recollections. 
Parul Sehgal The Case Against the Trauma Plot, New Yorker

2 comments on “Fiction writers and filmakers love it but do we always need to write Trauma into our stories? Parul Sehgal QUOTES FOR WRITERS

  1. Sarah Waldock
    February 13, 2022

    Jane Austen’s characters do not need to be pierced by sudden memories; their backstories are revealed with far more subtlety by the Mistress. We know the trauma that Georgina has suffered by Wickham’s advances; we do not need her to dwell on it. We know how Anne has suffered for years before she finally gets her captain. their trauma resonates in their being and does not need any excess prolix.

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This entry was posted on February 13, 2022 by in Quotes and tagged , , , .

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