The Inner Bruise

All of my stories come from dreams. It’s true. I wake up, grab the notebook on my bedside table, and capture every detail I can before the dream fades from my memory. I’ve crafted entire worlds based on those notes, complete with complex plots, subplots, and surprise twists. When I first started writing, I tried and tried to turn those notes and worlds and plots into stories, but they never quite worked, and I couldn’t figure out why.

Then I took a class that changed everything. The problem, it seems, was that I only cared about the world and the story. I wasn’t developing my characters beyond how they would fit in the narrative. They were like props on a stage. I learned that readers have to care about your characters, or they aren’t going to read very far, no matter how compelling the story is. So, how do you make readers care about characters? One good way is to give them an inner bruise.

The best stories have characters with well-developed inner bruises. Take Kaz Brekker, for example, from Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows. Kaz’s inner bruise was formed during his childhood, when Pekka tricked him and his brother. The resulting devastation drives everything Kaz does as an adult. It colors every choice he makes. When he agrees to mastermind an impossible heist, it’s in direct response to the inner bruise he’s nurtured and answered to for years. In other words, his internal pain drives the story.

In Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, Simon’s bruise is his fear that everyone will discover his sexuality. He makes a lot of questionable choices throughout the story in direct response to that fear, and those choices are what drives the story. Inner bruises provide not just internal conflict, but external conflict as well. They inject tension, and tension is what keeps people reading. They provide the motivation that explains a character and shows what he/she/they are made of.

So next time you create a character who doesn’t have that spark that draws readers in, ask yourself what the emotional bruise is. Really flesh it out and dig deep into how it would affect your character’s inner dialogue and life choices. The more defined the bruise is, the more interesting and sympathetic your character will be.