Writing Trauma Without Romanticizing Pain: Mental Health, Abuse, and Healing in Fiction
Writing trauma calls us to press our hands to the pulse of what hurts. Not to expose it, but to understand it. To shape language around experiences that often resist being named. For many marginalized writers, trauma is memory. It lives in the body. Choosing to bring that to the page is an act of bravery, tenderness, and truth-telling.
Stories hold power. When that power is used carelessly—when trauma becomes an aesthetic, when pain is mistaken for depth, when suffering is reduced to spectacle—the harm is real. Readers feel unseen. Survivors find their experiences distorted. And writers, often unknowingly, can reinforce the very systems they hope to resist.
I’m not here to censor you. I just ask that you take responsibility. Your words carry weight. And writing bravely means writing with care. There is a relationship between writer and reader, one built on trust, vulnerability, and intention. That relationship deserves tending.
There is no rulebook for writing about trauma, but I do hope to provide you with a set of tools for writing about trauma, mental health, and abuse with integrity. Whether you’re drawing from your own experience or pulling purely from your imagination, this is about honoring what you carry, and how your words might meet someone else’s pain. You don’t need to avoid writing about hard topics, but how we write about them matters.
Writing Trauma without Romanticizing Pain: Mental Health, Abuse, and Healing in Fiction
The Impact of Portraying Trauma in Fiction
Stories stay with us. They teach us how to imagine ourselves, how to grieve, how to survive. When trauma is represented with honesty and care, it can feel like someone reaching across the page to say, I see you. You're not alone.
But when trauma is flattened, glamorized, or used carelessly, it can feel like a betrayal. It can reinforce stereotypes, retraumatize readers, and undermine the trust between writer and audience.
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), literature and media play a powerful role in shaping cultural understanding of mental health. But they also caution that inaccurate or sensationalized portrayals can contribute to stigma, harm recovery, and make it harder for people to seek help.
One 2019 study published in Clinical Psychological Science found that people who were repeatedly exposed to graphic media depictions of trauma—especially fictionalized versions of real-world events—experienced higher levels of acute stress and PTSD symptoms.
And while fiction can be a powerful space for processing pain, it’s not neutral. Common missteps can cause unintended harm, especially when authors rely on trauma to do the emotional heavy lifting. Some examples include:
Glamorizing pain by romanticizing suffering or making it beautiful without context or consequence
Using trauma as a shortcut to character depth without showing the long arc of healing or complexity
Centering abusers by spending more time on their redemption than on the survivor’s agency or aftermath
None of these choices make you a bad writer. But they do deserve your attention. Because your readers—especially those who have lived these stories—deserve more than to be treated as a spectacle.
They deserve stories that recognize the full truth of what it means to endure, and to keep living.
Grounding in Craft: Intentional Choices for Writing Trauma
Writing trauma with integrity isn’t about what happens in the plot, it’s about how you tell it. The craft choices you make can shape whether a story feels exploitative or tender, flattening or expansive. Here are a few guiding tools to help you write trauma with nuance, depth, and intention.
1. Show the aftermath, not just the event.
Instead of centering the trauma itself as the climax, focus on what comes after: the silence, the coping mechanisms, the relationships that shift, the rituals of survival. Readers often understand trauma through the small moments, how someone flinches at a certain sound, avoids mirrors, or overcompensates in ways they don’t even notice.
These details carry more emotional truth than a blow-by-blow of the traumatic event.
2. Use sensory detail wisely.
Vivid detail can draw readers in, but be careful not to slip into voyeurism. Ask yourself: Is this sensory moment about the character’s experience, or is it just for shock value? Ground sensory choices in the emotional reality of the character, not just the physical sensations of harm.
3. Consider narrative distance.
Who is telling the story, and when? A character speaking from years of distance will carry a different lens than someone in the raw immediacy of the trauma. Flashbacks, fragmented memories, dissociation, or even unreliable narration can reflect the fractured way trauma often lives in the body and mind. Narrative distance gives you control over what is revealed, when, and why.
4. Build complexity, not just backstory.
Don’t let trauma stand in for character development. Instead, let it inform how your character moves through the world, how they form relationships, and how they perceive safety or threat. Show contradiction, resilience, numbness, and fire. Let them be messy. Let them surprise you.
Books that do this well:
Damsel by Elana K. Arnold subverts the fairy tale rescue narrative to reveal how control can be disguised as care. The trauma isn't just the inciting incident, it's the system that enables it.
Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All by Laura Ruby explores trauma across generations of women through haunting, layered prose. It resists tidy answers, giving each voice its full complexity.
The Sky Is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson captures grief through surreal, poetic language, honoring the disorientation of loss without flattening the character into a single note of sadness.
Centering Healing: Writing Beyond the Wound
Trauma may shape your character’s life, but it doesn’t have to define their entire narrative. One of the most radical things you can do as a writer is make space for what comes next, for healing that is messy, nonlinear, and rooted in community.
1. Let healing be visible, not just implied.
Show how your character begins to re-engage with life, even imperfectly. That might mean trusting someone again, setting a boundary, laughing for the first time in weeks. Healing doesn’t mean the trauma disappears. It means your character is learning how to live with it, not under it.
2. Recovery isn’t linear—and “fixed” isn’t the goal.
Avoid narratives where characters are rewarded with healing because they were “good victims” or forgave someone who hurt them. Real healing is uneven. It can be quiet, slow, defiant, or unexpected. Give your character permission to be whole, even when they’re still in progress.
3. Let other characters hold space.
Community can be a vital part of recovery. Found family, mentors, messy friends, or even a pet show how care might exist outside of romantic or heteronormative frameworks. Who helps your character feel safe enough to soften?
Books that embody this:
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak explores grief, loss, and war through the eyes of a child, but centers human resilience, memory, and the power of story as healing forces.
I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston—while the trauma here is quieter, the book beautifully explores emotional complexity, identity, and queer joy. Characters grow and heal without being reduced to their struggles.
Questions to Ask Yourself as a Writer
You don’t need to have all the answers before you write about trauma, but asking the right questions can help you write with more depth, accountability, and care.
These are invitations to pause, to listen, and to shape your work with clarity and compassion.
Whose story am I telling, and why? Am I centering the survivor’s voice, or is the story more invested in someone else’s reaction to their pain?
Is this trauma a defining feature, or part of a more complex whole? Does this character get to exist beyond what they’ve endured? Do they have joy, mess, contradiction, and agency?
Am I showing the impact, not just the event? Have I made space for what comes after: the grief, the anger, the coping, the survival? Or have I rushed past it?
Is the pain necessary for the story, or just there for effect? If I removed the traumatic event, would the character still have depth? Does the story still hold emotional weight?
Who benefits from this portrayal? Is this story serving survivors, communities, or truth-telling? Or is it leaning into spectacle, shock, or redemption arcs that center the wrong person?
How might a reader who’s lived this experience feel? Have I approached this with the kind of care I’d want if it were my own story?
These aren’t easy questions. But they’re the kind that shape meaningful work, the kind that earns trust and creates resonance.
Writing with Care, Writing with Courage
Writing about trauma is never simple, and it shouldn’t be. But it can be meaningful. It can be honest. It can offer something real to the readers who need it most.
Whether you’re writing from lived experience or imagining a story far from your own, your work carries the potential to harm, to heal, or to hold. The difference lies in how you approach the page: with intention, with humility, and with a willingness to be accountable for what your words might stir.
You don’t have to write a perfect story. You don’t have to write a painless one. But you do have the power to write one that honors truth, complexity, and care.
If you’re writing a story that grapples with trauma, mental health, or abuse—and you’re unsure how it will land—reach out. This is the kind of work we hold sacred at Burgeon. We believe in stories that don’t flinch away from pain, but also don’t turn it into spectacle. We believe in nuance, in healing arcs, in wild, imperfect, beautifully honest characters.
And we believe in you.
Let us know if you’d like support revising, shaping, or deepening your work. This is what we’re here for.
You’re not just building a habit. You’re becoming the kind of writer who writes.
Inside The Residency, writing becomes part of who you are—not a task on your to-do list, but a rhythm you return to. With care, structure, and community, you’ll build momentum, trust your voice, and keep showing up for the stories only you can tell.
Choose the path that fits your season, and come write with us.
Tiffany Grimes (she/they) is the founder of Burgeon Design and Editorial, a queer founded boutique editing and design house for brave creatives. At Burgeon, we specialize in book editing, coaching, and web design for the individualists, nonconformists, and trailblazers of the literary world. If you’re a maverick, outsider, rebel, renegade, dissenter, disruptor, or free spirit, you’ve come to the right place.
