*BEFORE my INFORMATIONAL POST, an UPDATE on PROGRESS

I ask potential readers to excuse me for taking so long to perfect my novels, but to be a publishable ‘talented’ writer, you need to do a lot of reading of books and articles and websites posted by other authors, and reflecting on lots of facets of their writing, as well as a lot of tweaking of manuscripts to reflect your own ‘voice’. I’m still tweaking the 16th draft of my first novel (the 13th draft of which was written through the Australian Writers’ Centre’s Write Your Novel course) based on what and how I’m writing in the second novel and what I learn through my reading. I’m even thinking that I won’t seek again to publish it until my next manuscript is reasonably close to finished.*

Trauma is often, in the literature, attributed to a singular, defining event. Fictional trauma, in my reading so far, typically centres on a moment of rupture that shapes everything after, although there are a number of really perceptive literary authors whose work goes beyond that**. However, in lived experience, trauma’s resonance lies less in the event itself and more in how it extends forward—subtly and persistently moulding identity, memory, and relationships in ways that accumulate over time and are often difficult to name or pinpoint.

When I began writing The Gaslight Dinning Room and The Cafe Slightly Left of Nowhere (both working titles), my main concern was to describe the depth and effect of coercive control and trauma upon myself and others. I couldn’t do it emotionally by writing a first-person memoir, so I turned it into third-person and added fictional scenes— what is known as ‘autofiction’. My hope was that readers would be unable to distinguish the truth about what I experienced from the ‘fictional inserts’.

I realised that the challenge was not how to depict what had happened, but how to represent what remained. This required a shift in focus—from each crisis point itself to what I came to think of as its afterlife, which became the starting point for the first book’s narrative.

MOVING BEYOND THE EVENT

One of the main creative decisions I confronted was whether to centre the narrative around the traumatic series of events themselves. Dramatising trauma through intense scenes can pull focus. Focusing on these moments risked reducing the characters’ experiences to a few single defining moments. So I placed greater emphasis on what followed.

In practice, this meant letting trauma appear not through spectacle, but through pattern. It emerged in hesitation, in over-accommodation. In lack of confidence. In guilt. In fear. In obligation. In the quiet ways a character anticipates harm even when it’s absent. It lives in how someone enters a room, interprets silence, and navigates relationships.

By focusing on these quieter manifestations, the narrative reflects not just what happened, but how it endures.

LETTING MEMORY REMAIN FRAGMENTED

Another challenge was how to represent memory. Trauma does not return in a linear or orderly way. It surfaces unpredictably, through sensory details, passing moments, or emotional triggers that are not always immediately understood. And in dreams (a real cliche, but I only used it once). To reflect this, I avoided presenting trauma in a linear narrative totally contained in the past as backstory.

Instead, I allowed it to emerge gradually, in response to the present. Sometimes a moment of tension reveals only part of the truth. Other times, a seemingly ordinary interaction might carry the weight of an unresolved issue. The Gaslight Dinning Room’s structure moves between past and present, but not in a way that seeks to explain everything at once. At this stage, The Cafe Slightly Left of Nowhere is chronological.

This approach resists closure, letting memory function as it often does—fragmented, evolving, and incomplete.

RESISTING REDUCTION TO TRAUMA

A central concern in writing trauma is the risk of reducing characters to what they have endured. Early in the drafting process, I found myself asking: Are these characters, Ruthie (Empowered by calling herself ‘Ruth’ in the second book—still a first draft in progress), and to a lesser extent, Frank, being shaped by their experiences or defined by them?

To avoid flattening Ruthie into a single dimension, I worked to ensure that trauma remained one influence among many. She exists within a network of relationships and roles. Ruthie is a mother, twice a spouse, a daughter, a niece, a friend, a sister and a teacher. Cultural expectations, a certain neurodivergent way of thinking, personal desires, and contradictions—these shape her, too. As are most victims/survivors of trauma, she is more than any one experience.

In some scenes, Ruthie and Frank are fully absorbed in the rhythms of living their best lives, attending to small, ordinary details. Nothing explicitly references the past, and yet its presence can be felt in the way they respond to others, to themselves, to each other and to the expectations placed upon them.

Moments like this were important to me. They allow the characters to exist as whole people, rather than as a representation of trauma. While the protagonist is ‘Ruthie’, my avatar/alter ego, ‘Frank’ is a character representing someone who had his own load of trauma and who made me promise to write about it.

USING RESTRAINT RATHER THAN EXPLANATION

Although writers are constantly told to show, not tell, there is also the question of how much to show. In writing about trauma, it can feel necessary to make everything visible—to explain, contextualise, and clarify. But I found that over-explanation risked diminishing the emotional complexity of the narrative. Instead, although there are several extremely graphic scenes in the first book, which I hope will make all readers uncomfortable, because you need to experience some of the trauma triggers to understand it, I deliberately chose to hold back by filtering other scenes through Ruthie’s sense of numb desolation.

This meant resisting the impulse to interpret the characters’ experience for the reader. It meant allowing certain moments to remain partially obscured, trusting that what is implied can carry as much weight as what is explicitly stated. In some cases, this meant leaving gaps—places where the reader must sit with uncertainty, just as the character does.

Restraint, in this sense, is not avoidance. It is a way of creating space.

HOLDING THE COMPLEXITY OF TRAUMA ON THE PAGE

Writing trauma fiction is not about recreating pain. It is about representing its complexity. Through my own journey, I approach trauma not as a fixed point, but as something dynamic—something that evolves over time and remains woven into the broader fabric of a character’s life.

The afterlife of trauma resists simplicity. It does not unfold in a straight line, nor does it exist in isolation. It continues in the tension between what is felt and what is expressed, surfacing even as a character grows, in how they relate to others, and in the small, often unnoticed moments that shape their experience.

Fiction offers a space to hold that complexity—not by resolving it, but by allowing it to remain present, shifting, and deeply human. Add to that my need to engage readers who do not want to be reading about deeply emotional ‘triggers’ in every scene throughout a whole novel, but who still want to relate to the characters, and my challenge becomes to add humour and Australiana and interesting narrative character and story arcs. I’m having the greatest fun adding humour, but it takes a while.

**Some books in which authors cover the lived experience of trauma well (IMHO), despite vastly different writing styles, include:

Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose series; Sally Rooney’s Normal People; Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous; Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting; Olivia Blake’s Along With You in the Ether; Holly Ringland’s The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge