A Conversation With Rene Denfeld on Writing Trauma Without Exploiting It (Killer Writers)

Award-winning, bestselling novelist Rene Denfeld has spent nearly 20 years as a licensed investigator, including serving as chief investigator for a public defender and working on hundreds of investigations, including death-row cases and efforts that have helped exonerate innocent people. That experience has shaped fiction known for venturing into extraordinarily dark places without losing sight of the humanity of the people who inhabit them.

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The author of The Enchanted, The Child Finder, The Butterfly Girl, Sleeping Giants, and the new literary thriller The Talking Bone, Denfeld has received numerous literary honors, and The New York Times recognized her for heroism in 2017. The Talking Bone, inspired by her real-life work exonerating the innocent, provides a fitting backdrop for a larger conversation about one of fiction’s most difficult challenges: How do we write trauma truthfully without allowing trauma to become the whole story?

“Rene, many writers feel uncertain when they’re approaching emotionally difficult material. When you begin writing about trauma, where do you start as a writer? Do you start emotionally, or do you start structurally?”

“I think trauma is this universal condition. We all have trauma. There’s not really a hierarchy of trauma. We’re all experiencing it one way or another. I think as a writer, what helps me the most before I even start is just comfort with trauma. I think of it as sitting with the trauma of my characters. My characters are real people to me. And I want to be able to sit with them and be comfortable with whatever they tell me. I tend to approach it through voice. I usually hear a voice, a thematic. It might be the voice of a character; it might be the voice of a theme or an idea that I’m going to get into in this story.”

“You portray wounded characters, but you always portray them with dignity. What early decisions help ensure a character who is shaped by trauma remains fully human rather than defined by the trauma that happened to them?”

“It’s very easy to fall into using trauma or crime as a trope. If we focus on that to the detriment of the characters, then we run the risk of treating the character’s trauma as a plot point, as something that happens for the sake of our story. I tend to approach it completely in the opposite direction. I want to see what happened to my characters, and then the plot grows out of whatever has happened in their lives. If I’m writing about something traumatic that happened to somebody, I will imagine taking those pages that I’ve written, and I take them to the fictional character, and I ask the character, ‘How do you feel about the way that I wrote about this? Did I do okay? Do you feel respected by how I wrote about this trauma?’ I want to make sure that that character doesn’t feel exploited.”

“For those who don’t have the access that you have, what kind of research or listening practices would you recommend to help them portray emotional wounds authentically?”

“The first thing that pops in my mind is to remember that this character is more than their trauma. If we’re writing about crime and violence, it’s very easy for us to start focusing on the traumatic elements of what happened. But you and I are also more than just the bad things that happened to us. What else does the character like to do in their life? I like to think about, ‘Who was this person? What did they enjoy? What were the positive things in their lives?’ In terms of doing research, it really helps to become familiar with the impact of trauma on people, especially over the long term. Dissociation itself is a really big subject, and how people can shut down after a traumatic event. Reading up on something like dissociation and understanding why somebody might present as shut down or unemotional after a traumatic event can, as a writer, lend such incredible depth to your story and give it that real human element.”

“What are some of the most common mistakes writers make when they’re depicting trauma in vulnerable characters?”

“It’s very easy for us and for trauma survivors to be reduced to the trauma and simplified to the point that the character becomes this one-dimensional object. I don’t like a lot of the modern storytelling about crime and violence, which invariably opens with a scene of some naked woman, her blood-spattered body lying there. And her death or trauma becomes then the catalyst for a story in which the real people step in. And that woman, her body and corpse, is kind of whisked off the stage, and it’s like she never existed. She’s somebody that was never embodied as a real person that mattered. I’m particularly interested as a storyteller in what comes after. But what if the victim doesn’t die? What if the victim’s still alive? Then we have to grapple with what comes after. I believe those questions bring humanity to our stories.”

“How do you balance emotional weight with the narrative momentum, so that the story continues forward?”

“Aspiring writers or new writers might run the risk of wanting to go into gratuitous detail, for instance, about the crime or the traumatic event. As writers, we can far more deeply capture the genuine horror, the genuine pain and difficulty of trauma sometimes by finding that one perfect sentence, that one tiny little paragraph. Sometimes it’s a small detail that can sum up so much more than paragraphs of what happened. As a writer, I’m searching not for pages of exploitative detail, but for a few lines that tell this story. That also keeps the plot moving.”

“How do you intentionally weave hope into difficult material without diminishing the reality of the suffering?”

“I grew up in a great deal of poverty myself, and one of my own personal experiences is that if you grow up with poverty and trauma and crime, people tend to deny you certain human attributes. It’s important that I gift those attributes to my characters. Our capacity for joy, our capacity for whimsy, for lightness. I like to make sure my characters have room to be silly, to be goofy, to find joy, to find beauty. Instead of being a counterpoint to the difficulty of their lives, it highlights the struggle.”

“How do you approach writing resilience in a way that feels authentic rather than sentimental?”

“I think resiliency has become this way that we off-board our collective responsibility. Instead of saying, ‘Oh, we should be helping each other,’ we tell people to be resilient. It’s not how it works. You can have someone who survived the most horrific traumas, and then the death of their cat is the one thing that just makes them fall apart. I see resiliency in the same way. It’s this complicated thing, and understanding the human condition keeps us from being more sentimental. Sentimentality doesn’t serve the characters at all, because then you’re just turning them into cardboard kind of figures that lack the real complexity of it.”

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“How do you personally define ethical storytelling when you’re working with such painful subject matter?”

“I don’t think we can shut down our writing because we’re worried about doing that. I think the best we can do is try to be extremely ethical to the story that we’re writing. We need a code of ethics around how we treat characters, and another around how we treat subjects. I don’t think a writer should have to have personal experience to write about a subject. I do feel that we have an ethical obligation to research it and find accurate information. I do feel like we have an ethical obligation to really find out the truth about these issues before we sit down and write about them.”

“Tell the truth, but compassionately.”

“Exactly, and to tell the truth compassionately, and with respect for the people that we’re talking about. If you want to pick a story like that, then you really need to understand the realities. You need to go visit a prison. Do some research.”

“When you step back from a manuscript, what signals to you that the emotional truth of the story is honest, and that you’ve honored the humanity of those characters?”

“There’s one way I always feel when I think I’m getting close, and that is, I could have done better. You always feel, ‘I could have done better,’ and I think that’s our humility talking, and that’s the real part of us that feels like, ‘I wanted to do a good job, I want to be in service to the story, I want to be in service to the characters, and I feel like I could have done better.’”

“If a writer could take away just one guiding principle from you for portraying trauma with compassion and authenticity, what would that be?”

“Put yourself in the character’s shoes. It’s helpful to have compassion; it’s helpful to empathize, but if you really imagine yourself to be in that position, imagine yourself to be the person in prison. Imagine it was you. Imagine that you are the victim of the trauma you’re writing about, and really identify how it would feel: What would it be like? What would you want people to think about what happened? What would you be afraid of? Connect to that character in a visceral way. It’s much harder to go wrong if you do that. My experience in my field is that people are often very open. They want to share information. So, another piece of advice for writers is to just pick up the phone, call a police station, call a local prison, and say, ‘I’m working on something, who do I talk to?’ They usually have a liaison officer that will set up a walkthrough or a drive-along. And if you do that, you’ll start collecting those little details that bring so much to your story. Or the fact that, in prison, they made special little toothbrushes that are only two inches long. There are all these little details that you pick up that will bring richness to your story as well.”

“It’s one thing to read about it, research about it, watch it on television, and then look into another human’s eyes.”

“When you do that, when you write your story, the beautiful part is taking the reader along with you, and then the reader is looking into their eyes as well. That’s part of the miracle of books: We get to go on that journey with each other.”

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Rene Denfeld is a bestselling author, licensed death row investigator, and foster adoptive mother. She is the author of the novels The Butterfly Girl, The Child Finder, and The Enchanted. Her novels have won numerous awards, including the French Prix du Premier Roman Etranger, and the New York Times named her a 2017 hero of the year. She lives in Portland, Oregon. https://www.renedenfeld.com/