Their Voices, Their Wounds: Pitfalls to Avoid When Writing About Trauma
Author Fartumo Kusow shares two very big pitfalls to avoid when writing about trauma and how she navigated around them.
Writing about trauma without sensationalizing the violence demands restraint. That is why I chose to focus instead on the resilience of the girls—their friendships, their faith, their determination to survive. I wanted readers to encounter them not as victims alone, but as complex young women with agency, humor, anger, and hope.
Winter of My Spring opens with Rada, the main character and narrator, declaring: "At thirteen, I saw no enemy. I knew no fear."
This opening lets readers meet these girls in their full, ordinary humanity—13-year-olds gossiping about boys, sneaking moments of freedom, testing boundaries with their mothers. Only then does the trauma enter their story. This structure was deliberate. Their existence does not begin and end with what was done to them. Their lives have the same layers, contradictions, and complexity as anyone's. They are not defined by their wounds, but by how they navigate them. To accomplish that, I worked to avoid two pitfalls: speaking for the girls rather than allowing them to speak for themselves and reducing them to their trauma—flattening them into symbols rather than individuals.
The Temptation to Speak for Characters
The first pitfall I navigated was the temptation to speak for these girls rather than allowing them to speak for themselves—to reduce them to symbols that serve a narrow focus rather than honoring them as individuals with their own voices. I chose first-person narration deliberately. Rada tells her own story in her own words, with her own logic. For example, when her mother yells at her for going on the roof and says, "You don't listen…There are eyes watching and ears listening twice as much," Rada sees this as her mother exaggerating and making unreasonable demands.
However, I don't interrupt to explain the psychological mechanism at work or the reality of the threat her mother sees. I could have had her mother or father tell her explicitly about the threat. I could have included a narrative to show her limitation or had the girls realize the danger once I explained it. Instead, I let Rada be a 13-year-old girl without imposing my authorial view. Rada's voice imperfect, angry, contradictory, remains sovereign. This allows readers to sit with ambiguity, to respect the girls' own interpretations of their experiences.
Perhaps the greatest danger in trauma narratives is the reduction of people to symbols, turning Rada into merely a girl broken by the trauma she experienced rather than a full human being. Even though I am from the same country as the girls culturally, I was acutely aware that these were not my stories to tell. They belonged to the girls who lived them. My role was to create space for their voices, not to annotate or interpret. This meant once I opened the page, I let the events, conflicts, and relationships evolve without my interruption.
Rada complains about her mother’s rules by saying, “Even hell would be better than here.” I left her to it instead of stating that there are so many levels of hell to come. Rada was to confront what came in her own terms. I decided to join the girls in their journey toward freedom and liberty. As the novel developed, patterns in how they spoke about their experiences emerged. What they emphasized, what they skipped over, the strategies they used to survive, remained their own making. These rhythms became the novel's rhythms.
Throughout the writing process, I returned to the question: Whose narrative is this serving? When I found myself writing explanatory passages about cultural context, I was familiar with, context the girls and I shared, I stripped them away. Each time I reached for my own personal views of the topics, I pulled back. If the girls can walk through the pages without knowing the danger ahead and how to survive it, the readers and I can sit with not-knowing. The girls don't owe us tidy explanations.
Flattening Characters Into Grief and Suffering
The second pitfall I worked to avoid was allowing trauma to flatten the girls into grief and suffering alone—to let their story collapse into a single note of anguish. Their humanity extends far beyond the trauma they endured. Like real life and most fiction, the novel reflects that truth. The vehicle the kidnappers placed them in signaled the deeper connection the girls shared and how that would carry them through. Rada says “I flew into Mika's arms, pulled Sara in, and melted into their embrace. It was as if I'd been running for hours and only now was finding rest.”
Away from home, and everything familiar, the girls turned toward each other. This shows both the literal and figurative comfort the hug offers the girls. At this point the girls do not know the depth of the trouble ahead, but that single physical connection, shows their agency. As I followed where the girls led, what emerged was their strength not woven around the trauma, but their friendship.
As I wrote, I asked myself, Does this scene let them be whole, or only wounded? When I found myself going too long in their traumatic experience, I pulled back. I listened for where the girls themselves found breath.
For example, when the girls decided that they will mess the chores like dumping “all the salt into the pot of lentil soup,” I knew they were never pretending the danger wasn’t there but were exercising the defiance of people who refuse to be reduced. That defiance surfaces plainly when Rada tells her friends, "I'm as scared as you are. But we can't let that stop us… We have to do something for ourselves."
She is not brave in spite of her fear. She is brave because of it. I did not write that distinction in. She wrote it herself.
Check out Fartumo Kusow's Winter of My Spring here:
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