I think there is sometimes an assumption that if a writer says trauma influences their work, then every book becomes some kind of coded autobiography.
Mine are not.
I promise.
You do not need to start reading The Listener and wondering which tunnel happened to me personally. 😂
When I say trauma shows up in my writing, I mean something different.
There are things I have lived through that changed the way I understand people, fear, grief, trust, anger, helplessness, and the weird ways our minds try to survive things.
That stays with you.
It changes the questions you ask.
It changes what feels believable to you.
And sometimes it changes the way you write a room before anything bad even happens in it.
I have a poetry memoir that nobody has ever read.
Nobody.
Not a friend. Not a beta reader. Nobody.
That manuscript holds a different kind of writing for me because it is much closer to memory. There are things in there I needed to write down, but needing to write them and wanting other people to read them are two completely different decisions.
That was something I had to learn too.
Writing something does not mean I owe it to anybody.
Some things can stay mine.
Fiction gives me another way to work with the emotional pieces without giving away the actual story behind them.
I can write about grief without telling you every detail of the person I lost.
I can write about fear without recreating the exact thing that taught me fear.
I can write about a character losing control without explaining every moment in my own life when I felt like I had none.
The feeling is enough.
Sometimes it is more than enough.
Honestly, I think that is why horror works for me so well.
Horror lets emotion become physical.
Grief can call you from a tunnel.
Trust can sit across from you in an office.
A random thought about bones can become something buried behind a house.
You can take something that is difficult to explain in normal language and make it into a situation somebody else can feel.
Maybe they have never experienced anything close to what you have.
That does not matter.
They know what grief feels like.
They know fear.
They know guilt.
They know what it is like to want something back.
And maybe they read one particular line or one character’s reaction and think, Oh yeah. I know that feeling.
That is probably one of the things I want most from the books.
Not for somebody to decode my life.
Not for them to figure out which part “really happened.”
Just to recognize something.
Because there is a difference between writing the facts of trauma and writing the truth of what trauma leaves behind.
That difference is where a lot of my fiction lives.
And for me, that is safer.
It is also more honest.
Because the stories themselves are made up.
The fear underneath them usually is not.