Life is Full of Stress and Hit Novels Are, Too
A couple of years ago, one of my friends was going through a divorce and she sighed, looked at me and said, “I wish I was a writer so I could do something with this pain—make it productive, you know?”
In a class I’m teaching at the Writing Barn, one of the writers said something similar. It was about how she knows that everything she goes through—the bad and the good—become a part of her work.
For most of us humans in America, life traumas suck. The world is trauma. It sucks for writers, too.
Adam Dalva wrote for Medium in 2022,
“Every day—through TikTok, Instagram, and Zoom—the internet forces us to think about how we present ourselves to the world, giving us endless opportunities to construct our identities anew. Little wonder, perhaps, that the personal feels ubiquitous in contemporary writing, too, with a slew of publications that draw from, or appear to draw from, the lives of their authors. (Think of the novels of Douglas Stuart, the essays of T Kira Madden, and the poems of Ocean Vuong, all writers who mingle personal experiences with exceptional creative writing.) But in the past few years, I’d argue that another driving force has been behind much personal writing: the many traumas of recent vintage, including the pandemic, racist violence, and the mental-health crisis. As these events have piled up, my writing students have become more interested in rendering their own experiences—especially the painful ones.”
Trauma happens in life. It also happens in novels. The goal of the novelist will always hopefully be to not exploit the traumas of others or communities in order to get on the NYT bestseller list, right?
James Hall briefly touches the world of life traumas in the 12 all-time bestselling American novels that he analyzes in his book, HIT LIT.
There, he mentions the Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS), aka the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, created by Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe way back in 1967.
As Saul McLeod, PhD, write in Simple Psychology,
“The scale was designed to identify major stressful life events and was based on the premise that such events, regardless of whether they’re positive or negative, might necessitate significant adjustment and, hence, induce stress.
The SRRS comprises a list of 43 stressful life events, ranging from marriage and divorce to minor law violations and changes in sleeping habits.
“Each of the 43 life events was awarded a Life Change Unit, depending on how traumatic it felt to be by a large sample of participants.
“For example, “Death of a spouse” has the highest LCU value of 100, indicating it’s the most stressful event on the list.
“By adding up the LCUs of events an individual has experienced over a year, one can get a score that predicts the likelihood of experiencing a major health breakdown in the subsequent two years. Higher scores indicate a higher risk.”
Life is full of stress for many of us. And hit novels? They are, too? A shark attacks a community. A war overwhelms a country. An affair puts everything in jeopardy.
Readers in our culture are conditioned to expect conflict in stories—the opposition that happens to your main character’s goals. That protagonist has to try to achieve the goals despite those obstructions.
Conflict can be big or small depending on the genre, but it has to be:
Specific;
Matter to the main character;
Not be super easy to deal with;
Happen to a character that the reader is into.
When you have multiple layers of conflict? That’s when you go big time.
A guy has to convince his town (society) that a shark (animal/supernatural) is going to eat everyone while also dealing with a failing marriage and his own inner demons? You’ve got layers.
It’s about struggles and conflicts, too, and there is a difference.
As James Scott Bell, in The Art of War for Writers, writes:
An inner conflict is plot-centric; it is an internal obstacle either triggered by or somehow directly connected to the story – the plot. Whereas inner struggle is something that plays against the character’s strengths; it’s something the character brings to the plot, usually from her past, either long ago or recent past (but before the first page). The plot will put the protagonist in situations where she has to deal with this inner struggle, and she’ll carry that struggle with her throughout the story. If the character is in a series, it will run throughout the book series.
Conflict gives your story purpose. Struggle, stress, and trauma give your story depth.
Holmes, T. H., & Rahe, R. H. (1967). The social readjustment rating scale. Journal of psychosomatic research, 11, 213.