A deep emotional injury from your character's past that shapes their fears, behaviors, and flaws throughout the story.
A character wound is the lasting emotional damage caused by a painful experience in the character's past. It's not a surface-level bad memory - it's something that fundamentally changed how the character sees themselves or the world. The wound creates defense mechanisms, drives flawed behavior, and usually sits at the heart of the character's internal conflict. In story structure terms, the wound is the emotional foundation that everything else - the lie, the flaw, the arc - is built on.
Characters without wounds feel like paper cutouts. The wound is what makes your character feel like a real person with a real history. It explains why they react the way they do, why they push people away or cling too tight, why they make choices that seem irrational on the surface. Readers connect to wounded characters because everyone carries their own wounds.
Will's wound is childhood abuse that left him believing he's unworthy of love. Every relationship he forms is shaped by this wound until Sean forces him to confront it.
Richard Papen's wound is a childhood of poverty and neglect that drives his obsessive need to belong to the elite group at Hampden College - at any cost.
Evelyn's wound is the pain of her father's disapproval, which ripples through every relationship in her life, especially with her daughter Joy.
Ground the wound in concrete, specific details. Not just 'bad childhood' but 'the night their mother locked them out in the rain and pretended not to hear them knocking.'
Real emotional wounds leave scars. Show your character learning to live with the wound rather than magically erasing it.
Let the wound reveal itself through present-day behavior first. Show the symptoms before the cause.
Write a brief scene where your character encounters a seemingly harmless situation - a song on the radio, a smell, a stranger's offhand comment - that triggers an unexpectedly intense reaction. Don't explain why they react that way. Then, separately, write a paragraph describing the wound that makes this trigger so powerful.