First and foremost: personal trauma is not something to be taken lightly. Feelings are valid and real people experience real things and that needs to be treated with respect.
Now…does that trauma belong to your characters, tho?
Have you ever read something fictional and known that the author is unpacking some serious shit?Realistically, unless you work on rough manuscripts, this is a no. (Editors and Agents are the people who get to help you figure out where those boundaries are and how close you actually want to keep the reader.)
Many people use writing as an escape or way to process. There is a lot of relief and healing that can come from getting your trauma and/or feelings out on the page. But that isn’t, when discussing fiction, what usually ends up on the page.
We want to write the words good, and we want to write the words good so the reader will care. But it is crucial to leave room for the reader in this space. There are infinite ways to pump up your voice and narrative style…but your readers gravitate to characters they can see themselves in. They need to resonate, feel real, and want. When dealing with trauma, that isn’t offered the luxury of a fictional world to breathe in, want is hard to articulate.
Unreliable narrators are one of my personal favorites when reading about characters who have suffered and survived, but is there room for my processing? Did the author fill that character up with their own therapy to the point that the reader doesn’t have any where to fill in the blank spaces? This is not something that needs to be stressed over for the first draft or so…get it out, then refine it.
I attended a book event recently for Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey. One of the most compelling questions that was asked was what motivated the author to make specific choices regarding their character's past and related trauma. They were frank about how certain elements of the story drew from their personal experiences and others didn't. But each was approached from her character’s lens and not their personal one…what would your character do…not what would you do…