Publication date: August 31th, 2021
After Adaline and Cache move to Salt Lake City, everything gets even stranger. Local cop Officer Abbott thinks Adaline's distinctive owl necklace may somehow link to his own missing daughter. Adaline's neighbor Maggie offers assistance and comfort, but Adaline suspects her of hiding other truths from her. Adaline tries to prepare for her girls' eventual return while investigating her own past forgotten traumas, but a threatening message urges her to let the past stay forgotten. Can Adaline find the truth and save her marriage to Cache, or will the tangled web of memories from her past keep her from moving on?
Author Lauri Schoenfeld's psychological thriller is a suspenseful tale of family trauma, discovering our inner strength, and understanding the power of forgiveness.
Read now
by Lauri Schoenfeld
We all go through pain either psychologically, emotionally, or physically. A lot of times it can end up being all three. No one shares their agony exactly in the same way as another because of our different personalities, upbringing, experiences, and perspectives. None of us are free from it.
As you're writing, your character or characters will always have something in one of these areas that they're striving to get through—trying to understand and process. They may be searching out who they are, and maybe because of their upbringing or culture, this search causes them a great deal of affliction, going outside the grain of figuring those pieces out. Perhaps the loss of someone they love has greatly affected their worth, will, drive, or purpose for existence. Or physically, an illness they feel is so intense that even getting up to take a shower is too much to handle. Each area can weaken your character's spirit and heart.
Readers want to keep reading because pain is a universal thing, even if they don't completely relate to what that character's dealing with. They want to root for them. The readers feel the agony and empathize with how much this space hurts the characters deeply and want to be there to push them forward.
The hero's journey for our characters is constant movement within that anguish. Getting to the next step can be more intense, scary, hard, and worse before it gets better. Our characters will want to leave, but they'll have to make the hard choice to face it and keep going through the storm. By doing so, some answers, lessons, and moments will define them.
Here are a few examples from some of my favorite books. There are no spoilers on endings!
From Fault in Our Stars, the character Hazel Grace Lancaster is a seventeen-year-old who has thyroid cancer. It's started to spread into her lungs, so she uses a portable oxygen tank to breathe properly. Hazel feels suffering day in and day out. She wants to be understood. To appease her mother, she attends a cancer patient's support group and meets a teenage boy named Augustus Waters. They begin to build a friendship, and she finds out he had osteosarcoma but had his leg amputated and is cancer-free. With their friendship, they're able to help each other with the struggles they both face.
In Shutter Island, Teddy Daniels is devastated by the loss of his wife, which took place in a fire. The grief he feels messes with him both emotionally and psychologically, sending him spirally to look for answers about his wife's death and his own sanity. He wants truth and answers. The story makes you question the depth of this man's sorrow, and you can't help but wonder where his head's at, but you're rooting for him to figure it out.
In Wonder, August Pullman, also known as Auggie, has "mandibulofacial dysostosis," a rare facial deformity. Surgery is not uncommon for him, as he's had (27) of them. Auggie's been homeschooled by his mom for eleven years, so when he's enrolled to go to 5th grade in a public school, pain, and fear of being different sets in. He wants to be accepted and liked. Auggie goes to school anyways and faces the unknown each day.
What hardship is your character dealing with?
Is it physical, mental, or emotional? All of them?
What would your character/characters have to do to face that pain? The next step forward?
What is one thing that your character wants and is in search of?
- Hazel wants to be understood/friendship.
- Teddy wants truth and answers.
- Auggie wants to be accepted and liked as he is.
For fun and research, go through some of your favorite movies and establish the characters' ultimate affliction and want/need (goal). Or even think about your own life story, a friend, or a family member. How has their pain/ struggle made them tick? React? How have they handled it?
Now, write that novel. Bring in all the raw emotion, so the reader's sucked into feeling it all right along with your character.