Tammy Letherer Confession: When I was a single mom, I used SNAP benefits to feed my kids. I also relied on Medicaid for our healthcare. I’ve carried shame about this for years. The voice in my head was relentless: I should be able to do this alone.
That feeling of failure wasn’t a result of my judgment alone. I’ve heard members of my own family talk about “those people” as if I weren’t one of them. In the news, a congressman recently suggested that SNAP recipients who didn’t have a month’s worth of groceries stockpiled shouldn’t receive benefits, “Because wow, stop smoking crack.”
Actually, four in five SNAP households include either a child, an elderly individual, or someone with a disability—not exactly the caricature painted by some politicians. As we head into Thanksgiving, SNAP is being gutted and, in Chicago, food pantries are facing unprecedented food shortages.
So now I’ve got shame and anger.
If there’s a bright side, both emotions make excellent material for writers. If I were creating a character in a story, either of those emotions would be something worth exploring. That pain, that anger—it’s material we can use.
At a recent writing conference I attended, Writer Unboxed founder Therese Walsh spoke about the essential story elements: the wound story, the ego story, and the expansion story. The wound story always originates in childhood—those formative years when we’re most vulnerable to encoding painful experiences.
The Wound Story
As The Emotional Wound Thesaurus puts it: “Because life is a painful teacher, a character will enter the story wearing some form of emotional armor. These flaws, biases, and bad habits are very often the result of profound difficult moments.”
For me, that childhood wound probably formed from messages I absorbed about self-reliance, from watching how my family talked about people who needed help, from cultural beliefs about what it means to be strong and capable. The generalization got encoded early into a misbelief: Needing help means you failed. Self-sufficiency equals worth.
When, as a single mom, I found myself needing government assistance, I wasn’t creating a new wound—I was poking an old one. The shame that flooded in wasn’t about the SNAP benefits themselves. It was about a misbelief I’d been carrying for decades finally being confirmed.
Generalizations in life lead to suffering—to pain we’d rather avoid. We think of that as bad. But the generalizations that form a character’s wound in fiction are good—without them there is no story. If a novel were a painting, we’d need an easel, a canvas, and paint. The wound story is the easel, the thing that holds everything up.
The Ego Story
This is where it gets interesting, because the misbelief doesn’t stay contained to one memory or event. It bleeds into everything. The misbelief becomes the ego story—the tinted glasses through which a character sees everything. The ego story masks the wound, adding another layer of distortion to how we see the world.
In my case, I should be able to do this alone doesn’t just apply to asking for help with groceries. It shows up in my creative practice. I isolate, convinced I should figure out craft on my own. I hesitate to seek out critique partners, writing communities, or mentors. I hide my drafts because “real writers don’t need help.”
The misbelief derails expansion. It keeps characters—and writers—trapped in a false narrative that prevents growth.
The Expansion Story
So how do we break free?
Expansion means doing the uncomfortable work of examining the wound without the protective layer of the ego story. It means asking: What if the generalization isn’t true? What if needing help doesn’t mean failure? What if community and connection are actually signs of strength?
Before we can create characters who feel deeply enough to resonate with readers, we have to understand our own wounds. Not theoretically. We have to recognize the wounds we’ve been carrying—often since childhood—and how they shape our adult lives. We cannot write authentic emotion we haven’t faced in ourselves.
If we only write from the ego story—the protective generalization—our characters feel flat. They’ll have that performative, surface-level shame that doesn’t ring true. But if we look at our own wounds, name the ego story, and actively choose to see the nuance, we can write characters who feel real. Characters whose emotional truth resonates because it’s rooted in the complexity of actual human experience.
Our job as writers is to tell the truth about what it feels like to be human during turbulent times. To face the emotions we’d rather avoid—shame, fear, failure—and write them so honestly that readers recognize themselves.
In your own writing, what wound have you been carrying since childhood? What generalization did you create to protect yourself? What misbelief are you still carrying? Trace that back to its origin. Give that to your character.
Transform armor into art.
That’s the expansion story. That’s how we move from protecting ourselves to connecting with readers. That’s how we turn our deepest vulnerabilities into our most powerful work. And right now—with families lining up at food pantries, with shame being weaponized against vulnerable people—we need more writers who can tell those true, messy, nuanced stories.
Until next time,
