Recently, I read a review of a book that was critical of it because the story contained too many trigger warnings. I was ignorant of the phrase, possibly because it is a hot topic more within the culture wars context. But since such warnings were claimed to be something that the author of this book had used too frequently to the detriment of her work, I wanted to understand what she had done wrong. What I learned was valuable to me as a writer and thus, perhaps, to you too.
What are Trigger Warnings?
Trigger warnings, according to Merriam Webster, are admonitions that an author, speaker, or third party like a librarian or activist provides to caution some audiences that they might find content that follows objectionable. Thus, a trigger warning would likely appear as a preface to a narrative to warn of upcoming offensive material or prior to a TV announcer switching to a graphic scene. With respect to such a warning within the body of a literary narrative, the warning would need to be placed in brackets ahead of the offending material. In the context of writing versus speaking, no author would want to interrupt their carefully crafted narrative or dialogue with such a bracketed warning,
I concluded that it had to appear as a preface—perhaps on the book cover, a forward, or similar section of a novel, but never as part of the narrative or dialogue itself. Thus, it was hard to imagine how an author could have used too many of them in the body of their text to have earned a negative critique.
But since the critique was clearly objecting to too many trigger warnings within the narrative, the use of that phrase in the context of a fictional writing made no sense. To illustrate, imagine being deep into reading the Godfather and then suddenly the narrative stops to warn you that the next scene will involve the head of a decapitated horse. Whatever the reviewer of the book meant to identify that had occurred too many times within the body of the text is unknown.
Perhaps the reviewer was thinking of different literary device like a literary trigger, a flashback, or even a foreshadow. Let me explain.
Conflation with Literary Devices
Trigger warning as a preface was defined above so we now turn to related concepts of trigger, flashback, and foreshadow. Trigger has two meanings. The first relates more to psychology than to literature. A trigger is an event or occurrence that reminds a person who has been traumatized of a previous trauma.
An example would be that when a person sees a man shot in a movie it triggers the re-experiencing of a similar traumatic event in their past. Such triggers are a common feature of people with PTSD. Although such triggers relate to psychological phenomena, nothing would prevent an author from depicting a character who suffers from this malady.
Use of a psychological trigger in this way would facilitate an author’s exploration of a character’s past to explain her present state of mind. Its use can also serve to segue to a scene of violence, action, or adventure that is interesting unto itself and adds texture to the story.
When an author goes back and forth through time, that literary device is called a flashback. A flashback does not necessarily require a horrible psychological trigger to provide a segue back in time. It can be nothing more than visiting a past non-traumatic event that helps the reader understand the present state of mind of the character. For example, a father’s use of a pocketknife to slice fruit for his five-year-old son. This scene from the past, or flashback, can lend meaning to the boy as a grown up when he inherits the same knife on the death of his father.
The second meaning of trigger is literary but is similar to its meaning in psychology. In addition, it is not widely recognized and may not be a true literary device. The literary trigger is said by some to be a wound or a false or negative belief that the character has about himself or the world around him. It is not used as a wound from the past to explain his present, it is what the character struggles with as he develops in the story. In other words, it relates the arc of the character’s growth—her journey or transformation into a changed person. It is the internal conflict about herself that she must resolve (or not resolve). And it is what triggers the reader into being interested and invested in the character.
It is similar to the meaning of trigger in the psychological sense in that it involves a negative: a wound, a false or negative belief that came from such a wound, or perhaps a burden of guilt from a prior event that the character must resolve. However, it goes further because it is used not only to explain the inner workings for the character’s mind by looking to his past but also what the character is trying to resolve in their life—in his arc as a character.
There is a related concept that may have been conflated into our book reviewer’s mind—foreshadow. It is very unlike the psychological trigger which refers to a prior traumatic event to explain the current state of mind of a character. And it is also distinct from the literary trigger which is a character fault, a burden of guilt, or a false belief that the protagonist must work through to change and grow. Instead, foreshadows look forward not backward and are usually not explicitly significant things that point obviously to events still to come. Instead, the foreshadow is just clear enough to tease the reader’s expectation about something that may be coming later in the narrative. Or it can be an obscure fact that serves later to reinforce and explain some future event.
The main purpose of a foreshadow is to hint at where parts of the story are going. For example, will the boy’s skill at shooting wolves in Siberia lead to him becoming a decorated military sniper (Enemy at the Gates)? His early skill with a rifle sets an expectation. The writer must have put it into the story for a reason. Thus, it builds suspense and tension as the story moves toward its climax—the day that Ivan becomes a sniper.
Might any of these literary devices be overused? Yes. Overly repetitive use of any literary device is likely to have a detrimental effect on the reader. Discretion in how much or how little a literary device is deployed in writing is what makes some writers good and some bad. So far as how an author could overuse a trigger warning in their writing goes, it was a red-herring. It was simply a misuse of the phrase which belongs in a preface to the narrative—not inside the narrative.