Make It Hurt

The feedback from this round of query rejections landed differently than I expected. Instead of sitting heavy, it turned into fuel. The kind that makes you go back and ask harder questions about what you’ve actually built. What did I want my characters to say? How would they describe their journey?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized something: my manuscript was too polished. Too nice. Too safe for the story it’s trying to tell. My characters too perfect.

Three Steps Away is built on survivorship. Every character in this series has walked through something catastrophic and will again. They’ve carried burdens that would break people who haven’t learned to live with fracture and keep going anyway. But when I sat down and really looked at what I’d written, I realized I’d given them all the trauma and none of the marks.

Think about a sandwich. A good peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It doesn’t work without all three components — the bread, the peanut butter, and the jelly. Each one brings its own flavor, its own texture, and its own essential role. Take away any one, and the whole thing falls apart.

Characters resonate when they work the same way. You can give someone a traumatic backstory, but if you don’t let readers see what they’ve survived, how they have survived — the tattoos, the piercings, the scarred-over places, the ways they’ve chosen to wear their survival — then you’re missing a crucial component. You’re handing someone the peanut butter and jelly without the bread.

I realized only a few of my characters had visible marks. Most had no tattoos. No piercings. No streaks of silver hair from childhood trauma. No scars that showed. No nervous tics. No signature. They’d all been through hell, but they looked like they’d just had a normal Tuesday.

That’s when it clicked: I was writing survivors who looked too comfortable. Too polished. Too mainstream. Too pretty in an ugly, unstable world.

The people I know who’ve really lived through something — they don’t hide it. They wear it. Proudly. A scar isn’t weakness; it’s proof the wound healed. A tattoo is a permanent statement: I was here. I survived. I’m still standing. Those marks aren’t decorations. They’re badges of honor.

So, I’m reworking Three Steps Away to honor the characters and the grit they have earned. I want them to match what I know about real survivors. The ones who clock in at work, show up at home, manage school, navigate family, and somehow are courageous enough to still squeeze every drop out of life while smiling into the abyss. The ones with the pebble in their shoe who keep walking anyway. They’re gritty. They’re marked. They’re real.

And so now, my characters will be too.

— H.K.P.