Survival stories...
How to stop surviving and start growing.
EFFIGIES — Bringing nerds together to reveal the hidden wisdom of comics for fuller, more productive lives!
What’s Inside:
Why helpful tools can turn into creative dead weight.
My new way for viewing character arcs and trauma.
How to revise the stories you tell yourself.
I’m in the thick of writing my next book—DEMON MODE—and with every new page, I’ve been digging through the creative tools I’ve picked up over the years—my writer’s toolbox.
Some of those tools were lifesavers early on: outlining formulas, rigid schedules, rituals to overcome fear. They got me to the desk. They helped me finish. But now? Some feel more like dead weight.
So I’ve started asking: do these tools still serve me—or am I just dragging them forward out of habit?
Trauma as character arcs.
Recently, I shared this thought in a Facebook post:
I’ve always thought about character arcs through Robert McKee’s lens—characters chase something they Want, believing it will make their life better, but what they Need is something deeper. And often, that Want causes them to hurt both themselves and others.
Trauma, and how we cope with it, operates in a similar way. It's either the result of chronic stress or a major incident, and we develop coping mechanisms to survive it. The problem? Those mechanisms can stick around long after the danger is gone, turning into subconscious, maladaptive behaviors.
Take a protagonist who grew up with an abusive parent. Say, as a child, he learned that pretending to be hurt would stop his father from hitting his mother. In that moment, manipulation and deception was a survival strategy—it kept him safe.
But as an adult, he's no longer in danger, yet he still manipulates and deceives others, not out of malice, but because it gives him a subconscious sense of control. He Wants safety, but the way he pursues it ruins his relationships and isolates him. What he Needs is to recognize that he's no longer that vulnerable child and that the very thing keeping him "safe" is what’s actually hurting him and the people around him.
Competing Needs and Wants like this make for great story drama. They also make real growth so damn hard.
The story I told myself.
Mark Manson (of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck fame) calls these maladaptive survival strategies “the stories we tell ourselves.” Stories that made sense once—but now hold us back. If we’re not careful, we follow them long after they’ve stopped helping.
In my case, I used to tell myself: “Writing is supposed to be hard.” That story helped me early on. It made me disciplined. It made me tough.
But now that story mostly makes me tense. It’s a survival tool that no longer fits the environment I’m in.
Rewriting the story.
So as I write this new book, I’m reassessing the tools I’m using to get through it. Here’s the four-question framework I’m using to sort what stays—and what goes:
What’s the story or strategy I’m using?
Where did it come from?
Is it still helping me?
What would serve me better right now?
Here’s what I came up with when I worked through the exercise:
For a long time, I told myself that “writing has to be hard.” That belief came from an early fear of not being good enough and a need for structure to stay consistent. But these days, it’s not helping much. In fact, it slows me down and adds unnecessary stress. What would serve me better now is letting writing be fun—and letting it be mine.
This isn’t just for writing. It works for anything—fitness, work, relationships, goals. The key is recognizing that not every tool needs to come with you. Some were for past versions of yourself.
What’s still in your toolbox?
We all carry old tools. Old stories. Old strategies. The question is: are they still helping? As I keep writing this book, I’ll keep editing the story I’m telling myself too.
And maybe you should, too. What’s one tool or belief you’ve carried forward that you might be ready to put down?
- Frank
I’m Frank Gogol, writer of comics such as Dead End Kids, No Heroine, Unborn, Power Rangers, and more. If this newsletter was interesting / helpful / entertaining…
After credits scene.
Last month, I was lucky enough to travel to India for my brother-in-law’s wedding. It was a beautiful and wildly different country—so full of life, color, and contrast.
The trip gave me a rare chance to explore and snap a few photos along the way. They don’t even capture half of what I saw and felt, but here are a few I really liked:
