Hello friends! Welcome to the last post of November! We only have a few posts left so hopefully we can make them last. I’m super proud that I was able to get this one up on time. We are approaching finals week and the stress just keeps piling on. On top of that I have a pretty bad cold. But here we are with a new post for this week and it’s relatively on time! So, without further ado,
Building Better Characters: The Backstory
So, I think that a very important part of a character is their history. Where did your character come from? What was their child hood like? Who did they grow up with? Did something traumatic happen to them in the past? Were they part of a minority growing up? If so how did that effect their view of the world? If not, how did that effect their view of the world? I sometimes think that a person’s history is one of the things that affect them the most as a character. All the other things that we talk about when it comes to characters relies on their past. Why is Vicky scared of the dark? Was she locked in a closet as a child? Why does Jean jump right into the fray when faced with a problem? Is it because one time he didn’t, and it cost someone their life?
A character’s history/backstory is one of the most important parts of a character’s details. The more detailed your characters history is the easier it is to come up with all the other details about a character. This is one of those things that I suggest that every writer write down. Sometimes writers that I talk to won’t write their history down and when asked questions about their characters, they are sometimes unsure how to answer. Writing down a cohesive background for your character makes them easier to understand, even to you the writer.
Again, characters should be like real people. When talking to someone it become easier to relate to them the more you know about their past. The best classes that I have attended are classes where people draw upon their personal experiences in life and share them to help make the class more relatable for everyone. The past of a person in real life is important to their character, their world view and their actions going forward. If characters should be like real people, then their history should be just as important to them as it is in real life.
Sometimes while writing your character’s history you’ll realize something about a character’s personality that you’d never thought of before. This has happened to me in the last year or two while I was writing my story The Queen, The Friend, and The General. I originally wrote it to be a comic, but I can’t draw to save my life. So instead this story was written more akin to a screenplay and it is left open in case someday I really want to do a comic adaptation of it like I always wanted to. My main character, Queen Holli was the only character that I had not really worked out any details on. All of my other characters had pages after page after page of character sheets of all different forms. But when it came to filing out Holli’s chart I didn’t know where to start. I knew all the basic parts, her name was Holli, she was the Queen of the kingdoms, her best friend is Lily. But I didn’t really know anything else about Holli.
So, I decided that instead of filing out her whole character sheet I was just going to write her whole backstory out as a narrative. And so, I did. Suddenly I knew so many new things about Holli. I realized that because I had her parents die as a child and her grandmother, who was the Queen and didn’t have time for her, her best friend Lily meant a lot more to her. I came to realize that I had made her wear skirts and dresses throughout the whole story but based on her history she would enjoy pants better and so I rewrote that small part of her personality. Writing out Holli’s backstory gave me more insight into who she was, what she did, and why she saw the kingdom the way she did. It makes Holli more real and made her character better.
Of course, your characters history isn’t always mentioned in the story. Some of the small details about Holli’s life story aren’t going to be necessary in the story. Part of building a better character is building a character just for the author. Sometimes it’s easier to write a relatable character just by knowing the details of your character. If you know your character like no one else, then it makes it easier to write them. Even if you don’t mention all the reasons for your characters doing things your reader will be able to tell that this was something that your character would inherently do. Readers are pretty smart. Don’t underestimate your readers.
So, that’s all I have for this week. I hope that you guys remember to tune back in next week for the next post. Yay! So as usual,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!