How do you create backstories?

Well, backstory is really just character development (and sometimes plot development, but mostly not) that *you* should have in your mind, though little, if any of it, needs to come out on the page.

World-building is everything from setting (literally building your world), to customs, culture, language, politics, religion, etc; the amount of world history most regular modern-Earthlings know is minimal, yet we all still get through the day.

Long story short: establish setting and let the past only come out in dribs and drabs as the reader needs to know it, and even then you can probably cut most of it.

satyesu said:

Especially (but not only!) with fantasy, where you often need to create the world also.

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Create whatever "world" you need to create to make your story work, in your head/notes/outline. There's no requirement for you to inflict this world-creation on your reader. Fantasy aficionados have a big acceptance portal for other worlds and magic and mythical creatures, etc. They don't need them explained.

The best Fantasy writer I've every read at invoking a different world is Ursula LeGuin. And she does it simply by telling a damn good story. So good that I'm happy to accept anything she writes as the way her world works. I don't need forensic details.

I need story. Way too many manuscripts I've read from aspiring Fantasy writers are morbidly obese with world-creation, and anorexic with story.

caw

Normally when I make backstories, I often have an idea of what my characters do in the story.

Example: character X wants to assassinate the leader of some religious cabal or something. This kicks off the plot. I start with "why?"

a) Personal reasons: Like revenge?
What did the cabal do? Did they have a reason for it?
b) Professional reasons: Like they'll gain something useful or are hired?
Who hired them? Why do they want them gone?

I keep asking questions to myself until everything (or enough) is explained that I have a clear idea what's going on and why everyone's doing what they are.

Fade, A+ avatar and sig, lol.

I think about the character's motivation.
i.e. What kind of backstory would give my character the motivation I want her to have to make my plot work....?

Or I think of the character's past first, and then how it might affect her life.

At the start of Romeo and Juliet, Romeo is moping around like the mopiest of moping mopeyheads. Why? Because he lurves Rosaline but she doesn't lurve him.

Or more precisely, she has sworn to remain chaste. Which means no hanky panky before marriage. And poor Romeo is so upset by this situation that he doesn't even want to take part in the customary cracking of heads between the sharks and the jets, sorry the Capulets and the Montagues.

All this is back story. We never get to see Rosaline (although she is at the masqued ball where Romeo meets Juliet). Romeo soon forgets her and gets on with the ass-whupping and smoochy stuff with Tybalt and Juliet respectively.

What the back story does is to establish who Romeo is and to provide a counterpoint to his meeting with Juliet. Juliet also doesn't believe in sex before marriage (that's the bad news) but she does agree to get married almost instantly (that's the good news, I suppose). Romeo goes from shallow love-struck slightly-mincy yoof before the play to butch serial killer, criminal on the run, faithful hubby and - because a loss of service lost a vital text message - suicidee/ suicider who unwittingly becomes peacemaker.

Now that's a backstory.

Or, if you prefer, Han Solo initially doesn't help Luke attack the death star because Jabba has put a price on his head for losing a naughty cargo. Which also explains why Han starts out as mercenary (yes, he did shoot first) because of the vicious, dangerous world he lives in. It's only when the rebellion takes him out of that harsh environment that his inner goodness can shine through.

"I love you."

"I know."

More procrastination?

If you check over the previous 158 threads you've opened you'll find you've already asked these questions, S.

Backstory is what you need to know to make sense of the character's present actions. For example, Mary is offered a piece of chocolate cake by Sarah, and Mary completely recoils. She goes absolutely insane and starts screeching at Sarah. Sarah says "I'm sorry, I forgot".

So what's up with that? The characters seem to know something we don't. You could easily keep the secret hidden and only allude to it, but perhaps this secret needs to be specific. That's where backstory comes in. If we knew that Mary has an allergy to chocolate and Sarah watched her asphyxiate and almost die, then we understand the situation a little better.

You do not need to create a vastly complicated backstory, but think about things like the character's social class, their upbringing, etc. The sort of things that would shape her as a person. You don't need to mention all of it in the novel but it means that her actions will stay true to her character.

Everyone who's lived more than one day has a backstory.

You don't need to tell it.

I've had life experience. I've had intimate conversations with 1000 people, easily. I pay attention to people. So it's easy for my characters to have backstory and layers. It just...happens, really, without a lot of conscious work. The only thing I'm conscious about is making sure different characters within a book are different. If I have one shy person, I don't create a second shy person. If one character is an orphan, I'd better not orphan a second. (er, unless my world has just had some sort of plague, in which case I might have oodles of orphans, or unless I'm writing in an orphanage, in which case, I will have several orphans.) Pay attention to folks. Listen more than you talk. Use logic in devising world and character. Be creative and then have fun filling in what you've made up by writing actual words of fiction.

I find sometimes the best way to create a fantasy world is to make a little "bible" of sorts that contains the creation story and how the different races/places came to be. You don't have to actually use it in the story though. But the characters know it and it informs their decisions and character.

For example the blue people hate the orange people because long ago the orange people stole their princess. You don't have to tell the whole story but the blue and orange characters know this. If that makes sense.

satyesu said:

Especially (but not only!) with fantasy, where you often need to create the world also.

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Something that has worked for me.

I got my hands on a copy of the spreadsheet Randy Ingermanson uses along with his Snowflake Method. I adjusted it to include things I felt relevant for character creation. Ice cream flavor is not relevant. Flaws, prejudices, sometimes misc information, a little more relevant.

I started to fill things in. This character has pierced ears, that character has startling blue eyes, that one over there has a scar...

...hang on. How did he get that scar? What was he doing? Was it during a job? A childhood accident? A barroom brawl?

Then it just sort of spirals from there. One question of 'when did this happen/how did this happen' circles around to other questions. A simple statement of 'this character plays the cello' can lead to other interesting things about the characters past. Was she sent to a finishing school? A school for the Musically Gifted? What happened there? ...

And so it goes.

Note that this backstory doesn't necessarily make it into the novel itself, but it does help define who the character is right now.

Great - and I have no doubt it has a purpose in your case, bearilou - to trigger the imagination and get the creative juices flowing.

That's perfect.

The trap for the unwary is the temptation to pour all that backstory and information onto the page simply because it's known.

Bufty said:

Great - and I have no doubt it has a purpose in your case, bearilou - to trigger the imagination and get the creative juices flowing.

That's perfect.

The trap for the unwary is the temptation to pour all that backstory and information onto the page simply because it's known.

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Very true and wisely pointed out.

It's why in many cases, I hate character forms where you fill all that out. It can become this FANTASTIC procrastination tool (experience talking *cough*) and the writer can fall in love with all the neat quirks and flaws they've given their character that they absolutely have to use it ALL or feel it's wasted.

I suppose, for myself in this case, the biggest help the spreadsheet is for me is to help define who the character is in that moment, that moment where the story starts, so that I know what kind of meaningful trials and troubles to throw at the MC that will help promote growth and spur the plot forward by giving the MC something to push against (the past) to propel in the right direction. Or the wrong direction!

But, as noted above, it can become a crutch if it's believed that the laundry list of the MC's past is of utmost importance to reader, when perhaps the only thing pertinent is that the future villain of the story is the one who gave the MC the scar, not necessarily how he got it.

I usually walk around, mulling on my story, and they grow. Music is good, I often use snatches of songs for ideas. I never write anything down. It's more like the vague humanoid shadow slowly morphs into a fully fletched character where backstory, research, personality, appearance and story function are all connected.

When I was a child, my mother called it daydreaming but now I think of it as creating.

Who does your character need to be to be the only person who can solve the story's major dilemma?

Now, how did they get to be that person? What experiences gave them the personality traits they are going to need?

A good example of this sort of thing is on The Simpsons television show. The evil Mr. Burns has an assistant, Smithers, who is a suitable minion/toady for an evil guy.

However, one of the show's writers obviously decided it was time to figure out what motivation an evil man's minion would need in order to be willing to continue being a minion.

So Smithers is gay and obviously has a raging case of the hots for his boss.

And like the very best backstory, this fact has never been stated outright. It's just something that enriches the fictional world by showing up in a subtle way every now and then.

So start with what your character needs to be to serve the story, then figure out what made them that way.

Well, as I'm getting started, I may write a short narrative about something that happened in my MC's life. Then as I'm actually writing, ideas from that short can come into the narrative of the novel - perhaps a person he sees reminds him of someone he had a bad experience with, so that will be a paragraph or two's worth of the character's thoughts that shed light on why he does what he does in the story. That's an example of how I approach it.

How Do You Create Backstories?

When all is fine and dandy, there's no story. The story starts when the problems begin.

So take Clarice in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, her story starts when her father dies and she has the lamb experience.

So the backstory is everything from when the problems start until we meet the character.

It's actually to do with the loss of innocence or being thrust out of the innocent state and things like that.

It's the Loss of the State of Perfection and the beginning of the cycle, for which I highly recommend watching Kal Bashir's videos at http://www.clickok.co.uk/index4.html

Backstory is everything that happened before the story starts.

Generally, before I start writing, I have a hazy outline of the character in mind. It gets stronger as I write. I develop the character's backstory as I write. I didn't even realize one of my characters was gay until my third draft. I didn't realize another was molested by her Uncle until the end of the story. When you revise, you can go back and integrate things smoothly. But on your first draft, that's when you discover your characters. They don't arrive, fully formed, on the paper. You, unfortunately, are not Zeus, and they're not Athena.

They're like people you just met. You don't know everything about John down the street the first time you meet, do you?

By creating the story before you even lay pen to paper. The backstories will create themselves.

I think up the best back story to fit the present story, that best explains why my character acts the way they act.

If they are scared of heights, the back story might be that when they were a child, they fell off the slide at the park and broke their arm in HALF.

Architectus said:

I think up the best back story to fit the present story, that best explains why my character acts the way they act.

If they are scared of heights, the back story might be that when they were a child, they fell off the slide at the park and broke their arm in HALF.

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I agree. You only need to provide relevant backstory, which enhances our understanding of why a character may have made a particular choice, particularly if it is an unexpected one.

I just tend to let my imagination run with it [generally when performing some dull task - normally at work. ]

With my MC I started with his basis in history. He's a Roman soldier, so he's been in the army for about five years. Status wise, his family is of Roman Knight class, and his father is of senatorial rank. He has a personal distaste for his father's Republican politics. His elder brother is a Tribune in the legions, another brother has died in military action, and has a younger sister. He has no personal interest in pursuing a senatorial career, but his father has other ideas. He has a taste for Greek literature and philosophy, as well as hunting and brothels.

That sort of thing.