Guest Post – How to Come Up With Intriging Character Backstories

How to Come Up With Intriguing Character Backstories – Rose Atkinson-Carter #Writing #Characters

Being able to get the protagonist’s motivations, goals, wants and needs right in a story is an essential skill to have in your writing toolkit. But one often overlooked, yet powerful skill, is backstory. When used correctly, the intriguing twists and turns of a character’s history is what makes a book sink its claws in as we read.

So how do we use backstory to create intrigue? While extensively developing our characters is important in the story, it’s also what you withhold from the reader, only to reveal later in a major insight at a critical point, which gives satisfaction.

Sound fun? Let’s look at some tips for coming up with intriguing character backstories and divulging them in a powerful way.

1. Establish the purpose of your character’s backstory

Let’s say you’ve written a character that pops off the page, and for the sake of your own sanity can’t figure out what drives them to do it. Or the character you’re writing could use some help — an awakening like Frankenstein’s monster more like it. Or maybe you’re wrestling with a flat character?

Creating an intriguing character backstory is all about understanding its purpose. In addition to being a way for readers to fall in love with or understand your character (and when done right, to plant opportunities for spin-off or prequel books from your much-loved cast), backstories also have to serve a larger purpose.

Figuring this out can save some headache. Often, what makes a character intriguing is their juxtaposition to the world they inhabit. Think Harry Potter, in a world of magic even he is interesting and stands out because he survived a killing curse. Or take Siuan Sanche from The Wheel of Time series: when we meet her, she is the leader of the Tar Valon women, formally trained witches known as Aes Sedai. Yet her beginnings can be traced to a poor fishing family, and that’s evident in her speech.

If a reader picked up your book for the promise of magic and beasts, adventures and curses, quests and epic battle scenes, part of the story’s fulfillment is learning about this world and your character’s history, as well as what makes them important in their world.

The more you ask yourself what the purpose of your character’s backstory is, the quicker you’ll learn when you’ve got a character that needs fleshing out. Will learning the backstory push the plot forward, or is it there to affect a character’s likeability? Does it explain something that happened earlier, or build suspense by making readers wary of a character’s past repeating itself? If your characters’ behavior hasn’t changed with time, why is that, and will they change over the course of your novel? All of these decisions will be crucial to your character development.

At the end of the day, intrigue is getting the reader to ask questions of your characters, and making sure you slowly supply the answers that help the story make sense.

Why is Demetrius always so callous to everyone?What made Samantha act that way towards the Guards of Light?Where is Phoenix headed if he knows they’ve taken his sister there? Why?Burke acts so odd at the sight of land compared to the others, where’d he’d come from?2. Deepen the character by asking questions about them

Once you know the purpose in which you’ll use your character’s intriguing backstory there are many ways you can proceed. What do you want to know? Everything?  A character questionnaire can help you flesh out your characters into multifaceted people with complex pasts and psyches, getting you to consider multiple aspects of their lives and experiences.

Knowing your character head to toe can be handy, and I’m talking beyond hair color, build and vocabulary. Think good and bad memories, fears and quirks, favorite meals and funny phobias. There are also mannerisms which don’t just have to be ticks, catch-phrases, or a particular attire and gait to their walk, but behaviors which reflect where your character has come from, helping you broaden your world. Each character is going to speak and think differently depending where they came from in your universe, use it.

3. Consider changing an existing backstory

Using inspiration from existing stories and changing character’s backstories can be a great way to dive into enriching your story. If you experiment with changing the past of your favorite character, how does it affect their personality and behavior? Change a few more things… How does it inform the text?

To give you an example: what if Katniss hadn’t been around while her sister was chosen? What if her story was trying to change places with another tribute but found the honor of being chosen was stronger in other districts? That would have a serious impact on how the readers see the character, her values, and her mission in the world of Suzanne Collins’ books.

Have fun with it.

4. Don’t overdo it

Keep in mind that while deepening your character’s backstory helps create believability, overdoing backstory and exposition can cause problems (the info-dump bat is a heavy one — you’ve been warned!). It’s striking the balance that builds worlds of wonder and awe.

Also remember that there’s no need to make your characters perfect. No one is flawless. In fact, there can be things that we like in a villain and things we don’t like in a protagonist. What creates intrigue is that they’re like you and me — obviously awesome — but flawed in our own beautiful, interesting ways. 

Intrigue is getting readers to ask questions about what you haven’t said yet. Ideally, you want to cast a spell over them slowly, so that they don’t know you’ve tricked them into reading your book until they reach the end.

Rose Atkinson-Carter is a writer with Reedsy, a marketplace and blog that helps authors with everything from how to make an audiobook , find the best writing software, to hiring a ghostwriter and everything in between.