Everyone Is the Hero of Their Own Backstory

Backstory can be tricky to manage. How much of it to show, and how to present it, are thorny questions. It’s really a matter of drawing a line between those things that you as an author need to know, and those that the reader needs. What goes into that second category is the difficult answer to come up with. Some say that the reader needs no backstory whatsoever, while others say it all depends.

But we’re going to focus on the other side of the equation today. So, which things must you, the author, know about your characters’ backstories? All of them. All the things.

Our approach is to flesh out everybody’s backstories during our preliminary phase, which mostly happens while walking the dogs. (If they get bored with all the exposition, they never complain.) What we’ve learned is that there’s a lot of value in knowing the detailed history of even a very minor character. Naturally, it helps us create vivid depictions, and it allows all the cast members to show up ready for work. But in addition to these fairly obvious gains, digging into secondary and even tertiary characters’ pasts has produced a few interesting outcomes.

• Minor characters have morphed into major characters.
• Minor characters’ peccadilloes have answered questions about major characters.
• Important world-building notes have emerged.
• We’ve spotted useful plot connections and subplots.

Just remember: now that you know Marcel got in trouble when he was in third grade for trying to cheat on a test, you’re not obligated to tell anybody else.