Digging Into the Past to Develop a Strong Backstory
My relationship with backstory is a bit of a running joke with my developmental editor, Tiffany Yates Martin. She knows that a minor query about a character’s history might result in paragraphs of detail I toss gleefully back at her. A deep dive into one character’s backstory is my starting point for nearly every book I’ve written, though most of their past ends up being my little secret. The reader doesn’t need to know all of it. But I do.
(Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Developmental Editor.)
Backstory is the framework of everyone’s lives, after all. Most of our quirks and personality traits and relationship habits are baked in by the time we hit adulthood. How we react to trauma or confrontation, to good news or adverse events, that’s all connected to the life we walked through on the way to the present.
Everyone comes from somewhere, all of us have a story, and those secret histories fascinate me. Think about every Dateline you’ve watched, every true crime podcast you’ve listened to. Now imagine each sibling, each cousin, each coworker who knew either the victim or the villain. The next-door neighbor. The girl who used to babysit the kids. The best friend from college who wishes they’d been in touch. The children of the victim. The wife of the perpetrator.
When I hear these tales of real mystery or violence, I wonder what happened to the people left behind. How did their lives grow or shrink from that awful point? How did they move on or why are they still stuck?
My latest novel, Follow Her Down, is backstory come to life. It’s about a woman whose entire world exploded 25 years earlier when her teenage sister went missing. She never recovered from being a child with a missing sister, a panicked and broken mother, and a brother who turned to conspiracy theories to help explain the pain of living. They’ve all trudged on in their damaged ways, but trauma often explodes right back to the surface when there’s another tragedy, of course.
A character’s history doesn’t have to be quite so dramatic in every book, but there’s a kernel there somewhere that helps explain how they avoid pain or confront it. A contentious parental divorce. A high school cheating scandal. A hypercritical caregiver. A strict religious upbringing.
Although I’m often indulging only pure curiosity and my love for scandal when I compose characters’ pasts, I do employ a few tools to help along the way. I sometimes use a worksheet to excavate insights into how a character would behave.
Check out Victoria Helen Stone’s Follow Her Down here:
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It can help to write down the basics like strengths, weaknesses, fears, and defining moments of this person you’re creating from whole cloth. But even the smallest detail, like how they celebrate their birthday, might be the crumb that leads you to a better story. It never hurts to put everything down in writing and see where it takes you.
Pop psychology books are an amazing resource too, especially if you’re working backward from a character’s current way of life. Why is this man on his fourth divorce and already looking for a new wife? Why does this woman constantly work overtime and avoid real connections with friends or lovers? How did the antagonist come to embrace shady behavior and pathological lying? Enneagram guides, books about birth order and family dynamics, Myers-Briggs style assessments, all of these can provide a real backstory punch to the gut.
These tools can help us gain deep insight into why a character behaves the way they do and assist in digging up surprising clues about which plot points might break their world wide open. That old adage for writing conflict still holds true, after all: Imagine the worst thing you could throw at this character and then figure out a way to do it.
I recently discovered a book series called The Descriptive Thesaurus Series. In particular, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma made me gasp with delight. This book by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi breaks down possible outcomes of different traumas in bullet-point style, providing wonderful prompts to jumpstart your fiction. What are the fears and defenses and strengths that could result from growing up in a cult, marrying a narcissist, being convicted of a crime you didn’t commit, or being financially ruined by a spouse? This book alone offers the seeds for a million different stories.
But developing backstory can be a much more organic exercise. Memoirs or personal essays open up the way we think about people’s lives, as does striking up a conversation with a stranger. Ask your parents and grandparents about their early years and how they overcame obstacles. Ask what it was like to grow up in a different time or live through upheaval.
Finally, be curious about even your own backstory and truly examine its effect on your life. Then transfer that curiosity to your fictional characters. Ask them questions. Watch them walk around in your head. Put on a therapist’s hat and inquire about their parents. You might be surprised by just how much develops and how very real these people can become to you and to your reader.