No Backstory Bashing Allowed!
Author Lynn Slaughter claims there’s no backstory bashing allowed in this area, because it’s essential to character development.
In grad school, we aspiring writers were repeatedly warned about the perils of backstory. Whereas in the 19th century, it was perfectly acceptable to frontload stories with previous history about characters and setting, contemporary readers were impatient and would never stand for such a thing. Instead, we were advised to share backstory sparingly, threading it into our fiction as needed.
That’s good advice. But when it comes to backstory, it’s only part of the picture. Ask a group of readers why they loved a particular novel or what has kept them returning to a favorite series, and most likely, they’ll tell you that above all, it’s the characters who’ve hooked them. They care about them and find them engaging and interesting.
If we want our readers to care about our characters, we must care about them as well. Our characters must become fully realized people we know well. And while every writer’s process is different, I’ve found no better way to develop my characters than spending time exploring their backstories before I begin drafting my novels. I’m especially interested in discovering what experiences have shaped them into the people they’ve become, with all of their strengths, flaws, and fears. Why do they react to situations the way they do? Make the choices they do?
Perfect characters are incredibly boring, not to mention irritating. But to understand a character’s flaws, we must dig deeply into their past. For example, Caitlin O’Connor, the protagonist in my novel, Missed Cue, is a dedicated homicide detective and a caring friend. But she has a glaring flaw. She keeps getting involved with married men.
This makes no sense until she finally gets into therapy and comes to terms with the messages she’s internalized about women from her father, a police chief whom she idolized. The smart career women he admired avoided the distractions of marriage and family. “Good mothers” (like Caitlin’s mom) stayed home fulltime to raise their children. Intellectually, Caitlin knows this is absurd. After all, her closest friend has a wonderful teaching career and a family. But emotionally, she’s been deeply affected by her dad’s beliefs. Affairs with married men offer some emotional and physical connection, while not in any way threatening her singular focus on her demanding career. And even though her father has died, I think that subconsciously, she’s continued to seek his approval.
By the end of Missed Cue, Caitlin has shed her married lover and embarked on the beginnings of a much healthier relationship with a divorced dad. Of course, her story doesn’t end there, and one of the joys of writing a series is that we get to explore the continued growth and development of our characters and their personal lives. In the sequel, Death in the End Zone, Caitlin’s romance has blossomed, and her new love is eager to get married. But she still feels terrible anxiety about moving their relationship “to the next level.” This makes no sense until you know her backstory and can empathize with the lingering power of the childhood messages her father sent her. We are all, after all, works-in-progress!
Needless to say, all of this makes for a much more interesting story than “Caitlin met a lovely man, and they wasted no time tying the knot.” And this subplot complication comes from exploring her backstory. As Elizabeth George points out in her craft books, Write Away and Mastering the Process: From Idea to Novel, ideas for conflict and plot complications emerge from careful attention to character development. Romance novelists know this well. What can keep two people apart who are obviously strongly attracted to one another until they finally achieve their “happily ever after”? Their reluctance to act on their feelings is often due to the emotional wounds they’ve acquired from their childhoods and previous relationships.
Moreover, puzzling behavior can only be understood within the context of our characters’ backstories. For example, in my novel Missing Mom, a mother suddenly disappears. Her daughter rejects the circumstantial evidence that points to suicide. Would a mom planning to take her kids to the mall for some back-to-school shopping later that day suddenly decide to take her own life? What would make this devoted mother with a successful career and a good marriage disappear? As my protagonist discovers, the answers lie in her mother’s past—in other words, in her backstory.
Of course, it’s absolutely true that in exploring our characters’ backstories, many of the details we discover will never see the light of day in our novels. Readers are not apt to care about our adult character’s childhood dog or the best friend in third grade who moved away.
But for my writing process, I’ve found that going into this level of detail about my characters and their lives is extraordinarily helpful. Above all, I want readers to care about my characters. And that always begins with my caring about them, which comes from getting to know them intimately.
Check out Lynn Slaughter's Death in the End Zone here:
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