The Importance of Backstories in Characterization

As I’ve gotten back into the swing of writing and trying to come up with new story ideas, I have come to understand the importance of giving my characters detailed backstories. In the past, I have often had a habit of making my characters essential “blank slates” in order to make them seem more relatable. They usually came from ordinary backgrounds, with ordinary lives, and just happened to have extraordinary personalities. The problem with this, and I think many of you will understand this quite quickly, was that this often made them bland at the best and impossible to relate to at the worst. I find that the concept of an “ordinary background” is in itself fictional. Everyone has had something(s) extraordinary happen to them at some point in their lifetime, even if they don’t consider it to be all that extraordinary. These occurrences help shape who we are today, often serving as the background blue prints that keep us unique and prevent us from being an army of mindless drones who all think act and talk the same way.

            For an example of such an event in the lifetime of an otherwise normal person, allow me to share something from my own “backstory”. When I was a child, I nearly drowned in the shallow end of a public pool during a school field trip. The life-guard literally had to dive in just to save me. All of my classmates saw it and I never quite lived it down. Now while this is far from a tragic enough tale of my past to drive me to… I don’t know, swear a life-long crusade to bring justice to any and all pools that would dare harm an innocent soul, it did have an impact on the man I came to be. The humiliation I felt that day was one of several moments that led to my sometimes overly self-depreciative personality. I didn’t like feeling embarrassed, so I tried to play it off like I knew that I was a joke rather than let anyone else make a joke out of me. This event also gave me this weird complex about pools and swimming. Whenever I see someone swimming on television or play a swimming level in a video game of all things, I can actually “feel” the water flowing across my face. In a sense, I feel like I am drowning. Odd I know, but imagine if I was a fictional character in a story. Push these basic elements to their extremes, perhaps making the complex into a full on phobia, and you could probably tell an interesting story if you put that character into a situation where they had to confront that fear. Then, you would have a character who responds in a unique, yet relatable manner while having an interesting reason for doing so. This, in my opinion, is what makes good characters interesting. Not only that they react in interesting ways, but that they have interesting reasons for doing so.

            One of the greatest tips on characterization that I ever received was the idea of the character biography. Essentially, you write out your character’s history to the point where their part in your story begins, detailing all of the interesting, and perhaps not so interesting aspects of their life. This way, you are able to understand just why they act the way in which they do, and most likely end up learning a few things about them in the process. I actually tried this with a set of characters that I had already created, many of whom felt rather bland beforehand. They had personalities, but I could not quite understand why they did anything or how they would really act. They were more archetypes than people, and I could not think of interesting stories to put them in . I put each of these characters through this little exercise, trying to think of a series of events that would lead to their personalities. In doing this, I not only managed to make these characters feel more like real people, I also came up with several future stories that would yield interesting reactions from them based on their respective pasts. Heck, many of the stories that I came up with had nothing to do with the main plot, but rather from the logical progressions of each of the characters. It is at that point that I had characters worth writing about. It was at that point, that I had characters that people could hopefully care for.

            I hope this has proven helpful for any aspiring storytellers out there. I realize that I am in no way a professional writer, (The scrawl and chicken-scratch above should be prove positive of that.) but as I try to improve my own storytelling skills, I also like to share the thoughts and conclusions that I have come to in the process of doing so. Tell me what you all think.