For most writers, character backstories are pretty simple: kill off the protagonist’s parents so that they can have a tragic origin and aren’t held back by a family that cares about them. In many books, backstories fill a basic role as a history that makes the character seem both experienced with grief or suffering and with little tying them down to their past life so that leaving it is unrealistically easy. From Harry Potter to Luke Skywalker, many of even our very favorite protagonists fall prey to backstories that have little impact on the story.
But backstories don’t have to be that way.
A well-written, fully-developed backstory serves as the inception of your protagonist’s most deeply-held desires and fears. Considering how crucial desires and fears are and the fact that they make up the very core of who your protagonist is as a person, this event is the moment that forged their identity. When a backstory is well-written, it comes into sharp focus throughout the plot because it drives everything else. Your protagonist — whether he realizes it or not — is taking every action, making every decision, because of that moment in his past that gave him values that he desires and fears. It’s a coming-of-age story condensed into a single moment.
And it can be incredibly powerful.
Backstories are well worth the work to become fully fleshed-out and unique. And so for this month’s workshop, we are going to show you exactly how to do that. We’ll walk you through how to take a character and discover the moment that drove them to becoming the person they are today.
Now, we’re going to be referencing this workshop here quite a bit throughout this workshop, so if you haven’t seen it, I would suggest reading it before going on. But otherwise, let’s dive in to how you can take a protagonist and give her a deep, meaningful backstory.
Desire and Fear
As I mentioned above, a meaningful backstory stems from your protagonist’s desire and fear, so understanding those is crucial to coming up with their backstory. In a previous workshop, we developed our protagonist Hallie and discovered that her core desire is fun and enjoyment and her fear is to be deprived and in pain. We can use these to come up with the event or reason behind them, which will serve as our backstory.
There are two main methods to do this, and we’re going to look at how both of them can apply to our protagonist.
Method #1: Write a Positive Backstory
This method is far less common than the second. The reason for this is that it tends to generally be less traumatic (and therefore, according to some, less interesting) but that doesn’t mean it is any less effective. Both methods are necessary for creating a cast with diverse backgrounds and experiences, rather than a set of characters who all have similar, traumatic pasts.
Both methods, however, come up with a backstory by asking the question why. In this case, we’ll complete the sentence, “Our protagonist wants fun because…”
The positive method gives, well, a positive answer.
Her past has been generally positive in relation to her desires and fears. She’s content with her past and wants her life to continue on the way it has gone. Maybe the hobbies she enjoys so much were encouraged by her parents, who are also happy to see her pursue her interests. Even if she has a more dramatic past, such as having lost her parents as an infant or dealing with some great change or challenge, she was able to use her interests and what seems fun to her to overcome it with relative ease. Overall, she’s been able to avoid her fear (of being deprived or in pain) altogether, and the difficulties she has faced haven’t changed or challenged her in a meaningful way.
Protagonists like this are powerful because it is so easy to push them out of their comfort zone. Thus the inciting incident has unusual power and the opening grabs the reader with a special interest. They also have the capacity to change radically throughout the work in maturity and experience, since they begin the book from a more sheltered perspective. They also are more realistic, since most of our readers are not orphans and have not endured some great tragedy early on in life.
However, because their pasts are less dramatic, there are very few of these sort of protagonists in literature. Although their backstories can seem less interesting, that does not mean they can be any less powerful or important to your protagonist.
Method #2: Write a Negative Backstory
Although this method is used more often, it is no less challenging. As the name implies, it involves writing a more negative history for your character. As before, you can flesh out the character’s backstory by completing the sentence, “Our protagonist wants fun because…”
Since this method involves a negative backstory, we will use the character’s experience with her fear to craft her backstory. Her desire and fear will be formed from a negative experience, which is why she fears what she does so deeply and holds her desires so strongly.
In this case, it’s possible she was deprived or in pain and used her hobbies as distractions from it. She desires to have fun and enjoy herself because without that, she finds it impossible to avoid the difficulty.
It’s possible she lost a close friend in childhood and dealt with the grief by painting or pottery. Or perhaps she lost the ability to pursue her hobbies — either through an injury or some unexpected hardship that made it impossible — and she would do anything to avoid reliving the experience.
Whatever you decide, using this method will help you narrow down exactly what purpose your backstory serves within your novel. When done well, a backstory becomes an integral part of your character. It forms the drive that pushes your protagonist to take each of the actions they do and serve as the inception of their very identity — who they truly are as a person.