How To Fix Shallow Characters — Create Strong Backstories For Them
By: Sherryl Clark
Tags: Novel Writing, Character, Fiction Writing, Writing Tips, Character Development

How To Fix Shallow Characters — Create Strong Backstories For Them

If you understand your character’s backstory, you will understand their motivations

Photo by Ali Yahya on Unsplash

One of the key pieces of advice we receive when writing a novel (or a screenplay) is to know our characters’ backstories. It’s good advice because without a deep understanding of what has happened to a character before he or she shows up in our novel, we won’t have a grip on something vital — motivation.

When you don’t understand what a character’s motivations are, and where they come from, you often end up pushing your characters around to fit the plot. This leads to readers who don’t feel engaged enough with the story because the characters don’t seem “real”.

Everything that has happened to a person in their life goes into making who they are right now. In ten years’ time, something new might have changed them, such the death of a child. We all have dozens of events that have gone into forming us, just as our characters do. Another problem for writers arises when you pile too much into the backstory, adding trauma after trauma, and then don’t understand what the possible effects might be. It’s why some writers consult psychologists and psychology texts.

I had my first introduction to this in a screenwriting workshop, where the tutor explained the different outcomes for a person who has had either a very distant mother or an overly intrusive mother. Here I became aware of the psychological depths of different fears — fear of abandonment, fear of intimacy, etc. Of course, it can get very complicated, but even a smattering of knowledge can help you get started.

For example, a character who had an idyllic childhood, spoiled and protected, may have a false sense of the world being a safe and wonderful place — your job in the novel might be to cause a catastrophe that entirely explodes their utopian beliefs. On the other hand, a character who has been abused as a child will inevitably carry that through to adulthood, and some good research will show you the ways in which this can manifest itself.

The problem with giving your character a child abuse backstory is this — everyone deals with it differently. Some people never get over it and suffer terribly, sometimes committing suicide. Some go the opposite way and cut themselves off from any emotional relationships. Some are able to grow away from the abuse and become tough (maybe too tough) and others dedicate their lives to helping children in similar situations. There are many possibilities.

If you give your character this kind of backstory, your challenge as the writer is to research and make the character, as they appear in your novel, believable and get your reader to care about them. Giving the character an abuse backstory doesn’t automatically ensure either will happen. You also need to recognize that probably this is enough trauma for one person and not load anything else onto them!

This is a more extreme example. Loading too many things into backstory can cause a much simpler problem — a character who never seems to know what they’re doing on the page, because their actions and reactions each time are coming from different places. Let me explain. Recently I was working with a character (let’s call her Mary) who had been a beauty queen as a teenager. Mary is now about 35, and has a daughter who is obese towards whom she feels some revulsion. She isn’t a nice person sometimes. Mary is still beautiful, slim, and is a musician/singer who works with elderly people in music therapy. You can probably already feel Mary groaning under all the “stuff” I loaded onto her!

Now, Mary is not the main character in my novel. She’s a supporting character. I needed her to be “real” and for her actions and reactions (especially towards her daughter) to be believable and understandable. More importantly, for the story, her singing and music turned out to be the key to her backstory. After quite a bit of free writing (I used a favorite technique of “interviewing” Mary and free writing her answers), I realized that the beauty queen part of her backstory was too much. Mary’s lack of understanding of her daughter comes from another place — her failures as a musician — not from the beauty pageant stuff. In fact, once I did the work on Mary, the beauty queen element seemed almost farcical and I deleted it.

You might ask why I would do so much work on a supporting character, yet I find any time a character is not coming to life, it’s time to develop their backstory and make them real. The more interaction they have with my main character, the more important this becomes.

Every major character needs a backstory and strong motivations for what they do, think and feel, not just your protagonist. Once you get to know them a bit, one of the best techniques is to “interview” them, a process I describe in this article. But think, too, about the layers of your character, and unpeeling them like an onion. It’s worth spending time on this groundwork — your novel will definitely show the benefits.