Character Work: Creating Backstory
I often resist anything that looks like outlining, believing myself to be a pantser at heart and preferring to just free-write and see where it takes me.
And yet my stories are always better for having done some sort of pre-planning. Even just a little bit. Otherwise I just get annoyed when it goes no where, or gets confusing, or no one's motivations make any sense and suddenly I've written 10,000 words of garbage that don't work.
Inspired by a podcast episode I was listening to today, I started scribbling out the backstory of one of my main characters, the vampire Dexter. I finished fleshing it out tonight on the computer.
I'd always had a general sense of his backstory, where he came from, who his family was, and the basic idea of how he got to where we find him when the story opens. But I'd never taken the time to fully write out the details. To understand the why of his behavior, based on what was driving him. What had shaped him and his motivations.
Let me tell you something.
By accident, I have flipped the dynamic between Dexter and the villain. It turns out, Dexter actually wants the thing that I thought the bad guy wanted all along, and it's in fact the bad guy's refusal to let him have it, rather than the bad guy trying to force it on him, that causes all the conflict.
And that just works so much better, on so many different levels, that I am beside myself with this magic called character development.
Just finding out who Dexter is, a rough sketch of his childhood and early manhood -- literally about 3 pages worth for the whole thing -- and I've found his basic underlying motivations, and my head is already exploding with all the ways that this knowledge is going to inform everything that he's doing and make the whole novel so much richer and deeper and actually going somewhere -- like, on purpose.
I can't wait to dig into the other main characters and find out more about them. And, once that's done, to dive into the world of outlining the plot points of an actual novel, ya'll.
And yet my stories are always better for having done some sort of pre-planning. Even just a little bit. Otherwise I just get annoyed when it goes no where, or gets confusing, or no one's motivations make any sense and suddenly I've written 10,000 words of garbage that don't work.
Inspired by a podcast episode I was listening to today, I started scribbling out the backstory of one of my main characters, the vampire Dexter. I finished fleshing it out tonight on the computer.
I'd always had a general sense of his backstory, where he came from, who his family was, and the basic idea of how he got to where we find him when the story opens. But I'd never taken the time to fully write out the details. To understand the why of his behavior, based on what was driving him. What had shaped him and his motivations.
Let me tell you something.
By accident, I have flipped the dynamic between Dexter and the villain. It turns out, Dexter actually wants the thing that I thought the bad guy wanted all along, and it's in fact the bad guy's refusal to let him have it, rather than the bad guy trying to force it on him, that causes all the conflict.
And that just works so much better, on so many different levels, that I am beside myself with this magic called character development.
Just finding out who Dexter is, a rough sketch of his childhood and early manhood -- literally about 3 pages worth for the whole thing -- and I've found his basic underlying motivations, and my head is already exploding with all the ways that this knowledge is going to inform everything that he's doing and make the whole novel so much richer and deeper and actually going somewhere -- like, on purpose.
I can't wait to dig into the other main characters and find out more about them. And, once that's done, to dive into the world of outlining the plot points of an actual novel, ya'll.
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