Behind the Scenes: How to Craft Compelling Backstory

A character’s backstory is where all the gold is buried in terms of their motivations and misbeliefs. Who we are in the present depends to a large extent on what has happened to us in the past. It’s critical for you to know your protagonist’s personal history—but that’s a pretty easy thing to work out. There are numerous character questionnaires available on the internet that you can spend hours filling out.

What you do with that information, however, is trickier—and everything depends on it. If you front load your novel with your protagonist’s life story or give them a variety of quirks and habits that don’t get used in any meaningful way, you will be squandering all that valuable information you amassed and possibly even turning readers away.

Creating Connection

In your opening pages, your main objective is to create connection between the reader and the protagonist. But we don’t usually connect with someone who tells us their life story. If we’re unlucky enough to sit next to that person on a long bus ride, we get up and move. We connect with someone who intrigues us, who makes us want to know more about them. We interact with them, watch how they behave and what they say, and develop our own ideas about who they might be.

Here’s the key: we should want to know more about your protagonist before we actually find out. When it comes to backstory, keep your readers on a need-to-know basis. Show us who this protagonist is. But don’t tell us why they are the way they are—not yet. That’s something you should hold back for later.

In fiction, we also connect with someone who has a strong voice. Contrary to what this might sound like, voice is not (or not only) about the way your character talks. Voice is about who they are as a person, and how that’s expressed in the things they notice and how they relate to what’s going on around them. This is why it’s so important to know that backstory. If you don’t, you won’t truly know who your protagonist is, and they won’t come alive on the page.

But then you have to use this information. If you’ve given your protagonist an extreme fear of heights but then their narrative goal has nothing to do with climbing a mountain or hanging out with their crush who lives on the twenty-seventh floor, that information becomes mere window-dressing. You’re not using it in a purposeful way—i.e. as an obstacle to your protagonist getting what they want.

Using Your Protagonist’s Backstory

We need to be strategic about our protagonist’s backstory: when to use it, how much of it to use, and how.

Use backstory to create intrigue. That means dropping hints and clues in the first half of the book that slowly get answered in the second half. There should be very little in the way of backstory in the first half of your novel. Treat your readers like detectives. Assume your novel is a puzzle they want to solve—and give them the space to do it.

Sprinkle backstory hints into scene. Rather than sitting your reader down and info-dumping a long passage of family history on them, give us one dinner scene. Show us how your protagonist interacts with their parents, their annoying siblings (and maybe their siblings’ spouses), their children, a server. Every one of these interactions can reveal character if you let it.

Build backstory hints into voice. Don’t give us a long history on how your protagonist is miserably single. Set a scene on Valentine’s Day. Make them walk past restaurants and flower shops. Give us some snarky internal monologue.

Don’t tell us they’re the bossy eldest sister. Show us how they behave with their younger sibling. Don’t tell us that baking is their life. Show the way they see possibilities for icing in the shape of a flower.

Showing your protagonist in action rather than telling us about them allows the reader to participate in the process of getting to know them. You are trusting your reader, giving them space to think rather than spoon-feeding them all the answers. And readers remember things better when they participate in them rather than being told about them.

What About Flashbacks?

Flashbacks are the uppity first cousins of backstory. Yes, they involve dramatization, which lifts them out of infodump territory, but you should only use them when absolutely necessary. Why? Because they come with a built-in disadvantage: whatever you’re dramatizing has already happened. No matter how interesting it is, it will necessarily lack both tension and immediacy. If your flashback is too long, it has the potential to create confusion in your narrative. By the time your reader returns to the present-moment storyline, they’ve forgotten where they left off.

If you must use a flashback—such as to dramatize the origin of your protagonist’s misbelief—the best course of action is to get in and get out as quickly as possible. The longer you linger, the greater the chance for confusion. Use cues to let the reader know when you’re moving back in time and when you’re returning to the present moment. Keep your reader’s ease of experience in mind. If they have to stop and think about where or when they are, you will break immersion and take them out of the story.

In Conclusion

The backstory of your characters is crucial to know, but like research, it is information and needs to be handled with care. Your job is to bring that information to life in such a way that it becomes part of what happens, who these people are on the page. You should never have to stop the story to tell us anything about your characters. The story should be showing them to us at every moment. That’s how you create the essential connection that makes us want to follow them right to the end.