Every Character has a Backstory… Myself Included
“We are the sum total of our experiences.” — Thomas Gilovich
Bringing characters to life in writing is rather like building a Frankenstein’s Monster. You combine different ingredients — sometimes different elements, physical characteristics, and quirks from different, real-life people — and hope that a lightning strike brings it to life.
One crucial ingredient is the character’s backstory. We are shaped by our past experiences. They play a huge role in making us who we are now. Not only does our past influence how we see the world, it also plays a role in how we make decisions.
And so, I thought, the best way to kick off this blog about writing is to start with a backstory — specifically, my own, to provide some context for everything that will follow.
As far back as I can remember, I’ve always lived life with at least one foot planted in the more ethereal plane of pure imagination. As a kid, I probably spent more time playing out imaginary stories and adventures than I did thinking about the real world. Whenever I had free time (and sometimes when I didn’t), I was a spaceship commander, ace pilot, warrior, astronaut, etc. I’d get myself through my homework by pretending that I had to solve my math problems to hack a security terminal or defuse a bomb to save the world.
That all started, from what I can tell, the first time I saw Star Wars. Yes, it was Star Wars that taught me that stories could be more than just events presented in text or on film. To me, Star Wars was not a movie, it was an experience — one like no other. It teleported me to exciting, new worlds, let me see things I’ll never forget, and made me feel things I’d never felt before.
The Original Trilogy was, in many ways, my first few steps into a much larger world: The World of Unfettered Imagination.
Eventually, I started trying to write stories, rather than just imagining the climaxes of adventures that only lasted as long as I kept pretending. I fell in love with the craft.
However, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t keep the momentum of a story going long enough to keep my old pal perfectionism at bay. As soon as perfectionism showed up, I’d start seeing things I didn’t like about my story. I’d notice that something was missing, though I couldn’t be sure what that something was. Soon after that, I wouldn’t have a story anymore. I’d scrap it all, go back to the drawing board, and come up with a new idea, which would be doomed to the same fate.
Year after year, the cycle would continue. I’d find a great idea, write the first act, lose my way in the second act, and never reach the third act — the part I had been the most excited about.
Each time, I’d think, “Surely, this time, things will work out. I’ve got a really good story,” but I’d be wrong. Something was missing.
Then I discovered the Save the Cat! method in an online writing class. I plotted and planned and replotted and replanned. It was foolproof.
That story died before I could even start typing it.
I realized that I wasn’t getting better at finishing projects, I was getting better at mercilessly slaughtering stories — and not just my own. I had learned a whole bunch of ways to not tell a story.
By the time The Last Jedi came out, all I could see was a dumpster fire abomination — a corrupted, hollow shell, riddled with more holes than plot.
And I wasn’t any kinder to my own stories.
As I neared the end of my 20s, my dream of becoming an author began to feel more and more like just that: a dream.
But then, something strange happened. I realized what was missing: My protagonist.
Now, that may sound silly. How does one write a story without a protagonist? Let me explain.
I had a protagonist, in the basic sense of the word, but he was not a character; he was a cardboard stand-in, there to record the events of the story and, occasionally, look cool.
I realized that I was losing interest in my story because I wasn’t interested in my protagonist — because there was nothing to be interested in.
Armed with this new knowledge, I set about studying characters and working on a system to create not only better protagonists, but better characters in general.
But this didn’t solve my tendency to stall in Act 2. What could be done about that? After all, it doesn’t matter how good your characters are if you can’t finish your story.
The guidelines presented in Save the Cat! proved too formulaic and yet, paradoxically, too vague. Something was still missing: Something to tie everything together and keep the story from wandering off into pointless tedium.
After months of examination, planning, and introspection, I found that the solution to this problem also rested with my protagonist: Hollow protagonists lead to hollow stories. Great protagonists, on the other hand, don’t guarantee great stories, but they do play a huge role.
And that brings us to now. This blog is not just the ramblings of an aspiring writer in his late 20s. It’s where I will post my findings while on my trial-and-error quest to uncover the secrets to great writing — and hopefully create a system that helps writers like me develop both meaningful protagonists and stories around them.
In other words, I guess you could say that I’m on a quest to not only identify the lightning that brings characters to life, but to also develop a method for controlling that lightning — all while actually writing a story.
I hope you’ll join me on this quest. Stay tuned for future posts. If you have any writing-related subjects you’d like me to give my thoughts about along the way, feel free to leave them in the comments.
Thanks for reading,
Alex
