My Writing Advice

Backstory

It's been awhile, eh?

Okay, so I've just done a ton of stuff for backstory for my book and I was talking to a friend who mentioned how she had a hard time with it, so here I am to do a chapter on how to develop a backstory and how to intertwine it with other character's.

To start off, you need to be ready to write everything, even stuff that isn't used. It helps when forming your character, what they're sensitive to, what lead up to what, it's just good to know your character, so start from the beginning.

When, where, and how was your character born? 

So, in the beginning it's good to just outline how your character was born. What's their birthday? Was their birth smooth, bumpy? Were they delivered through a c-section? And if you want or know, where were they born? And then you can go onto briefly describe their early life. Were they grouchy? Did they develop quickly? Include a memory from their early life. Now is also about a good time to mention how their early household felt, was it busy? Quiet? 

It sounds intimidating, but I assure you, depending on how easy their life was, it could take only two paragraphs. 

I'll give you my character's beginning backstory:

"Zendo was born on December twenty-third to Elizas and Ethelred Hul. Her mother was a fairly fragile woman and almost died in the process of giving birth, but luckily she recovered and took little Zendo home.

"The next years of Zendo's life were a breeze, she was always well disciplined and followed along with things easily. She was the picture perfect girl with the dragon eyes of her mother and the white hair of her father. Until the day she met Labhras."

See? 

So, now moving on. 

Young Life Ages 4-12

The description of their young should definitely include a sense of where they began developing their personality. Despite you possibly thinking this might be the least important, it's actually more important than teen years. You want to mention any people they meet that have had an impact on them, any events that have shaped their personality. Even if it's already established in their profile that they have a certain talent, it's good just to say when they developed a liking for it. This should be a shaping stage and definitely a place to put events that can inflict long lasting results.

It's also good to note if they had a good childhood by describing how often they did something, how well they interacted with family, etc. But that would be mainly for main characters.

For example...

Character A meets B and they get along really well which creates a friendship that is very strong. Person B shapes person A by doing this event or simply having this trait. Also, A learned how to sew when she was 9.

You can go into whatever detail you want, it often fluctuates. 

I also just want to state that the amount of detail is very reliant on the importance of a character. 

Teen Years

Anggggsttttt

This is the time when you want to fill everyone in on how their life is going, not as many things are being introduced, depending on the age of the character this stage can either be important or unimportant because let's be honest, all teenagers do is sit and do one activity all day and then possibly study for school. Teen life is filled with drama you don't need to mention for all the older losers unless it was bullying or something. However, if your character is a teenager theirself, it's good to mention recent drama as it could affect how your character is acting and supply a reason for their behavior.

Adulthood

Depending on the story or the character, this part isn't important. Good things to note are how easy their transition into adulthood was (which might just come into the backstory naturally) what job they received, really just events that are affecting your character's life up to the age in which they're at. You can say their education level, anything that has an affect. Things now can still happen that you don't need to put into the story, important things can still happen that no one necessarily needs to know about. In fact, that's all that basically needs to go in adult life. Do you think anyone's gonna know that Fane once saw his cast out brother on the streets in his thirties? No, but write that down, obviously he'll have a sort of place in his heart for people cast out onto the streets. 

Adulthood is the place to fill in reasons you've missed as to why a character does something or is a certain way. While you should be doing this the whole way through, if you've got some loose ends here it is. 

It's also a place to update social relationships. I didn't have to do this because my oldest character, Fane, was a lonely butt who still kept good ties with all his buddies and it just wasn't important because everything I could've said was assumed.

And that's the last thing, what should you keep out?

It's good to keep out anything that's insignificant that you can assume or have memorized. Like, the state if Fane's social relationships. I don't have it written down but I know that he's doing quite fine with everyone he meets. You also don't need to go into detail about events. Unless an event is a turning point in their life, (or you just felt like it. I did sometimes,) events do not really need heavy detail. You can straight out say someone felt very sad because their friend left them, backstories aren't going to be handed out on flyers until they're in your book so don't overdo it.

So that's how I did my character backstories. A lot of them were over five pages, but I had one that was merely two pages and I had everything down that I needed. It's very dependent on what you think you need and the age of the character, this is just an outline of what you should consider including if you're stuck.

Thanks for reading!!! 

Have any questions or need help? Just ask! I'm willing to edit your story if you need help, I'm only as hard on it as you want me to be.