Character Design

Back story

Welcome back my human (and non-human) beings. Hope you're looking forward to another lesson on the do's and don'ts of character design. 

Let me start out by stating the obvious, backstory is a must have. . . ALWAYS!

"But Kenzie!" you're already asking, "What if I want my character to seem dark and mysterious? Or what if they don't remember their backstory?"

Those are both, actually, really good questions. But if you want a character to seem dark and mysterious, that doesn't mean that you just shouldn't give them a backstory. They had to come from somewhere. They weren't just magically spawned into the world at 19 with that scar over their eye. And if they were, that's a backstory. You don't have to make them go around sharing their story with everyone, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't have one.

And when it comes to things like a character with amnesia or some other reason for not remembering their backstory, I hope to goodness that you have a good reason for that. When you add character to a story that can't remember their history, a lot of the time it just makes you seem lazy, and it makes the character seem two dimensional.  This can be helped though if there is a reason for your character not remembering and if it adds to the plot. Maybe they were brainwashed by an evil scientist. Or they got a bad head injury and can't remember anything past two weeks ago. I think what you're really missing here is that THAT'S STILL A BACKSTORY!

Long story short, you can't have a character without a backstory. The backstory is what determines everything about a character. How they act, how they dress, how they look, everything. 

A perfect example of a character without any backstory is Bella Swan from Twilight. Don't come for me now. I'm as big of a Twi-hard as any other girl out there, but Bella was always a huge problem area. She was given some backstory, (Her parents were very young when they got married and then had her, their relationship didn't work out, she went with her mother to live in Phoenix, and now her mother is moving to Florida and she is going back to live with her dad in Forks for a while.) But that's it. We never hear anything else about her. We don't know what it was like for her when her mom remarried, or what it was like never being around her dad, and we never even hear anything about her friends from Phoniex. I find it very hard to believe that she went to school with these people for the majority of her life, and yet she never made friends with any of them, and not a single one of them even bothered to attempt to stay in contact, or even message her to see how she was doing. Bella is the perfect example of what not to do when it comes to backstory. We, as the readers, are expected to believe that this girl never had any kind of life whatsoever before she came back to forks and met Edward.

As necessary as the backstory is, you should still be careful about adding too much backstory. don't spend all of your time and energy working on extremely detailed backstories for every single one of your characters. You still need to remember that you're focusing on what's happening now, at the time of your story. But at least give your main characters some history, a foundation, something to build off of. 

That's all for this week. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them in the comments. And when you have all the backstories written for your characters, and you're ready to move on, please move to the next chapter. 

QUESTIONS TO ASK:

Is this backstory realistic?

Did I include enough detail?

Did I put to much detail?

Does their backstory match their personality?