I've written three novel-length projects, a novella, and numerous short stories. Over time, my work has won many Wattpad contests, and I would like to share my tips on how to make a good story and get people to read your work. I have learned much ov...
Note: These chapters I'm writing on backstory are based off of a fantastic book I'm reading called "Build Better Characters", by Eileen Cook. She's a counselor and a writer who approaches character-building from a psychological standpoint. The group she works with, Creative Academy, has a whole website of resources for writers at https://creativeacademyforwriters.com/.
In the last chapter, we learned about advanced interrogation methods you can perform on your characters in order to learn more about their past (with no torture involved...yet 😉). But there's no possible way you can fit all the backstory mentioned before into your book, unless you're writing a super long series (and even then, it'd be spaced out across multiple books). So how do we decide what's important to include?
"Joye, my character is in an apocalypse and her favorite music is hip-hop and she has purple hair and her dad was killed by zombies and she just broke up with her boyfriend after one date and..."
Hold up! I'm going to stop you right there. I mentioned info-dumping when it comes to worldbuilding, but it's also very important to artfully weave in backstory in a way that won't cause your readers to buckle under all that information. Why? Because they'll forget your character's backstory. And a character without a memorable backstory is a boring one, and one that the reader won't like and may get frustrated with.
This, like writing emotion, comes as instinct now for me, so I did some research. In the book I mentioned in the author's note (which you should read - they have many more helpful tips I don't list in the interest of avoiding plagiarism) are two methods I learned. Let's take a look at them, and I recommend using both in your story. They're very helpful for different things.
1. Use A Timeline Tool
In Build Better Characters, Eileen Cook discusses how in her counseling sessions she'll have her clients make a timeline of the most important events in their life, with the earliest ones starting at the top. Events they perceive as negative go on the right, while events they perceive as positive go on the left.
This tool is useful because it boils down information to the most important, defining moments in a character's life (this will help you a ton when deciding whether it's worth mentioning that your character's first job was a grocery cashier). It also creates depth of perception in your character. For example, one person who gets diagnosed with a chronic illness might mark it on the right as a negative thing. However, another might mark it as a positive thing because of the things it taught them about friendship and forsaking their own pride.
Below is an example timeline I made for Shadow Weaver. It's written with the first scene of Starwalker as the end, so please be on the lookout for vague Alura spoilers.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
2. Ask the right questions
Cook also includes a set of questions one can ask if they want to decide on a case-by-case basis what's important to the story. Below is a quote from the book, originally from page 91.
