Writer's Workshop: The Neverending (Back)story · 12:49am Dec 6th, 2015
Hey, all! Time for another fun little lesson. This time, we're gonna talk about writing backstory and how much you need to set up beforehand. Let's begin.
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When I took a dramatic writing class, my teacher handed out a paper he called the "Bone Structure." This paper was meant to help us flesh out our characters, make sure we understood everything about them. And when I say everything, I mean everything: where they grew up, their favorite breakfast cereal, their blood type... I could go on. Now, as a freewriting technique, I can't fault it. If you know absolutely nothing about what you want to write, then sure, writing a bunch of random stuff can help you. But what if you already have an idea of your character? Do you really need to know everything about that character? Or what if you've got a background character? Do you really need to know that character's blood type or what they had for breakfast?
I say, no. Remember my rule #1: "Write what's important." If your character is already up and about, we don't need to know what they had for breakfast unless that comes up for some reason. Unless your character's currently in the hospital or has some condition, they probably don't even know their own blood type. Instead, you should focus on what actually affects the story itself. Look at their story role, their physical description, their relationships with the other characters, their situational affect, their useful skills...
Hold on, that's still a lot of things. Tell you what, here's a trick I learned from a tabletop roleplaying game forum: pick three key aspects. That's it. So long as you pick three things that are broad enough and help the character fit into the story, you should have enough to make those traits useful without the characters seeming like archetypes or stereotypes. In FAE (Fate: Accelerated Edition), there are even two specific things you pick. Let's go over those real fast.
The first Aspect you choose in FAE is the High Concept. This is your stereotype, your extremely broad character idea. So maybe your character is the Lost Prince of the Northern Kingdom or a Hard-bitten Noir Detective. If you're ever uncertain what your character might do, you can always fall back on what the High Concept might stereotypically do. The second Aspect is the Trouble. This is basically your character's central flaw, something that bugs them at every turn. This could be something within them, like Never Shuts Up, or it could be something external, like Hunted by the Villicenti Family. If you ever need to put your character in trouble or create conflict, just bring in their Trouble and watch the fireworks. (The third Aspect in FAE can be anything you want.)
Here's an example of this in action. Let's say we wanted to create Aspects for Rainbow Dash. For her High Concept, I'd give her Speed Demon. That's her most basic character trait: she wants to be the fastest pegasus in Equestrian history. (You'll also notice that's what her cutie mark means. That was not an accident.) For her Trouble, I'd call it Best Before the Rest to represent the fact that she tends to put herself before everyone else to get into trouble. For her third Aspect, let's give her something like Wonderbolt Fanmare. (If you'd like to see my work on this for the rest of the Mane 6, click here. Just... ignore the other stuff for now. I may get back to it some other time.)
The cool thing about this method is, it works for anything! Setting? Not a problem. What kind of place is an Oasis of the Frozen North, is Under Siege of Darkness, and is Covered in Crystals? The Crystal Empire, of course! How about the plot? Totally doable, too. A High Concept of Modeling is My Life Now, a Trouble of Why Can't I Just Be Happy for Her?, and a third Aspect of Twilight Can't Keep Her Mouth Shut pretty well describes "Green Isn't Your Color" if you think about it.
Of course, this is just meant to be a framework. Perhaps as you write the story, your character comes up against something that doesn't quite fit any of the traits you'd given them already. In that case, you'll have to come up with something new. Whenever you do that, you'll want to make a note of it with the rest of the traits you've been working with. So maybe for Rainbow Dash, I'd want to add Crazy about Daring Do for another trait. Or I would change Twilight's Student of Friendship Aspect to Princess of Friendship after she became an alicorn. These aspects certainly aren't set in stone!
If this whole "High Concept/Trouble" thing doesn't make sense to you, just pick three whatever. Maybe the character you want to make is a storekeeper, he's fat, and he loves to laugh. Sounds good. You'll notice, though, that none of those three are the storekeeper's color scheme. Really, does that matter? If you're going to waste one of your precious three traits on their color scheme, it'd better be good. In any case, once you've picked your three traits, show them in the story. "Fluttershy walked up to the storekeeper. He was a fat, jolly-looking sort, and he laughed heartily when Fluttershy approached his stand. 'What can I do for you?' he asked her." Boom. Done. No pussyfooting around with "He was a little bit taller than Fluttershy, with a green-brown mane and a tan coat. He wore a green cap on his head and--" Bo-ring! Nobody cares.
Look, writing is hard. I get that. But trying to fill out an biography's worth of information about your character is only making it more difficult, not less. It'll only drive you crazy as you try to decide, "Okay, so he probably like Frosted Flakes, but maybe he'd like Froot Loops better?" No, focus on a few useful details. What's their main role in the story? What's their weakness? What's an important quirk of their character? If you know those, I'll bet you've got enough to get by.
I don't see blood type being all that relevant in storytelling, but that just could be me.
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That... was my point, wasn't it? Or are you saying something else?
Second, it actually can be. For example, in "Mad Max: Fury Road," it's a critical plot point twice in the movie that Max's blood type is O-, the universal donor. In a story about... vampires, maybe, or in a hospital like I said, it might be really useful.
In Japan (and occasionally here in the US), blood type frequently pops up as a personality indicator. Type A characters are stubborn and responsible, for example, while Type O are optimistic and self-centered. But now I think we're talking about something entirely different.
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A bit of a teal deer moment, admittedly.
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...Oh. Gotcha.
I think that tricks and templates like this address one of the common foibles in amateur writing; consistency. Characters remaining the same person from scene to scene sometimes gives new writers trouble, for a variety of reasons (ranging from the plot controlling the character to idea overload to author appeal and countless others).
These sorts of exercises are a bit of a necessary evil though: they emphasize consistency over complexity. Good characters and settings should have as many details figured out by the author, even if those details never come up in the story. Simplistic characters and settings have their place, of course, but an author should strive to make their protagonists and settings as multifaceted as possible: that leads to verisimilitude.
Consistency is definitely a valuable lesson, and these sorts of things are good starting points and building blocks regardless of one's level of experience. As one gets more experience writing, however, they should take care to grow beyond basic tools.
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I... disagree, I think. I don't think characters need to be as complex as, say, a human being is, because characters aren't humans; they're pawns in a story, serving a specific purpose. Yes, it can be interesting to give your characters quirks and close details, but I don't plan that out; I just come up with it on the fly if it comes up. (For example, saying that Twilight likes rooibos tea in a couple of my fics.) When you're planning the character out for your story, I highly doubt you need to take things like that into account.
Or perhaps you're saying that, rather than have them cohere to a stereotype, have them tweak it in some way to make it unique. Sure, I suppose, but 1) that's not strictly necessary, 2) it's probably not as unique as you think it is, 3) that's what the other traits are for. Or, of course, you could cheat and just reword the trait to include that tweak. So for example, suppose I'm making a film-noir PI, but I decide to make them cheerful and quirky rather than sullen and gritty. I could just change the High Concept from Hard-Boiled Noir Detective to Cheerful Noir Detective. Don't know if that makes you feel any better, but...
And of course, these traits shouldn't be 100% all the time. A good story should have your characters struggle to fulfill their traits, or break their rules if the situation demands it. For example, maybe one of your characters is Always a Gentleman, but they're caught up in an explosion and tons of people die. If you decided to have him say, "What the f
was that?!" we'd understand that the situation is so crazy that he's breaking his normally-perfect demeanor. This is the case for, say, Pinkie Pie in "Party of One." But again, this is in execution, not planning. When your characters are still in planning, I think it helps to have them be consistent. I see no point in writing out, "Okay, my character is always a gentleman, except in these specific circumstances. Maybe those circumstances will come up in the story, maybe they won't."
Hmm... Now I'm curious. Do you think your characters are complex? I've read two or three of your stories, and they're quite good, but I don't recall the characters being particularly deep. (Considering I just wrote three paragraphs about how that's not a problem, please don't consider that an insult.
) I bet, if I went and read one of your stories, I could summarize your most complex character with three FAE Aspects. But there I go shooting my mouth off. :P I just dumped a whole bunch on you, and I'm still not sure what you mean by "complex," so perhaps if you could explain that, we can see if anything I just said has any bearing at all or not. 
3684696 I agree that characters shouldn't be as complex as real humans. The entire point of fiction is that it is an abstraction and streamlining of real life. That's why the law of conservation of detail is so important.
When I say "complexity" I suppose I mean that a character should be able to express and perform a wide array of emotions and actions. Just like a real human, the many situations a character will encounter will warrant many different responses.
I suppose you could say that complex characters are an evolution of consistent characters. The latter displays a few traits, while the former displays branches and evolution of said traits. The trick is that the author must broadcast these traits to the reader, hint at them, but not let them overtake the narrative. The character (at least initially) needs to display their personality to the reader and then slowly grow (or display) more traits over time. The more complex a character is--the closer they are to a real human--the harder it becomes to both show that to the reader and make sure it stays relevant to the narrative.
This is why tools like this are a good starting point. As mentioned, they help new authors to take steps towards creating characters with gradually more and more elements to them. But intuition and experience are a large part of writing good characters, so these tools have their limits.
Now, you mentioned some of my stories, but my stories are terrible examples. In all my major stories with complex characters (I suppose I Am Not the Actor and If You Came to Conquer/Inexcusable would come to mind), I as an author failed to show the traits of my characters effectively. The characters may be complex, but the author isn't competent. I even wrote an entire review of the latter two stories where this was listed as a major area of growth.
Also as mentioned, "complex characters" aren't always going to be the best choice for a story. If you want to write (or read) a pulpy adventure story, then your character needs far less traits than if you're writing an involved psychological drama. I use archetypal characters in my comedies a lot: they don't have much complexity because it isn't needed.
I don't really like to use the word "stereotypical" to describe characters: I prefer the term "archetypal". I suppose one reason this conversation is so hard to have is that all these various terms--including the ones I'm making up definitions for--are difficult to explain effectively. I also wrote this right before bed, so if any of my clarifications need clarification then please say so
(late reply because I like to mull over my replies and then forgot about this post in the interim
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