Crafting Character Backstories Without Slowing Your Story
Sometimes, character backstories are crucial to explain motivations or mindsets. However, it's key to learn how to write these without letting your novel get bogged down in flashbacks of past events. Here are some tips that might help.
The 5 w’s of story – where, what, why, who and when – can all change to create variety and interest. None of these elements must change. The characters in your novel or your setting could remain fairly constant. Yet change opens up possibilities for new developments and intriguing new scenarios. These keep your novel exciting and interesting. To avoid your story stagnating in a single location, shift somewhere new – another town or country, from the city to the countryside or vice versa. Make sure any change of setting makes sense in relation to the story.
If the latter half of your book feels sluggish, don't be afraid to cut!
This is the first part of our series on writing and developing character backgrounds. I'll share more tips in upcoming posts. Don't forget to leave a comment telling me what else you'd like to see!
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It’s great that you share these tips with young and aspiring writers. Even though they may not be writing novels, I believe it will be very useful for them to learn something new from a really skilled writer like you. I’d be glad to hear some recommendations on how a writer can develop the plot without cutting down chapters (I often see it in the books of young writers). Anyway, thank you for this post, it is very informative!
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I totally agree with your last point, but I also think it would be great to explore how to develop the right relationships between protagonists. That would be super interesting.