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Every character walks onto the page carrying the baggage of
a lifetime. He or she comes with a
personal history – parents, children, siblings, exes, partners, mentors and
tormentors – not to mention education and work experiences. These relationships and experiences meld in a
host of memories, unresolved conflicts, festering wounds, and unfulfilled
desires. Together, they make up a unique
personality. The past may not play a
substantive part in the story you’re telling, but it casts a perceptible shadow
over the present. All characters are
influenced to a greater or lesser degree by what happened to them before they
are introduced to the reader. In real
life, people can do things for no reason at all. But in fiction, a writer is obliged to supply
the character a plausible motive for his actions. In my own novels, I’ve found that oftentimes
that motivation arises out of my character’s backstory. To paraphrase William Faulkner, the past is
never really past.
While a compelling backstory enriches the characterization
and lends depth and believability, it isn’t always easy to establish. If you’re writing a series, it becomes
increasingly difficult to repeat the character’s history over and over
again. I call this challenge of telling
the backstory “summoning the ghosts.”
You don’t want the ghosts to take over the plot. Their purpose is to do a bit of haunting,
inform the reader why your character thinks and behaves the way he does, and
promptly fade back into the ectoplasm.
Interrupting the action to insert long explanations will only bore your
readers, and if some present action is triggered by a character’s past, it’s
best that the reader be aware of that past before
the critical moment when the action takes place. Backstory can be woven into a scene through
the character’s internal thoughts, reminiscences, emotional reactions,
dialogue, and occasionally through flashbacks.
But sometimes, as happens in real life, a character can’t move on with
her life until the ghosts of the past have been banished.
In my fifth Dinah Pelerin mystery, Where the Bones Are Buried, Dinah is living happily with her lover
in Berlin, Germany when two characters from out of her past show up and
threaten to disclose secrets that will turn her life upside down, possibly even
send her to prison. By summoning these
particular ghosts, I had to confront the fact that unavoidably, I would be
revealing part of the mystery of the first novel. But these ghosts had been rattling their
chains through four books. It was time
for an exorcism. Character and the
complexities of human relationships have always mattered more to me than plot
and I decided that, if Dinah were going to have a future, she had to sort out
her feelings about the past once and for all – the lingering blame and distrust
of others, as well as her own guilt.
In writing Where the
Bones Are Buried, I realized that in some ways I had been in denial as much
as Dinah. I had created her backstory,
but shied away from its psychological implications. I had been too cautious about holding the
ghosts at bay. By delving more deeply
into Dinah’s past and giving her the opportunity – the choice – to exorcise her
ghosts or carry them around with her forever, she became infinitely more real
to me. No one can forget the past
completely, but I know I’ll have a much easier time feathering in the backstory
in my next Dinah novel.
Jeanne Matthews was born and raised in Georgia. She graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in Journalism and has worked as a copywriter, a high school English and Drama teacher, and a paralegal. She currently lives in Renton, Washington with her husband, who is a law professor.
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1 Comments
What an interesting post on character development over the course of a series. Thanks so much for sharing your perspective on this.
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