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So You Want To/Make Interesting Characters: Difference between revisions
So You Want To/Make Interesting Characters (view source)
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Planning a sensible backstory for your characters helps strengthen their personality traits and establish their way of life. If your character's story and life is solid enough, they won't feel to the reader as "just a face" that was put there to fill a slot in the plot. In turn, having your character's backstory clearly influence their decisions (even if it is not clear to the audience what the backstory ''is'') helps your readers relate to the character.
Sometimes people plan their characters from the backstory onwards. Say you have a main character Bob, who (like most other characters) has someone he cares about-- [[Dead Little Sister|let's say, a younger sister]]-- suffer a [[Death
Sometimes, this is done the reverse, building a backstory for characters that are already at the acting stage: Now say you establish early on that Bob has a girlfriend named Alice. You have a general idea of what you want her to be like: shy and quiet, loves to cuddle. That's cool. Why is she like that? Well, she was always shy, and never really broke out of that. She grew up in an orphanage, where she was picked on, so she stays withdrawn most of the time. She and Bob (and Bob's sister) grew up in the same orphanage. After Bob's sister died, he saw her being picked on, and [[Rescue Romance|stood up for her]]. And then... here they are.
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