I've had something of an epiphany lately. It's not an entirely pleasant one to think about in real life, but it's something incredibly important to consider in creative writing. Everyone you've ever met has a past. Good pasts, bad pasts, pasts we're proud of, pasts we try hard to forget. There are things we do share and things we don't, but all of it contributes to who we are and how we act at any given moment. No two people have the same past. No two people will react the same given the same trial. And so will no two characters.
One of the issues that I have been wrestling with during the revising of my work-in-progress is how my main character ended up the way she did--namely, a calculating sociopath. Something specific happened off-screen in her past that caused her to not only close off her heart, but also loathe her older brother. It isn't an easy thing, to put myself in the mindset of a person being broken, and also the person breaking her.
The thing is, while that one specific event may be alluded to within the actual pages of my WIP, it will never actually be stated. There will never be a flashback to it, I will never explain exactly why it happened. The important thing is that it did, and that it caused my character to get to where she is in the story. It influences how she speaks and interacts with her brother, and how she feels about her love interest. This past, no matter how hidden from the reader's view, changes things about the story and the character.
Real life tends to be like this as well. The first time we meet a person, we likely have no idea what happened in the however many years before meeting them. All we know is what they tell us and what we observe in the time we spend with them. Sometimes they reveal things about their past, but they likely don't tell all. We can never know everything about them, all of their secrets, everything that has ever happened to them to get them to where they are today. But it did happen. And it's the same with characters. When the reader first meets a character on the first page of a book, they don't know a thing about the character or their past. Most of the time, by the end of the book, the reader still doesn't know everything. There are certain things that the author never reveals, but they know it is true, that it happened. And that's what gives depth to characters.
The difficult part for the author can be figuring out that past, the little nuances that occurred in a character's life that created the character seen on the page. In my opinion, and in my experience, the hardest part is putting yourself in the character's shoes, living through those difficult parts in their lives that they will keep secret 'til their deaths (or at least until the reader closes the book after the last page). Because most of the time, those secrets are hard to handle. You have to dig deep into your own experiences to pull from something that is only slightly similar, and then make it worse. Not only that, but in a lot of cases you then have to examine the psychological effects that these secrets caused, which is sometimes even more difficult to realize.
Different characters have different secrets. Some are more difficult to delve into than others, some require that you go to a dark place you may not want to go. To figure out how to break a character, you sometimes have to figure out how you would break yourself. And that isn't an easy thing to force yourself to do. I still haven't quite managed it yet for my WIP, and anyone who has read my other stories knows that I can be incredibly mean to my characters sometimes. But this has been harder, in part because the character's past does happen off-screen. My character begins having already gone to that dark place, faced it, and emerged changed. Now I have to figure out what she was before, and what caused this drastic change. It isn't easy. I don't think it could ever be easy.
So I'll leave you with this advice: backstory is important, but it won't always be simple. If you don't know your characters' pasts, this is something you should figure out, because it will change certain actions and relations within your book drastically. It will allow your reader to better connect with the character, because readers have pasts, too. They will see themselves in your characters, they will know that certain things happened to the characters, and in some ways they will long to know it, and in some ways they will fear to know it. This will give the characters depth and intrigue, far more than if they had just come into life fully formed on the first page. Give your characters pasts, let some of it bleed through, and keep some of it hidden for only you to know.
My best friend is fond of a quote that I unfortunately cannot give credit for because I have no idea who said it: "Your characters are like geodes: in order to see the beauty inside, you first have to break them." It isn't always easy, but that beauty will show through in your story if you do.
No comments:
Post a Comment