Crafting Compelling Backstories
Sometimes, a character's backstory is key to understanding their motivations or mindset. But it's crucial to learn how to write it without bogging down your novel with excessive flashbacks. Here are some tips that I believe will help you.
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.
Don't Fear the Cut: Streamline Your Novel's Middle
This is just the first part of our series focusing on writing and developing backstories. I'll be sharing more tips in future articles. Don't forget to leave a comment and let me know what topics you'd like to see covered!
Alex
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!
Nina
I totally agree with your last point, but I also think it would be great to find the right ways to shape the relationships between the main characters. That would be super interesting.