by Siobhan Shier

Created on: February 03, 2009

A backstory is "the history behind the situation at the start of the main story. A backstory may include the history of characters, objects, countries, or other elements of the main story" (wikipedia.org).

Why is this important?

Say you have your character, Sally, who is in a story with the simple plot: Sally goes to the bank, is held up in a bank robbery and ends up being kidnapped by the robbers. She struggles and eventually manages to escape only to find that her husband was killed trying to rescue her.

This is an interesting enough story; it has a character, action, drama, suspense and horror. On its own it is rather bland. Giving the plot and the character a backstory adds an entire different dimension, filling out the situation and allowing you as an author to toy with the heartstrings of your audience a little more.

Lets add the following element: right before she left for the bank, Sally had an argument with her husband. Now you've given your main character some emotional dimensions. Throughout the story you can have Sally thinking she is going to die and obsessing about the fact that the last moment she shared with her husband was an unpleasant argument. When she finally breaks free she can be elated that she won't die without telling him that she loves him - then have that elation crash down around her when she finds out that he died instead.

What if we flesh it out even more, but adding one tiny detail: the argument was about the fact that her husband is a police officer, and she wants him to retire since she is scared for his life because of his dangerous job. At this point you have a character that has a great deal of emotional baggage to handle which will make her reactions far more realistic and make it more interesting for the reader to follow along.

You don't have to deliver this backstory all at once - it can be used to entice the reader along. All the time Sally is in the bank and kidnapped you can have her worrying about her husband coming after her, but not tell the reader why she is worrying. Leave it up to them to wonder if he is a mobster or a dangerous kick butt action hero - when they find out in the end that he is an older cop that should have retired years ago it will add a little suprise punch to the story.

A backstory is important. Without one, the characters are flat, unbelievable, and uninteresting to the reader. If there isn't something to discover, some dark childhood secret or unknown dimension to a person's life, than the reader can get the entire thing at a glance and not want to continue reading. Think of it like artwork - a basic pencil sketch is the character and the plot, and the backstory is the shading and the paint.

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