I know what you're thinking, Audience Surrogate. You want to know how on earth I found myself the subject of a backstory and how to properly explain your own in a way that can be understood.
Alright, I guess I can give you some pointers, though there will be sore spots for me. We all have a few.
However, before we go into backstories, you might want to consider schooling yourself on how to Write a Story first so you'd know how to tell a story as a whole before getting into the nitty gritty details.
After that, consider paying a visit to See the Index for general information on how to write whatever you're aiming for.
You good? Good. Here's my backstory.
Necessary Tropes
It all began with Backstory. Much like every character, genre, narratives and everything in between, Backstory can be one of the most reliable methods of giving readers a glimpse of what made the subject of interest the way they are or can be as detrimental as a Cliché Storm, completely destroying the immersion of the world as a whole.
To find out how much variety they had to offer, I got to explore the Backstory Index, a helpful library providing general information on types of backstories that can used to add more depth to a fictional world.
Choices, Choices
Believe it or not, the interesting thing about the backstories is that there are numerous choices on how they can used for storytelling.
For instance, if you want to reveal what made The Lancer of a Five-Man Band the cynical and wary man/woman the way they are, give them a Dark and Troubled Past or a Cynicism Catalyst and go into a little detail on who or what caused it in the first place.
Or, to go into villains despite my trepidations, if you want to add a little more to your antagonist rather than making them Obviously Evil, you can always provide them with a tragic story that could lean to Well-Intentioned Extremist or Anti-Villain at most. A Freudian Excuse doesn't hurt, especially if you want to have the enemy attempt to justify their actions.
Or perhaps, depending on what genre you know you're doing, you could give more depth to the characters and/or the world they live in with an exploration into When It All Began as a story hook, Had to Be Sharp to explain a character's hard demeanor in a harsh environment, and use this to move the plot along.
Pitfalls
Unfortunately, that's when things went horribly wrong...
Backstory, whenever they'd been called on to add depth to a story, had been subjected to bouts of tropes in the Backstory Index over and over again that any originality was difficult to produce without dragging your feet through the mud of clichés.
Among the tropes that have been used more times than I can count are those concerning family. I can't tell you how many times I've heard of characters with Parental Abandonment as justification for Deceased Parents Are the Best, or how many characters have Abusive Parents as part of their troubling past. Troubled Backstory Flashback can be just as easy to misuse if cut from the same cloth as other works of media without doing something different.
Then again, events tied to the past can be overdone, too, and would hurt the story just as much. Among them are stories concerning murder and rape - subjects NOT to be taken lightly. If you are going to incorporate tropes such as Rape as Backstory or Sympathetic Murder Backstory, you'd better bring your A-game if you want to avoid leaning to Romanticized Abuse or the like.
You also want to know how backstories for a setting can go wrong, too? Well, there is the matter of the Doomed Hometown, a frequent trope used for causing the hero or supporting character to go out on an adventure. If written poorly, readers will question why the hometown was ruined in the first place.
Potential Subversions
I'm sorry if the pitfalls felt depressing to listen to, but it's something you have to hear about so you'd know what to watch out for. However, that doesn't mean there aren't methods to change up writing backstories.
What makes Backstory interesting is that it doesn't necessarily have to be a tragedy. Defeat as Backstory, for example, can be used to explain how a cocky hero was humbled by a strong opponent with inspiring words of wisdom they took to heart. Or perhaps you can give the character a Surprisingly Normal Backstory but still create an exciting story to engage readers.
And who says the backstory has to be clear-cut? What if you have someone who claims to have a story, but you want to make the audience unsure whether to believe it - or what to believe at all. A Multiple-Choice Past can be a good choice, especially for an antagonist, because such characters take pleasure in contradicting themselves and keep the readers guessing.
Ambiguity never hurts either. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether there is a story behind the character. Sometimes a character has a Mysterious Past, and the full story isn't brought up immediately until later on in the story - or it isn't at all. Or perhaps there isn't any explanation to particular details of the character in question, such as an Ambiguously Absent Parent or Ambiguous Criminal History.
It never hurts to try a different angle with backstory tropes, trust me.
Writers' Lounge
Potential Motifs
You know, sometimes what can help clue in on the backstory of a character or the story of a location is to make use of Motifs or Symbolism.Let's say you have a female protagonist who, once in a while, finds bird cages in unexpected places. Perhaps something about these things bothers her. If you spotted a Caged Bird Metaphor, you'd be right. And what if the cages also have birds inside? That's Animal Motifs used in conjunction with the last subject I mentioned. As you can see, it's an example of a hint the heroine may have been in a Gilded Cage in her past, and the birds and their cages are crucial storytellers to her background.
If played right, the items, shapes and symbols can be effective in tipping the readers and viewers into portions of their past.
Suggested Plots
When it comes to the plots of the stories, it can be challenging to establish backstories that would engage readers or viewers without boring them so much. That's why it's in your best interest to decide what genre you're doing before determining what backstory to use and when to apply them.Suppose you're writing a fantasy story for a book or film, and you want to establish how the world you created came to be and why the story begins in this world's present day. One of the best options to introduce your world is to write a Creation Myth. Such a trope can offer ideas on what this world is, their gods and their moralities, races brought in the world, etc. When It All Began isn't a terrible idea either, as I mentioned in passing, because you can establish how the story began, and then build upon it with the tropes available in the Backstory Index.
Now, what if the story is horror - Gothic Horror, Cosmic Horror, or any horror story? Well, Backstory can be a useful tool to make a story or character unsettling. One way you could approach this is to use Backstory Horror. This trope can be useful in bringing up a horrifying event in the protagonist's past, or perhaps it can initially trick the readers into thinking a character's story is tragic before revealing the true nature of the backstory.
Department
Set Designer/Location Scout
If there's one good thing about our discussion on backstories, it's that we're in a suitable location to talk about the subject.Settings can be reliable if you want to initiate the backstory, so long as you know how to pace your story out.
One of my favorite settings is a quiet scene with a campfire in the middle. A Campfire Character Exploration is very useful if you want to tell a character's story during a scene or chapter with a moment of calm. While The Lancer or The Hero are usually the ones who go through this, who's to say other characters can't do the same? Try to use this to flesh out your cast more by delving in the other members of the Five-Man Band, especially if it can help create a stronger connection between the characters.
Props Department
Sometimes a clue to a backstory in the form of a prop can be one of the most instrumental tools to dive into the story of the character or characters.For instance, if you have a world that is heavily invested in printing written, one of the best ways to give a hint of a character's past is a Newspaper Backstory, where an old article might have information that the protagonist wants to confirm with the subject.
