How to Write a Character Backstory

What a backstory is for

A backstory has one job: it explains why the character wants what they want and fears what they fear today. That is all. It is not a biography, and it is not a list of everything that has ever happened to them.

The difference shows up fast on the page. A biography wants to be told, so it turns into an information dump in chapter two and the story stops moving while the reader is briefed. A backstory built around a want and a fear never needs telling, because it is already doing its work in how the character answers a question.

Test it in one move. Delete the history from your notes and reread the first three chapters. If nothing in them changes, the history was not doing anything.

Write the want and the fear into a DreamPress story and both stay in front of the model for the whole book. Start a character now.

A worked example

Here is one character taken through all six steps. Her story is a contemporary drama.

Step 1: the present. Dinah Vance, 41, runs the only pharmacy in a small town. She wants to buy the building she has rented for eleven years. What stops her is that she will not borrow the money, and she has never explained why.

Step 2: the one event. When she was nineteen her father co-signed a loan for a friend who then left town. The bank took the family's shop. That single decision produced both the want, which is to own the floor she stands on, and the obstacle, which is that she treats debt as a trapdoor.

Step 3: what it cost. She left college in her second year and never went back. The word she uses for this, on the rare occasions she uses one, is "paused".

Step 4: what she hides, and from whom. The bank asked her, not her father, whether the figures on the form were right. She said they were not. That answer is the one thing she will not say out loud, and the person she most wants never to hear it is her sister Ruth, who has spent twenty years blaming the friend.

Step 5: who else was there. Ruth, who was sixteen and remembers a different version. And the friend, Gil, who came back eight years ago and is now on the town council, which is the body that has to approve the sale of the building.

Step 6: written as a page. Here is the finished backstory, at about 250 words, in her own register rather than in note form.

Dinah was nineteen when the shop went. It did not happen in a day, whatever people say now. It happened over a spring, in letters her father left face-down on the counter, and in the particular quiet of a man doing sums he has already done.

Gil Merrick had asked for a signature, not money. Her father gave it the way he gave everything, quickly and without reading, because reading would have looked like doubt. When the letters started, he told his daughters the figures were a formality and would be sorted by June.

In August a woman from the bank came to the house with a folder. She spoke to Dinah, because Dinah was the one who answered the door and because her father had gone very still in the kitchen. The woman asked whether the income on the form was right. Dinah looked at the number, which was roughly double what the shop had ever taken, and said no, it was not right.

She has never known whether that answer changed anything. The shop would probably have gone anyway. But she gave it, and her father heard her give it through an open door, and he never once mentioned it in the eleven years he had left.

She left college that autumn to work. Ruth, who was sixteen and upstairs, has told the story a thousand times since, and in her telling it is entirely Gil's fault. Dinah has never corrected her. She has also never signed a loan agreement, and she never will.

Notice what the page does not contain. There are no dates beyond her age, no description of the town, and nothing about her childhood before the spring in question. What the page holds is a want, an obstacle, a cost, a secret and a witness, which is everything the plot runs on.

Type a situation line like Dinah's into the character backstory generator and it hands back the event, the cost, what she hides and how it shows today. Do the same with your character.

How much of it goes in the story

The reader meets the effect first, the cause later, and never the whole thing. That order is the whole craft of using a backstory.

The effect belongs in chapter one. Dinah refuses a favorable loan in the first ten pages, and refuses it a little too fast. The reader now has a question, which is far more useful than an answer.

The cause belongs in the middle, and it belongs to a scene rather than to narration. Ruth says the thing she always says about Gil, and this time Dinah does not agree with her quickly enough. That is the reveal, and it costs one paragraph.

Most of step 5 never appears at all. You wrote it so that you would know how Ruth behaves in a room.

Holding a reveal for twenty chapters is where drafts break, because you forget what you planted. DreamPress keeps a story bible — it calls it World Information — and a running memory beside it, the same on the free plan as on Pro, so the bank letters in chapter two are still there in chapter forty. Park the parts you are not using yet in a character sheet: the character sheet examples show the eight sections that earn their space in a novel. Set your story bible up free.

Mistakes that flatten a character

Trauma as the only event. A character whose past is nothing but harm becomes a case file. Dinah's spring is a bad one, but the backstory above is about a decision she made, not an injury she received. For sixty starting points that are not all tragedy, the character backstory ideas page groups them by what they make a character do.

A backstory that contradicts the present. If the history says she is terrified of confrontation and chapter four has her firing someone without blinking, one of the two is wrong. Reread the draft against the notes once, early.

A secret nobody would actually keep. Ask why the character has not simply said it. If the honest answer is "no reason", it is not a secret, it is a delay.

A backstory the plot never touches. The reason Gil is on the council is that it puts the past in the room where the present is decided. If none of your character's history can walk into a scene, the plot will not feel personal.

All four are drift between the notes and the draft. DreamPress carries the history into every chapter it writes, so the two cannot come apart. Write the draft here instead.

Using the generator

The character backstory generator runs the six steps above. It is free, it needs no account, and it takes one line of input.

Type the present situation first, in one line, and be specific: "runs the only pharmacy in a small town and will not borrow money" gives you far more than "a pharmacist". The situation line decides almost everything that comes back. The name is optional. The what shaped them picker is step 2 — choose one, not three.

What comes back is a history, a defining moment, what they hide, and how it shows today. Read the last field first. If "how it shows today" gives you a scene you could write, the rest is usable. If it does not, re-roll that field before anything else. Add the witness from step 5 and the cost from step 3 in the character's own words, and the page is done.

Then write from it the same evening. Paste the backstory into a DreamPress story and the first chapter comes back with the character already behaving like the person you just built. A chapter costs 1 to 3 credits, you get 15 credits every day for nothing, 50 more for verifying an email address, and 20 a day once a writing streak reaches seven days. A picture of her costs 3 credits on every plan including Pro, and narration comes with the chapter. Write chapter one tonight.

Pro is $9.99 a month or $71.99 a year and carries 1,000 credits a month. Credit packs run from $4.99 to $99.99, never expire, and the first pack an account buys is doubled. Take the free credits first.