Backstory

9 September 2024

Backstory

Everything is a backstory. The first words you write are always backstory. No matter how much you have plotted and thought out, those first words are always backstory.

Every story is about a person, but almost by definition it is also about other people. Characters, unless supernatural, can never know the intentions of other characters. In this way they are as human as we are. Whenever you write a character, you are inevitably writing the backstory of their life. It’s always in hindsight that we write. You can write in the future tense, but there will always have to be a point at which we look back to. Otherwise, how does the action unfold? How does the conflict develop? Writing in the future tense is just a transposition of time. But I digress.

There will be a lot of digression, regression, repetition, recursion.

Backstory is motivation. A character’s motivation. Or at least a part of it. We, like our characters, are motivated by many things.

The past is prologue, or so someone said. Therefore, backstories are beginnings.

Once you think in this way, you can start to feel your characters take life, because you now understand them yourself. Sometimes those first words feel so important (and they are in a way) but they are really just setting up something else.

All stories are backstories.

Again, telling the future is one thing. But all those futures are still set in the past. Since every future is a past to a future yet to come.

That’s why fortune tellers and psychics make great narrators. As do highly perceptive people of any kind, which is sort of what fortune tellers are in essence.