Somewhere, when I wasn’t looking, they passed a
law at the federal level that requires that you must be able to access reruns
of Law & Order on television no less than 24 hours a day, seven days a week,
on at
least one channel (multiple channels if possible). This law pertains only
to those folks who have cable TV, which is just about everyone.
My two favorite characters on Law & Order SVU are Munch, played by Richard Belzer, and Fin, played by Ice-T. They are solid characters. You know they have some depth to them. Fin comes from the streets. You sense a shady past. Munch has central European roots, he is a conspiracy nut, and he speaks several languages. He also maintains a dedication to individual rights that makes you wonder how he justifies being a police detective. Although you seldom get a look at the backstory of these characters, when you do you enjoy it.
With the pace of television and a story like Law & Order, there is only time for maintaining backstory on two characters on a regular basis. There is also the challenge of complicating the plot.
I face the same challenge in my novel Rules for Giving.
There are several main characters. Those with the most extensive backstory are Gavin, the protagonist, his former girlfriend Tilda, and Tilda’s daughter Rose. We meet Gavin and Rose in the first chapter, but Tilda comes to the reader only in flashbacks. She doesn’t make an entry until well into the last quarter of the story. There are several other characters, and I’ve developed their backstory as far as I think is necessary.
How far down the cast of characters do you develop backstory? One of the stronger secondary characters in Rules for Giving is Leo the Knuckle. Leo is bigger-than life, both physically and also in her personality. She is a six-foot-two-inch veteran of Army Special Forces (the time frame is in the days of don’t ask, don’t tell and the Army doesn’t know Leo is a lesbian, and when it becomes obvious, she is too valuable an asset). She is trained in the martial art. After the Army, Leo makes her living as a private investigator and sometimes bodyguard. Because she is who she is, and because of the role she plays in the story, I give Leo a little more backstory. I don’t want to tell too much story, though. She needs some mystique.
The inspiration for Leo comes from two sources.
The first is Roberta Muldoon, a character in John
Irving’s The World According
to Garp (played by John Lithgow in the movie). Roberta is a transsexual who was
formerly Robert Muldoon, a professional football player. The other inspiration
was a girl I played on an office softball team with for a season. She didn’t
work in our office, but she had a big bat.
Even though Leo the Knuckle gets limited backstory, her role as larger than life is important. She is one of those people you know will come back in another novel.
Someone once asked Abraham Lincoln how long a man’s legs should be. Honest Abe was purported to have answered, “Long enough to reach the ground.”
How long should a character’s backstory be? Enough to tell the story.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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