Why Character Backstory is Important

Some writers create a character sketches for each of their major characters. Much of the sketch never makes it into the novel, but it serves to give them a frame of reference for where the character is coming from when they say or do something.

There was an example of this in a recent piece by actress Molly Ringwald (quick—what movie do you most associate her with?) in the online New York Times. Ringwald has tried her hand at writing and this week published a novel and a work of non-fiction. Her transition to writing came from her acting. In the piece Ringwald talks about how she found it necessary to develop backstories for the characters she portrayed.  These backstories gave her an understanding of the emotions behind what the characters said and how she should deliver their lines. It was Ringwald’s character backstory that gave birth in The Breakfast Club to the line, “It’s like any minute … divorce,” referring to Claire’s parents (Claire being the character played by Ringwald).   

Ringwald also talks about how, despite her best efforts as a writer, people will interpret characters within their own frame of reference. She uses the example of a friend of hers who read her novel and saw one of the characters wearing a “breezy hippie dress,” something Ringwald had not intended, but which she later realized with within her friend’s right as a reader to do.

It would be interesting to see how this element of description plays when it comes to location. I recently finished reading Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey. Much of the action takes place in the unique geography of southern Utah where, over millions of years, water has cut narrow channels or canyons into the bedrock, many so narrow that only one person can pass through at a time. I have camped in this area, so I am familiar with the geography. Grey’s description is not the best, it leans towards the convoluted, and I wonder how someone who has never been to that region would picture it in their mind.

As Ringwald observes in her article, though, in the end it comes down to the writer and the reader and how they come together, one providing and other interpreting the descriptions.

See ya’ later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

 Photo by Pgianopoulos (File:Molly Ringwald in Greece.jpg) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons from Wikimedia Commons