Pulling inspiration for this question from Poets and Writers magazine, but the original questions posed are as follows: 1. What happens when you resist explanation for a characters choices? 2. What tools other than backstory can you use to create a dynamic character? It caused me to sit back and think for a moment about what that meant in my own writing. It also immediately made me think of Anton Chigurrh from No Country for Old Men. It's been a while since I've read it but I was struck by remembering he didn't have that much given about him throughout the course of the story, and he was completing a task he'd been given. The stark, emptiness of his personality made me wonder if that's how a character with no backstory would turn out, but that isn't to say he's less memorable. What are your thoughts, friends?
Considering how in "Story Genius" Lisa Cron shows how back story can be used to create a complete story, I think it is needed to some degree in most stories. That said there are genres where it can be minimized or left out completely, such as an action genre. A flat arc character can let their actions speak for them. No Country for Old Men is memorable for Anton Chigurrh's determination to do the job he was given. What made him that way doesn't really matter to the story. Other times, John McLaine's desire to get back with his ex-wife is the small bit of information needed to explain his drive. I think the author needs to know something of the character's back story to write the character. Whether that is shared with the reader is a different matter. I would say it takes more talent, or skill to with hold the back story and still make the character interesting for the reader.
I don't think direct or overbearingly explicit backstory is particularly effective or even necessary a lot of the times. Only to the extent in which it informs the reader as to the character's present. I've always treated characters through the lens of apotheosis. There's a reason we're writing about what the character is doing now and not ten years ago. If ten years ago was interesting, we would be writing about that instead of the "present." Unless you're doing a long biopic or multigenerational shit, in which case, the backstory is a front-story that evolves chronologically. Oof, you had to pick that one, huh? Equal parts good example and irrelevant example because, well, Cormac McCarthy. No Country is in the objective POV so you're never in anybody's head. Ever. No thoughts, no direct emotions, no reminiscing, nothing. With Cormac, anything in the backstory realm has to be either explicitly stated in narration, which he never does, or spoken directly in dialogue, which is rare but not non-existent. There are a few exceptions in his bibliography but they are very rare and almost always framed in non-standard narration. Relatively speaking, of course, because none of his shit is standard. There is one scene where Anton is speaking either with Carson (Woody Harrelson in the movie) or Carla Jean, Moss's wife, right before he kills them. I can't remember which but he tells a story about how he was got into a fight at a truck stop or something and ended up killing the guy and that opened his mind to... Cormac something McCarty something death is the only true force something death death and more death something. It's not a lot of backstory but it informs the read a bit about the present. Then with Sheriff Ed Tom there are those first person italicized interludes at the beginning of the chapters were he recounts law enforcement stories from his past that inform the reader about the theme of the book, which is the cryptic title restated as This is not a Country for Old Men Anymore. I don't count those sections as narration because it is the character "speaking" in first person, which in Cormac's style, is as close to interior monologue (reminiscing) as you get. And then there's the scene where Moss is crossing the border back from Mexico and speaks to the guard about being a Vietnam Vet, which is about all the backstory we get. Again, direct dialogue. And there's a scene with Carla Jean talking to the sheriff where we learn she met Moss while working at Walmart when she was 16 and married him a few weeks later. More direct dialogue. So, yeah... I guess Anton is an example of a backstory-less character, but in Cormac's world, that's just about everyone.
It's a different matter when you're talking about the bad guy. I'm thinking about this whole spate of movies and Broadway plays where they examine the backstory of a classic villain and try to humanize them, which kicked off with Wicked (but which I suspect really began with John Gardner's Grendel). The Wicked Witch, Jason Voorhies, Michael Meyers, Norman Bates—these aren't so much characters as forces of (human) nature. They're in human bodies, sure, and you could go into why they became evil, but it doesn't matter. In fact they work much better as forces of nature or monsters. If you psychologize them, give them a backstory, and make us feel pity and compassion for them, they no longer work as monsters, unless you want it to be a sympathetic monster like in Frankenstein or King Kong. And really those are tragedies from one point of view and horror stories from another, but the biggest horror was what happened to the tragic hero/monster character. So I guess it depends on where you want the reader's compassion to lie. But for your main characters—the good guys—sure, backstory is what fleshes them out and makes them who they are. Also for a bad guy if you don't want them to be a force of nature, human or otherwise.
And if you want to look at it psychologically (as I generally do), the monsters and villains sometimes (often) represent some shadow element buried deep in the main character, or maybe collectively in the whole group—whatever their character flaw is that they need to face and overcome. It might not be specifically stated that way, and the author might not be consciously aware of it, or only dimly so, but often that's what the monsters do represent. This is where that idea comes from, like the Joker telling Batman "We're not so different, you and I." Or that perrennial trope of zombie movies that was stated at the end of Night of the Living Dead: "They're us. They're us and we're them—" as the character watches people rounding up, torturing and butchering zombies while drinking beer and hootin' and hollerin' (it was a bunch of backwoods hicks with tractors and cowboy hats). A shadow figure isn't a real character or a human being, it's something you project onto other people—it's actually a part of yourself you've been afraid to face, that gets projected out onto somebody else or as some mysterious monster or ghost. To develop it into a fully human character destroys that whole aspect of it.
^ In fact I noticed in Frankenstein, there's a very definite sense that the monster is really a split-off part of its creator. Victor is driven by some inner dark compulsion that makes him shun the company of human beings and labor in dark attics stitching together the parts of corpses, tormented by some insane drive that he can't explain or overcome. Then, the moment the creature twitches and comes alive, that dark compulsion suddenly drains out of him and he's a different person—he's who he was before he was overtaken by it—horrified by what he's done and by the thing he's created. Now it's alive and begins its mission to destroy everything he loves and then him. In a sense it's very similar to a lot of the ancient myths concerning monsters. They're often symols of the inner things that can turn us into monsters—greed, rage, jealousy, hubris etc.
Everyone has a backstory. If you exist in a certain place, there's a reason for it. I'd say that your character having a backstory is far more important than whether you actually present that backstory to your audience. It's one of those things that an author might need to know about his characters, even if it never appears to the reader. As for making a character more interesting, for me all character interest centers around choices. Are we impressed by good choices? Upset by bad ones? Laughing at silly ones? So basically think about what your character would choose to do and how that makes the character different.
I like to give my characters backstories but breadcrumb it though the story. I've always found it off-putting as a reader when an author feels this urge to start a story by telling you a three paragraph essay on someone's life story. Sometimes, depending on how a character is introduced, it works out ok, but there are a few authors, even well known ones who like to slap you in the face with a bunch of character history just because...the character has a story.
The first, and fantastic, book in the Maddadam Trilogy is almost entirely spent informing about a character's past and his world as it pertains to one pivotal decision. And the main character is something of a character foil in all that, which is annoying until you look at it in retrospect and realise it's the most relatable perspective, the only workable one. Though there is something reductive about giving a singular reason for the way someone is, especially if it's direct life experience. It undermines his perspective on the world as a biased predictable product of chance x reaction. Of course it's no less true or real and a good number of real life perspectives are indeed mono-circumstantially formed, but it doesn't change the fact they can be less satisfying. >I want to tear down the racetrack and build a community centre because gambling is evil, and making for one fewer of its accommodations is an inherent moral victory. My father wagered my family's future on a horse named Smartass. Dad didn't win. He hanged himself. It wasn't that Smartass that let him down, though, it was everyone who couldn't know a bad thing when they saw it. This implies had she not a gambling father, she would not have discovered what she believes to now be the Ultimate Truth. She only has skin in the game because it was put there for her. She's less an agent of runaway morals that will challenge the reader and more a sympathetic force misguided by fate. Is that bad? Not really. I'd still enjoy her as a character. It just might be a lesser appeal to the themes. I don't know. I think good backstory is good and bad backstory is bad. How's that for a conclusion?
