I spend a lot of time with my clients working on backstory. Why? Backstory explains the characters' motivation and determines their arc over the course of the story. What's past is prologue, and it's going to define how the characters grow and change and eventually get their HEA.
Why is backstory important?
It’s foundational work that you’re doing with your story. What does the character need to overcome during the course of the book, and where does that past trauma or wound come from? How does it then inform how the character thinks, acts, and reacts to events in the story? What kinds of assumptions will they make because of it?
I’m sure you’ve read books in which it feels like the characters have only started existing on page 1, rather than on page -10,000. What a solid backstory should do is make the character feel lived-in and fleshed out and formed by the events of their past rather than formed by the events of the story you’re telling. That can be a subtle difference, but in execution, having the former will create a richer, more developed character.
So how much backstory do you really need?
I do think you need to know a lot for your main characters, especially the major moments that, for better or worse, have defined their lives so far. Go deep into these moments to figure out their thought process, their rationalizations, their emotions, their fears, and use all of this to show how they react to parallel moments in the main story you’re telling.
But don’t go overboard—it’s easy to get bogged down in backstory especially when you do all that work to get clarity on it. And filling in ALL the backstory can be a great way to procrastinate on, you know, writing the actual story (yes, I know the tricks you writers all use to avoid writing the hard stuff).
So do you have to know things like their favourite colour or how they drink their coffee or what happened on their tenth birthday? Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes it’s enough that you know their past and can then predict how the character will act, or you can shade in their personality with subtext from that backstory, and you don’t need to put that on the page. But you don’t need to know every trauma and joy of their life, just the ones that matter to the story you’re telling. Backstory explains why the characters are the way they are when we first meet them; your main story explains how your main characters reconcile and make peace with their pasts and move forward together.
How do you insert backstory into the main story?
Backstory is all about subtlety, so you probably don’t want to plop it all in up front or all at once. Revealing backstory can feel very much like exposition when you let it do the work of explaining the character’s whole past pre-book. You don’t generally sit down and spill your entire life story to someone you just met, so don’t have your characters do it to the reader or to other characters either.
Having a full picture of a character’s backstory and how it affects them will be like peeling an onion back, a layer at a time, and revealing those layers slowly throughout the book will be part of the reader's understanding of the character’s arc, and the character’s partner's deepening understanding of why they act the way they do. These backstory reveals are usually good to show rather than tell, so show how they react to a reminder of their past rather than them explaining why they reacted that way.
Flashbacks can be an effective way to show key moments in their past, but flashbacks can sometimes bog down the pacing—so make sure if you’re using a flashback, it really needs to be there and is going to do the work to help reveal more of the character’s major issues to resolve in themselves.
Final Backstory Tips
Obviously you want to pay the most attention to your main characters’ backstories, but it might also be useful to shade in the minor characters’ backstories too, at least in your own head. In romance, you never know if a minor character might be a scene-stealer that your readers clamor for more from. The minor character’s backstory doesn’t necessarily have to make it onto the page, but you could think about why they’re friends or antagonists with your main character and see where their backstories parallel each other (or not).
I recently read The Emotional Wound Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, and it is a fantastic resource to help you work through how your characters’ pasts are affecting their presents. The book itself is definitely worth the buy, but this page will give you a little taster of how it’s set up and the kind of information it offers.