Hello! In our last lesson, you learned how to write crisp and clear dialogue, giving your characters a voice. Now, we'll go a step further to make them feel truly three-dimensional by exploring their past.
Every interesting character has a history that shaped them. In this lesson, we will focus on how to identify and describe a character's key past experience in a short, powerful paragraph. Understanding this skill is fundamental to creating characters that readers can connect with and root for.
What Makes a Character's Past "Key"?
A character's backstory isn't just a list of things that happened to them. It's the collection of defining moments that explain why they are the way they are now. A key past experience is a single, significant event that left a deep mark on them, influencing their fears, desires, and decisions in the main story.
This infographic provides a great overview of the different elements that form a character's backstory. A key past experience often involves conflict and helps define their values and goals.
To really understand the purpose of backstory, it's not about looking backward, but about understanding the present. Let's watch a clip that explains this idea perfectly.
How to Write Character Backstory (Prompts for Writing Relatable Characters)
In this video, author Abbie Emmons explains why backstory is crucial for making sense of your character's current actions and beliefs.
Watch the section from the beginning of her explanation where she discusses that you write backstory to understand who your character is in the present. Notice her advice to "begin with the end in mind."
As the video suggests, you're like a detective solving the mystery of your character. The key past experience is the most important clue. Storytellers sometimes call this event the character's "Ghost" or "Wound"—something from their past that haunts them and drives their actions. It's the source of their biggest fears and their strongest motivations.
Finding Your Character's "Ghost"
So, how do you invent a key past experience for a character? A great way is to ask a few simple questions. These questions help you connect a character's present struggles to a specific moment in their past.
How to Write Character Backstory (Prompts for Writing Relatable Characters)
Let's return to Abbie Emmons' video for some practical advice. She provides a set of four questions that will help you pinpoint your character's defining past event.
First, watch her "therapy session" analogy from this segment to understand how to look for pivotal moments. Then, pay close attention to the four specific questions she lays out. These are: What is my character's biggest misbelief? What happened in my character's past to make them believe such a thing? How is my character dissatisfied with their life today because they believe this? What does my character think will make them happy?
Let's see these questions applied to a real example. The following clip from the same video analyzes the protagonist from the show Mr. Selfridge, showing how a painful childhood memory created the man he is today.
How to Write Character Backstory (Prompts for Writing Relatable Characters)
This next segment is a case study of the character Harry Selfridge. It's a fantastic example of how a single past event—discovering the truth about his father—shaped his entire life.
Watch the detailed breakdown from the start of the case study. Notice how his father's abandonment (the Ghost) leads to his misbelief that he must be a spectacular success to have any self-worth.
The short animated film The Present offers another powerful example. It tells the story of a boy who spends all his time playing video games. His mom gives him a puppy, but the boy is disgusted to see the puppy is missing one of its legs. He rejects the gift. However, as the puppy persistently tries to play, we get a final reveal: the boy himself is an amputee, missing part of his leg. Suddenly, his initial reaction makes sense. His own past experience—and the way it shaped his view of himself and the world—is the "Ghost" that explains his actions.
Writing the Past: Narrative Tenses
Once you've identified your character's key experience, you need to write it clearly. Since you're describing events that happened in the past, you'll need to use narrative tenses. These are the past tenses that help you tell a story in the correct order. You're already familiar with the past simple and past continuous. The past perfect is especially useful here, as it describes an action that happened before another past action.
Let's watch a video that explains how these tenses work together to build a clear picture of past events.
HOW TO USE THE NARRATIVE TENSES: Advanced English grammar lesson.
This grammar lesson from To The Point English with Ben breaks down the narrative tenses used in storytelling.
First, watch the introduction from the beginning to understand what narrative tenses are. Then, focus on the detailed explanation of a short anecdote from this clip. Pay attention to how he uses past simple, past continuous, and past perfect to show the sequence of events.
Here's a quick reminder of how these tenses work:
- Past Simple: Describes a completed action in the past. (
I saw my friend.) - Past Continuous: Describes an action in progress at a specific time in the past. (
He was buying a present.) - Past Perfect: Describes an action that was completed before another past action. (
I had last seen him in 2009.)
Using past perfect (had seen) makes it clear that seeing him in 2009 happened long before the main story event (bumping into him at the shopping center). This is perfect for writing about a key past experience that happened years before your main story begins.
Creative Task: Describing the "Ghost"
Now it's your turn. Imagine a character named Leo, a talented artist who is afraid to show his work to anyone.
Using the four questions from the video, first brainstorm a key past experience for Leo.
- Misbelief: "My art isn't good enough, and people will only ridicule it."
- Past Event: What happened to make him believe this? Maybe he entered a school art contest as a child and the judge made a harsh comment? Or a family member laughed at a drawing he was proud of?
- Dissatisfaction: He has dozens of sketchbooks hidden under his bed but feels like a failure because no one has ever seen them.
- What he thinks will bring happiness: Maybe he dreams of having a secret identity as a famous online artist.
Your task:
Write a short paragraph (50-70 words) describing the key past event that made Leo so fearful. Try to use at least two different past tenses, including the past perfect (had + past participle verb).
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Example Answer
Here is one possible version of Leo's backstory. Your paragraph will be different, but check to see if you used past tenses correctly to show the sequence of events.
Leo was ten when he entered the town's summer art fair. He had worked for a month on his watercolor painting of a ship at sea, and he proudly hung it in the display tent. Later that day, he overheard the judge telling someone that his painting "looked like a blue mess." The judge laughed. Leo took his painting off the wall, ran home, and hid it in a box where no one would ever see it again.
Notice how "had worked" shows that his effort happened before he overheard the judge's comment.
Conclusion
Great work today! You've learned how a character's past is the key to their present actions and motivations. By identifying their "Ghost," you can create characters that are not only interesting but also deeply human and relatable.
Key Takeaways:
- A key past experience (or "Ghost") is a defining event that shapes a character's beliefs, fears, and goals.
- To find this experience, ask why your character is the way they are in the present.
- Use narrative tenses like the past simple and past perfect to clearly describe events that happened at different times in the past.
In our next lesson, we will continue practicing these skills. You'll write a short, engaging anecdote, which is a mini-story about a single interesting event.