We hear a lot in the fiction world about how our characters need to have flaws, backstories, and vulnerabilities to make them human. This is what allows our audiences to connect to and identify with the characters.
There has been a huge trend in the fiction world lately toward creating character-driven plots. These plots start off with the character’s flaws and insecurities as the focal point of the story.
I actually had a prospective client turn me down for a job because I didn’t use this approach.
We see examples of this littered throughout the fiction industry.
Harry Potter was an abused child, hated by his aunt and uncle, and kept locked in a cupboard under the stairs.
Katniss Everdeen is a poor girl struggling to survive in a harsh world without any advantages.
Bruce Wayne survived a violent robbery where he witnessed his parents getting murdered before his eyes.
All these characters experienced these traumas before the story starts. The characters’ backstories are supposed to make them more human and relatable.
A character’s insecurities, dark secrets, and hidden pain are supposed to inform the audience about the character’s motivations. The dark history is supposed to help us understand why the character does what they do in any given situation.
Personally, I see this approach as forced, contrived, and unrealistic.
When we meet a new person on the street, we don’t understand their backstory, their hidden insecurities, or their underlying motivations for doing anything.
We learn and discover that over the course of time. In most cases, we don’t ever find out any of that information about someone. We deduce it through their actions and behavior.
The same goes for fictional characters.
The best way to flesh out a character’s personality, motivations, and humanity is by displaying their actions and body language.
The audience meets the character for the very first time on the page the same way they would meet someone in real life. The audience knows nothing about this person.
Dumping a bunch of backstory on the audience is the worst way to make a character realistic and believable.
The Batman franchise is the absolute worst for this. Practically every instalment of the franchise begins with a flashback sequence. We revisit Bruce’s parents’ deaths leading into some shoe-horned segue that explains how the murders made Bruce become Batman.
Character development works much better when we play out the scene in real time and show the character’s personality through action, dialogue, and body language.
More of the character’s personality and hidden motivations becomes apparent as the story goes.
If the writer does his job, the events of the story will throw the character into different situations that cause the character to react in certain ways unique to his or her personality type.
We as humans are subconsciously programmed to make judgments about someone’s personality based on their body language and reactions to events that take place around them.
This is how we get to know people over time. A person never has to tell us their life story or explain anything to us. We make those judgments automatically and come to those conclusions on our own.
Given enough time, we’ll come to know the person even better than if they did explain themselves to us. People can lie to themselves about who they are and why they’re doing something.
Whatever a person tells us might be completely wrong—either because they outright cover up their own character flaws or because they don’t understand themselves well enough to give an accurate picture of why they do anything.
Getting to know the person and finding these things out for ourselves gives us a much clearer picture of who they are, what they’re capable of, and what motivates them to act the way they do.
The same applies to fictional characters. The events of the story will lead us to get to know a character better than if the writer dumps a bunch of information on the audience at the beginning.
Quentin Tarantino explains this perfectly in this video describing why he thinks Robert DeNiro is the greatest actor of our time.
Tarantino explains that DeNiro goes so deeply into becoming his character that he can only react a certain number of ways to any given situation.
These reactions reveal the character more thoroughly than any explanation could.
If a dog walks across the set, DeNiro doesn’t say, “Cut! Cut! We have to start over!”
He reacts to the dog exactly the way the character would.
This is what I do. Once I’ve created a character, I place them in a scene and allow the scene to play out naturally. The character can only respond to the situation in a limited number of ways considering their personality and experience.
Let’s do a little thought experiment.
How much difference would it make to the story if we never found out that Bruce Wayne witnessed his parents getting murdered in a robbery?
What would the Batman story be if Bruce’s parents never got murdered at all? What if they died in a car accident or were still alive and living in another part of the country?
What if Bruce just decided to become Batman because he couldn’t stand to watch crime destroy Gotham?
Would it really make any difference to the story if we take out that element of his history?
I say no, it wouldn’t make any difference. Each of the Batman stories would have played out exactly the same way because how he became Batman isn’t really that important. He already is Batman.
He would have battled the Joker and all his other nemeses exactly the same way whether he had that traumatic history or not.
We don’t need some sob story about his painful childhood to make us think he’s a poor little rich kid we should all sympathize with. That’s just the writer trying to manipulate us.
If an element isn’t critical to the plot, it doesn’t belong in the story. If the story works without it, then it has to go because it’s superfluous to the story itself.
It would work just as well or better if we saw Bruce’s inner conflict over his current situation. He’s only one man. He can’t be everywhere at once.
We could see him haunted by the horrors he’s seen on the streets and brooding over all the lives he can’t save.
What about Harry Potter? How would the story be different if Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon never mistreated Harry?
Would it really make any difference to the story if Harry showed up at Hogwarts as a happy, confident, well-adjusted boy?
Some might argue that he had to be abused to explain why he didn’t know he was a wizard. I personally wouldn’t have done it that way because I don’t think it’s necessary to the plot.
The author could easily have written it into Dumbledore’s letter asking the Dursleys to keep Harry’s magic a secret from him for his own safety. They could have been kind, caring relatives who went along with this for Harry’s benefit.
Then the story would have played out exactly the same way. This traumatic backstory is totally unnecessary and irrelevant to everything else that happens.
When I create characters, I drop them into a situation in the opening chapter of the book. I don’t tell the reader anything about the character at all. I let the reader meet the character there as if they were meeting a total stranger on the street.
The unfolding events of the plot give the character plenty to cope with, struggle with, and react to. This is how the character develops.
The character will develop over the course of the story exactly the same way they would develop in real life. The past takes a back seat as the character attempts to cope with the present.
The history can be revealed later when it becomes relevant and necessary for the reader to understand it. It doesn’t belong at the beginning when the audience is just meeting the character for the first time.
I created a scene towards the end of the Prideland series where Renfroe and Tom Sharples meet in Renfroe’s garden.
These two characters have barely spoken to each other through the entire series and never in any meaningful way. They’ve barely been in each other’s presence for more than a few minutes over the course of five years.
They come face to face across the garden and they share a moment of significant eye contact before they start their conversation.
All the other events of the story leading up to this moment are what make this moment actually mean something.
This moment is a combination of forces that have been acting on both characters over the course of time.
The two characters didn’t know each other at all before the story started. Neither of them even knew the other existed.
The events of the story cause each character to mean something to the other. Each character exerts his influence on the forces affecting the other. This is how character development works.
These forces come together in a moment of significant eye contact. This moment means something even though the characters have hardly met or spoken before.
Two characters seeing each other across a garden wouldn’t mean anything without all the events leading up to it.
We never find out anything about Renfroe’s or Tom’s history before the story. None of that matters.
I did the same thing in Battalion 1. In the opening chapter, the audience knows nothing about Captain Corban Rhodes except his name and the current circumstances in which he finds himself. We don’t know anything about his past or his personality.
The unfolding events of the following chapters offer enough challenge and tension to create both an internal and external conflict for him to grapple with.
We see his responses, emotions, and struggles through his decisions, body language, and internal dialogue.
Battalion 1 never elaborates on Rhodes’s backstory because it isn’t relevant to the plot. None of the characters’ backstories are relevant to the plot.
Rhodes doesn’t ask about his subordinates’ histories because the situation doesn’t call for him to know that. The characters have enough to deal with already without digging up the past.
This is character development done the right way. Artificially inserting information about the character’s history is unnecessary and contrived.
It isn’t necessary or even desirable to deliberately assign flaws, trauma, dark secrets, or insecurities to make a character relatable. We don’t have this information in real life and it doesn’t work in fiction.
It works much better to start off with what looks like a normal person on the surface.
Remember the old saying: A normal person is someone you don’t know very well.
Getting to know the person over time reveals what makes them something out of the ordinary.
It works even better if the audience sees the person transform into something completely different over the course of the story.
The character doesn’t need to start out as something out of the ordinary. That could actually make them less relatable instead of more so.
It’s a sign of amateur writing when an author feels the need to insert these traumatic backstories that serve no useful purpose to the plot or even the character’s development.
The events of the story should be interesting enough. The audience wants to see the character’s effort to grapple with these events and the internal conflict that arises from the struggle.
These contrivances only weaken the character instead of strengthening them. It’s a sign that the character and the story itself aren’t strong enough to stand on their own.
The writer doesn’t have to manipulate the audience’s feelings into caring about a character they would otherwise find boring and one-dimensional.
I hope this helps. Have a great week, everybody.
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