Remember what you wore on your first day of high school? (black acid wash jean skirt.) A memorable travel experience? (navigating the Paris metro system all on my own as a 16-year-old.) Your crush in Grade 8? (Andrew Bible.)
Those moments don’t necessarily define you; you are more than the sum of your experiences, but they do add to who you are as a person. They create texture and depth and while you won’t go around telling everyone you meet about your worst mark in high school (8% on a Grade 12 physics test), it’s part of your backstory.
You know what my problem with backstory is? Creating it for my characters. In my first novel (see “Earlier Work” tab for an excerpt) my main character Mackenna is a senior in high school who has lost her boyfriend to her best friend. I wrote a lot about how she hates Kathryn–in the present. After I had some friends read a draft, they pointed out how little they knew of Kathryn and Mackenna’s relationship before. Why were they best friends? I had to create the backstory, only parts of which made it into the novel, but it was nonetheless important.
I started down the same (first-draft) path with Lyra. She’s a girl who learns she has super cells after her boyfriend blows her up school and kills her whole family, but I wrote very little about who she was before the explosion.
This scene is right before Lyra reluctantly accompanies David to church.
Draft 1:
“I need to understand religion’s appeal,” Lyra says.
Annie looks at her for a long time before her expression softens.
“You need to understand religion’s appeal to Jonah,” Annie surmises.
Lyra nods. She needs to know how Moto and his thugs swayed Jonah into such violence. She needs to know what they offered him.
What they offered him that she could not. That she did not.
Because Lyra understands that Jonah’s descent into religious madness is as much a rebuke of her, of their relationship as it is of Moto’s ideology. If she had been enough, Jonah would never have sought out religion.
Annie is cautious when she answers, like she knows she’s dabbing at Lyra’s wound, but she’s resolute. “The church has no answers for you,” she says quietly. “To understand the appeal of religion on Jonah, you need to understand Jonah.”
Lyra feels her eyes burn. “I thought I did.”
I start to get across Lyra’s guilt yet I gave the reader very little to go on–how could she have been with someone like that? Who was Jonah and why were they together? And how could she have been so blind to not see what was happening to Jonah? Do we hate her because of it? Or is her lack of awareness of those around her part of her weaknesses, part of what makes her human?
I took another stab at it, trying to add in Lyra and Jonah’s backstory.
“No?” Annie asks, her tone light on the surface, but barbed beneath. When Lyra does not respond, Annie presses her. “You don’t want to know how Jonah could have succumbed to religion? You’re not curious what it was about religion that brainwashed him?”
Lyra stiffens. She feels pricked as if Annie throws darts at her. She has asked herself those very questions, but not for the reason Annie thinks. She is not interested in religion to discover what it offered Jonah; she wants to understand religion only enough to learn what it offered him that she, his girlfriend, could not. Why she, his girlfriend, had failed. Because if she had offered him what he was missing, if she, his girlfriend, had been enough, Jonah would still be alive.
Her family would still be alive.
She’d known Jonah for years; they’d been in several classes together and he often acted in the school’s musical for which Lyra painted sets, but they only started dating last fall after Lyra overheard Jonah talking to his friend about rock climbing. They were on stage after rehearsal. Lyra had put away her paints and was rolling up her drop cloth, but she waited until his friend was gone before approaching Jonah.
“You climb?” she asked.
Jonah looked at her, surprised, but pleased. “Yeah.” He pushed a mop of curls out of his eyes.
To Lyra, Jonah’s interest in rock climbing seemed a curious contradiction. He seemed to her a theatre geek, an actor and musician, more inclined creative pursuits than a gruff outdoorsman.
“It’s a real sport,” he explained. “You’re outside, in nature, man against the environment, not punting around a silly cowhide ball on a scissor-cut lawn to a bunch of other padded jocks too afraid of their shadows to test their real strength.”
Lyra laughed. “Not a football fan, are you?”
Jonah approved of Lyra’s passion for sailing; the vast power of the ocean, he said, was like his rock walls; a constant reminder of our fallibility as humans, a constant desire to overcome it. Despite his support, Jonah never liked sailing, just as Lyra never liked rock climbing. She’d tried it once; physically it was hard, but also literally; the stone cliffs became for her an impenetrable barrier as opposed to the way she could slip and glide through the sea.
But what if she had tried harder to share Jonah’s interest? What if she’d taken more time to appreciate rock climbing the way he did? What if she hadn’t dismissed his talk of ropes and harnesses and carabiners? What if she hadn’t guilted him for missing so many weekends with her when he disappeared into the mountains?
What if she had paid more attention to what had been more important to Jonah?
“You can’t know,” Annie cuts into Lyra’s thoughts. “You’ll never find out why Jonah snapped.”
The idea is that all these little pieces of a character’s puzzle will, by the end, create a whole picture of him or her. By the end, I want the reader to better understand why Jonah did what he did and why Lyra chooses to do what she does.
Better get back to creating more puzzle pieces.