B is for...

Today is the second day of the Blogging AtoZ. I had a great time going around the blogs I'm following and saying hi as well as seeing what everyone else posted. There were so many awesome posts, which deserve cudos to the authors. Well done on the first one, and best of luck with the rest, can't wait to read them. Oh and Apologies for the text heavy posts.

Today's post is all about Background, a necessary requirement when creating your characters. 

As writers we all know that when creating our characters we need to furnish them with backgrounds, we also know that a great deal of this information will never be used. Then why do it you might ask. The simple answer is, that as a writer who is in the process of writing a story, we need to know this information for ourselves. We need to know how they are going to react in any given situation and what led them to this point in time. A good background will also give your character depth.

In the beginning of your character creation exercise, you can probably write a quarter of an A4 page, or a small dossier of several pages. As the story progresses, you will probably add more and more information to not only the background page, but also the profile (more on that later in the A to Z).

An example from my own character creation files, I have a character called Ryan:

'Ryan has no idea of his past, where he came from, or how he got to Ireland. He remembers masked people messing with his body, injecting him with painful injections, putting him through painful tests. He remembers blood, lots and lots of blood.'

This is a simple background, not too much faffing around. As this character becomes more fleshed out (during the writing of his story), we discover that: 

• Ryan has worked for a dark organisation called 'The institute' who are intent on destroying Enhanced beings. He has been experimented on, and turned into a fighting machine, whom they have used to assassinate targets, or capture them. 

In the next update to that background story, we discover even more about him:

• He was shipped to Ireland in order to take care of the Tutha De's mentor, Dr. Eiru O’Brien, which he doesn't do as she tells him that she can help him with his memory. 
• He doesn't believe her, but then she clears one block, which shows him the family he once had. He escapes the Tutha De, and goes straight into the arms of Universal Military Policing and Supernatural Organisation  (U.M.P.S.O), who are led by Freemont. 
• He is helped to sever ties from The Institute. Ryan, along with a healing ability is proficient in the use of knives and various other weapons. He has no idea how he knows how to do this, or when he was taught. 
• Ryan rides a Harley Fatboy motorcycle. 

found on the internet, these are DnD character backgrounds

As I said before, not everything in the back story will end up in your story, but it will help you figure out how the character you are creating will react in a given situation. How he talks to others, how he thinks is all down to this. He may not know everything, but you can fill in the blanks.

• Ryan was born in Australia, centuries ago
• He outlived his own time period. Never seeming to age past 40. This of course caused trouble in his own family, he had to leave when the villagers wanted to burn him and his family at the stake for being witches.
• Ryan moved around the world, trying to figure out who and what he was. He moved from city to city, landmass to landmass, until he met up with and fell in love with Lisa. 
• Ryan married Lisa after he revelled to her his past and his ability to heal as well as her finding out about his prowess with weapons, especially knives.  
• Lisa has two children, James and Laura. Ryan dotes on them.
• Their life is Idyllic, until the Institute find them.
• The Institute kill Lisa in front of him, and take him prisoner. 
• His offspring are not in the cabin when this happens, they were out in the city with friends. 
• It is the experimentation with his mind that wipes this all away from him.

This is an updated version of Ryan's background, it fills in the blanks for me the writer, and allows me see where I need to delete his memory in the story, or allow him to find clues about during his search.

I hope this has been helpful. 

TWW