Backstory

A new book by me has been released called The Prophetess, and it is an exercise in backstory.

Most of us know that backstory is character biography that we do not reveal. Most writers have come across advice to write a character biography. You should know all the biographical facts about your character. I know, for example, that my ongoing character, Sossity Chandler, was born in 1970 in Big Rapids, Michigan. She has blonde hair and grey eyes, started playing guitar when was thirteen because her father took her to a John Denver concert in Chicago and she wanted to play and sing as he did. I could go on and on with this and bore you. But this is character biography, which is a little different from backstory.

Backstory is what your character did, not what he or she is. Sossity, for example, speaks Spanish fluently. This is because the area she grew up in is home to a lot of migrant workers who have settled down. As a kid, she played with Spanish-speaking children and used her child-ability to pick up the language. At age fifteen, she moved to Grand Rapids, but did not want to lose her Spanish, so worked on it and went to Mexico as an exchange student, once for a summer, once for an entire year.

I often think up backstory about my character. I never write it. I fantasize about them, create imaginary situations they were in, think of how they would react to a current event, even create conversations they would have. This gives them depth and life even though those things will never actually appear in a text.

Once in church I heard a sermon from the New Testament that talked about a girl who was a fortune teller. The bible said she was possessed by a “pythoness” spirit.

This intrigued me. A pythoness spirit was what the Greeks called the spirit of prophecy the priestesses of Apollo were possessed with. At the temple of Apollo, the priestesses who were so possessed could give oracles that would tell the future. I wondered at this. The biblical text indicated the girl was only a young teenager. How does a fourteen year-old girl get possessed by a spirit? And if it is a pythoness spirit, why isn’t she living at the Temple of Apollo with all the other priestesses? Why is she a fortune teller living in a Roman city instead of a priestess?

Furthermore, the spirit speaks through her to say that Saint Paul is a servant of God who has come to show the way of salvation—which, as the story has it, is the truth. If it is a demon, and demons are evil, why is it telling the truth?

So I began to make up a backstory to explain all of this. The backstory became my new novella, The Prophetess.

We can create backstory for any character we sketch out, and we need to. Very often, it will become the material for creating a compelling narrative. And it’s as easy as fantasizing—something I do very well and find a lot more fun than writing a character biography.

 And consider getting a copy of the book, available now in Kindle.