The Seductive Trap of Back Story

This time of year is all about looking forward, but with our screenplay characters it's easy to get obsessed with looking back.

Fleshing out a character’s back story is crucial for building their world of relationships, ensuring authenticity in their on-screen presence, cementing their values and beliefs, and creating those powerful gems of personal history that are key to generating audience empathy. Most writers love figuring out what makes their characters tick, but building back story can also be a seductive trap.

We can get so caught up in how the character became who they are that all the huge, transformative, defining moments in their lives have already happened.

Life has chewed them up and spat them out and they arrive at page one of our screenplays fully formed. And possibly a little stagnant.

The difficulty many writers encounter is how then to use all that rich, formative history to create fresh story in the present with genuine momentum. What is the next stage of transformation in the character’s story that will unfold as we watch them? Or have we joined them too late in their journey?

Ironically, it’s sometimes the wildest, most fascinating backstory that makes it impossible to take the characters anywhere new that can match up with what they’ve already gone through.

Be careful not to waste all the most interesting stuff about your character in their back story. Drag the biggest choices and challenges into the present.

So many screenplays that cross my desk (including ones I have written myself!) are about characters who are stuck: who can’t move on from where they’ve landed BECAUSE of their history. The screenplay is structured to explain and reveal WHY the character is the way they are. In theory it’s interesting, often even moving. But it’s looking back and not projecting forward. Delivering information rather than active, urgent, pressing choices that will change the course of the character’s life now. And though it might FEEL like the character is facing a huge stakes moment in their lives as they process their past, in terms of actual story, very little happens.

The balance isn’t quite working.

The real purpose and power of back story isn’t to explain the situation in the present, it’s to FUEL the dramatic conflict moving forward.  

For a brilliant example, look at Emerald Fennel’s ‘Promising Young Woman’. The defining event in Cassie’s backstory is that her best friend Nina committed suicide after being raped by a classmate at medical school. This history doesn’t just create feelings or inform Cassie’s personality, it motivates her into action. Cassie’s determined and meticulously planned revenge doesn’t simply reveal the past, it informs every decision she makes and her mission continually raises the stakes for Cassie and everyone around her.

And note that we witness her party trick of faking being out-of-it-drunk to expose the sexual assaults committed by deluded ‘good guys’, before we learn why Cassie has taken this campaign on. We are engaged in her present plan first, which itself is compelling, before we understand the history that has set her on this path. The back story serves to reinforce Cassie’s conviction, focus the stakes, and provide us, the audience, with an extra reason to invest.

Big backstory = a big swing in the present.

Most importantly, ‘Promising Young Woman’ uses the protagonist’s backstory to present a clear dramatic question that propels the drama forward: Will Cassie make everyone pay for what they did to Nina?

When you’re building your character’s history, it’s worth remembering that often the most useful back story isn’t the reason why a character can’t do something but the reasons that they MUST.

What will force them to take bold action? What secrets, lies, people or unfinished business from the character’s past can create disruption in the present that they can’t ignore and will dictate the path they now take?

The back story you diligently create for your character shouldn’t lock your character down, rather use it to lock them in.