Backstory: Avoid Info Dumping by Making It Essential: Part 1 — Guest: Kris Kennedy
Backstory helps readers connect to our characters and provides context for their actions, but how can we make it compelling and avoid boring information dumps?
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Struggle to Write Characters? Here’s Help!
As writers, we have to make our characters seem real to readers, but it’s often not easy. So here’s two resources that can help us create characters that seem real.
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3 Ways to Define the Essence of Our Character
A character’s essence is about more than just unique characters, but what is their essence? These 3 perspectives on character essence teach us about our characters.
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Make Characters Unique with Layering
Somewhere along our learning curve as writers, we’re likely to come across the skill of layering. Layering can help us create unique characters, no matter how stereotypical or tropey they might be on the surface.
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How Do We Create Realistic Villains? — Guest: Kassandra Lamb
The antagonist in our story might be a love interest or truly evil or anything in between. When our story requires a villain, we might struggle to avoid clichés. Kassandra Lamb shares her insights into psychopaths, sociopaths, and other bad guys.
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How to Create a Redeemable Villain — Guest: Becca Puglisi
We all love a “good” villain, but sometimes we want our bad guy to see the light and find redemption (or at least start on that path). Becca Puglisi is here to show us how with four paths to redemption for our villain.
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One Simple Trick to Avoid an Opening Page Infodump
It’s hard to get our opening pages just right because we have to grab readers’ attention, introduce our characters and the story world, hint at a problem, etc. With everything we want to get across to the reader, we might dump too much information. How can we avoid info dumping or confusing readers at the beginning of our story?
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The Most Important Question in Storytelling: “Why?”
A common problem—even in traditionally published books—is Missing Motivations. A character’s goal can feel irrelevant if readers don’t understand why they have that goal. Or a character might seem stupid or unlikable if readers don’t know why they’re acting a certain way.
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Balancing Elements: How Can We Know the Right Amount?
I’ve offered several posts here about balancing various elements of our story, but there’s still room for debate because we have to find the right balance for our voice, genre, tone, and style—for our story. That means there is no perfect amount of backstory or description or emotion.
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Backstory: When Is It Necessary?
We often think about the purpose of backstory in terms of “what do readers need to know?” But with that perspective, it’s too easy to include too much backstory. Instead, we might be better off if we think about backstory from the perspective of what the story needs.
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