Five Steps to Creating Characters—Step Five

Five Steps to Creating Characters—Step Three

In February I talked about Make a character likeable by making someone like them. Linked below. In March I talked about Character Arcs, linked below. In April it was Give them Quirks. In May I talked about my main character types. Now this month how avoiding backstory dumps enhances you book and your characters

This month I’m talking about making characters quirky.

1.      Make a character likeable by making someone like them

2.      Character arcs

3.      Give them quirks

4.      My main character types

5.      Avoid backstory dumps

Avoid backstory dumps.

One of the great tricks of writing and character development is backstory. It makes her who she is, informs most of her decisions and drives all her relationships. But backstory is tricky. It has to be carefully doled out so it’s not a backstory dump. Those are clunky and boring. Those are story killers.

If you begin your book with your character behind the wheel of a car, driving and thinking about everything that’s brought her to this point. You’re doing it wrong.

Same goes for talking with a friend about all that’s come before. Just because you work it all into a conversation, doesn’t mean it’s not a backstory dump.

Stop that. Her backstory needs to be dealt out in sentences not paragraphs. In reactions.

A line I just wrote about—not about the Lumber Baron’s Daughters Series, those are all done, but my work in progress coming in July 2023…my delicate flower.

This is my WIP. The delicate flower seamstress loves to make dresses and she lives in a town full of men on the foothills of the Wind River Mountain Range in Wyoming which was, interestingly enough, the first state (it was still a territory then) to give woman the right to vote. All these men learned she knew how to make chaps (she didn’t really, she just looked at a pair and figured it out and they were a hit) Now every man in the territory wants a pair. She’s going mad and making a fortune with the stupid boring chaps.

Then she just discovered a homesteader new to the area with three half-grown daughters who are wearing britches and don’t even own dresses. The girls have rebelled against the britches. The dad doesn’t have any money. My heroine, desperate to make a pretty dress for someone had arranged a deal where the girls come in and work off the cost of their dresses for a dime a day, for about two hours work after school which they absolutely refuse to attend wearing britches.

An excerpt from that book, currently titled, Lady Justice. Book #2 of the currently titled Wyoming Sunrise series.

>>>The girls would deserve much more than a dime a day. But she didn’t want to do a single thing that would stomp on their pa’s pride.

            It was a tricky business, but she had learned well how to get past Web, her first husband. The fool had ideas that weren’t always fair or reasonable. And he didn’t like anyone, especially his wife, challenging him. She’d tried a very few times and remembered a stinging slap or two, or seven.

            Web’s attitude about his wife was a big part of her decision to let her brother go on west while she remained in Wyoming. Here she had the right to vote and she was finding it easy to remain safely unmarried. As a matter of fact, the more outspoken she was about women having rights equal to any man, the more she repelled suitors. In a town that was very lopsided toward men, that wasn’t easy.

            But she was proud to say she’d managed it. <<<

This is in chapter five and it’s the second book in a series. The first reference to my sweet, delicate Nell having suffered abuse in her first marriage. Although I have mentioned that she never says much about her first husband.

When you write a three-book series, it's tricky to introduce the characters who will populate the series but keep the main romantic hero and heroine front and center, while developing the secondary characters with an eye toward setting them up for their own story, often before I, as a seat-of-the-pants writer even know anything about them or their stories beyond the broadest strokes.

So toward that end, the future creation of characters, I’ve found it helps me to have the basic character types. To think in terms of quirks. To make them likeable by making people like them and by holding off on heavy backstory dumps, doling it out. That is my basic method for creating characters. And as my 71^st book prepares to release, I guess I’ll keep doing it this way.