Improve Your Characters Instantly: Just Add a Backstory Ghost

When you’re exploring how to improve your characters and digging up ways to get readers to invest in them, you probably start with the usual list—which includes important things, such as a relatable motive, a winning personality, and an engaging narrative voice. One other thing you can add to your characters to instantly make them more interesting and compelling is a backstory ghost. This is a term used by screenwriters to describe something in the characters’ past that is still haunting them.

For Example:

• The hero of Inception is haunted by his wife’s suicide.

• Mistborn’s Kelsior is haunted by his wife’s death as a slave in the mining pits.

• Peter Parker is haunted by the murder of his Uncle Ben.

• Bleak House’s Esther Summerson is haunted by her illegitimate birth.

The list goes on and on.

What all these characters have in common is the depth of their backstories. They arrive at the beginning of their stories with baggage already in tow. Not only does this give you the opportunity to tantalize readers with your characters’ mysterious pasts, it also gives the characters themselves more to overcome and more to be motivated by. The backstory ghost is often at the core of their internal conflict.

>>Click here to read Creating Stunning Character Arcs: Your Character’s Ghost

>>Click here to read The #1 Key to Relatable Characters: Backstory

>>Click here to read Give Me 3 Minutes and I’ll Give You a Better (and Darker) Backstory

>>Click here to read What’s the Difference? Your Character’s Ghost vs. Wound vs. Lie vs. Weakness

In contrast to all these successful backstory ghosts, consider the book that got me thinking about all this recently. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s beloved A Princess of Mars presents a main character who has no backstory ghost. Even though his past as a Confederate soldier and general adventurer offers all kinds of opportunities for a backstory ghost (as, indeed, we find manifested in the death of a wife and child in the recent adaptation John Carter) the author never took advantage of the opportunities.

Those who love the classic book aren’t likely to complain, but just the inkling of a backstory ghost would have gotten even more interesting mileage out of this character.

Wordplayer, tell me your opinions! Can you improve characters in your story by adding a backstory ghost or two? Tell me in the comments!