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I love doing back stories on my characters because I am not restricted by any rules or guidelines and I can allow my mind to create at will all the history and description and thoughts and nuances of a character. Sometimes, if I'm doing a stream-of-consciousness type thing on a character, I actually drift into story-making territory and I kind of watch as an "outside party" as my character shows me what other interesting sh*t they've been up to and wouldn't THIS be a great story or germ of an idea for yet another screenplay?
The danger of having such a complete back story is the sometimes urge to include too many details of that background into a screenplay. It works wonderfully well for a novel - I had a beautiful memory of my main character and her wedding night integrated into a scene in my novel where she is laying on her daughter's canopy bed. On her wedding night, her husband chuckled as she planned out that their first child would be a girl and she would have a canopy bed. And so on.
The screenplay opens after the mother has already divorced the father so the memory is bittersweet.
The tiny details like that would never have fit into a screenplay. But it did help make my characters more "real" to me as I wrote for them in the screenplay.
Doing the backstory also helps assuage some of that urge to put unnecessary fat into a screenplay.
After doing a back story, have you ever found yourself scrapping your original storyline because your now very defined character suggested something even better to you?
The danger of having such a complete back story is the sometimes urge to include too many details of that background into a screenplay. It works wonderfully well for a novel - I had a beautiful memory of my main character and her wedding night integrated into a scene in my novel where she is laying on her daughter's canopy bed. On her wedding night, her husband chuckled as she planned out that their first child would be a girl and she would have a canopy bed. And so on.
The screenplay opens after the mother has already divorced the father so the memory is bittersweet.
The tiny details like that would never have fit into a screenplay. But it did help make my characters more "real" to me as I wrote for them in the screenplay.
Doing the backstory also helps assuage some of that urge to put unnecessary fat into a screenplay.
After doing a back story, have you ever found yourself scrapping your original storyline because your now very defined character suggested something even better to you?
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