How to Write a Back Story

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Part of the video series: Practical & Creative Writing Lessons

Summary: Writing a back story helps develop a character by illustrating their first memories and experiences, but it also creates a more realistic world in which the characters live. Enrich a novel, play or story with background information with advice from a produced playwright in this free video on writing.

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By Laura Turner
eHow Presenter

Laura Turner received her B.A. in English from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., graduating magna cum laude with honors. She then attended the University of Nevada, Las...read more

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"Hi, this is Laura Turner, and today we're going to learn about, how to write a back story. And there's a couple of different things I want to talk about today with back stories, first I want to talk about writing a back story for a character, and then I want to talk about, writing a story for the story you're going to be working on. Most commonly a back story is used to sort of enrich the character that you've created. So, some question you might want to ask of your back story for your character, are things like, their first memory, if you think about surveys you've taken on-line, think about the little questions, your favorite things, write down these things about your character, the first thing you remember about your mother, the first thing you remember about your father, things like that, that you don't necessarily need to put into your story or your play, but that would be helpful for you to know about the character, in order to create a more rich world. Now writing a back story for the story that you are writing now, can also help you in creating a more rich and real environment. Someone, or the author that I believe is the best at doing this, or was the best at doing this, was, J.R.R Tolkien who wrote along with The Hobbit, and many other volumes, lots of back story novels to his Lord of the Rings trilogy. In fact, he even also went so far as to actually create maps of the worlds that he created, so that we not only have a world that he has created, but also a reality base. And the fact that he actually went to such an extent to write the history of the world that he was writing about, makes that, like pretty much, the ultimate back story that you can create. I don't think that a back story is necessary in all types of writing, in fact you can write your story without having your back story written, but what it does, it helps you to create a more rich environment. It's what sets Tolkien apart from other writers who have not done so much work as he did, to create a complete environment and world for his story. So, think about implementing a back story into your novel or your play, especially if you're getting stuck and you're not really sure where to draw from, because creating those memories in your characters will help to create new scenes and new chapters in the work that you're doing."