8 Developing Characters of Your Own
Dramatists see a person’s character, conflicts, and destiny as interrelated. Some conflicts arise from outward circumstances, others from the circumstances generated by his or her inherent nature. Thus spiders climb, and cats stalk birds, but the master of the Pequod hunts the great white whale out of obsession with revenge. His backstory (prior history) is that Moby Dick took his leg and destroyed his ship, and now Captain Ahab (limping on a prosthesis made of, yes, whalebone) is ready to risk his own life and those of his crew to get revenge.
A backstory is a character’s formative circumstances prior to the story’s present. Backstory details are called givens, and each helps to establish the character’s ...
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