Have you ever wondered how much you need to know about a specific character before you start your story? Do you need to have an entire outline of their childhood before you can start writing in depth about them? We don’t think so! But it is important to listen to these questions as they emerge. This can help you figure out how to incorporate facets of each character’s identity that have narrative weight, instead of crowding the story with small facts that might not be necessary. This can help you layer and backfill as you build out – and discover– your story. 

Homework: Identify something from your character’s life before your story begins – write a scene in which that element of the character weighs on the scene but is never explicitly mentioned.

P.S. Want to come write with us in 2025?! Our retreat registration is open, and we are starting to fill up! We are going to unlock our creative processes in Minnesota and explore Story Refinement as we cruise down the Mexican Riviera! Learn more here. 

P.P.S. Are you tired of ads?! You can join our $5 tier on Patreon and receive ad-free episodes each week!

Powered by RedCircle

Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: The lens of who, by history and community. How much do you need to know about their background before the story to tell it effectively? I discover as I go, and then layer it in for continuity. Backfill! Beware the statement without narrative weight, without effect on the character. Consistency! History and identity and community are opportunities, not burdens. Make your identity verb-based. Where are they on axes of power? What stakes are driving the plot? What are their idioms? How does the character relate to their communities? Can anybody solve the plot problem, or does the character solve it because of who they are? Use pieces to imply a larger community or world. Make sure they have enough context. Build your net, drop something into it, and then tell us about the three or four threads that caught it. 

[Season 20, Episode 06]

[Howard] Writing doesn’t have to be a solitary activity. That’s why we host in-person retreats and workshops. At the Writing Excuses retreats, you’ll get access to classes, one-on-one office hours, critique sessions, and activities to keep you inspired and motivated. Become a more engaging storyteller and learn how to navigate the publishing landscape. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you’ll also build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 20, Episode 06]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] History and community.

[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I’m Erin.

[DongWon] I’m DongWon.

[Howard] And I’m Howard.

[Erin] Today, we are going to continue our discussion of the lens of who by talking about what your character brings with them from who they are. Their identity, at its core, the communities that they come up in. Like, how much do you need to know… Question for the group… About who your character was before they entered the story in order to tell it effectively?

[Mary Robinette] I find that I often don’t know the answer to that when I start writing, but sometimes, I will be writing and will discover a thing later as I go. But then I have to go back and layer into the early part of the story before I have made that discovery in order to have my character make sense and have them have continuity. In a beautiful, perfect world, I will have sat down and I will have figured out how old they are and how many siblings there are. But a lot of times, especially when I’m doing short fiction, I just… I just start writing.

[DongWon] You can backfill all that information in as you go. I think, in a lot of ways, like you’re saying, it’s not that you have to have prewritten the document ahead of time, though knowing that here’s the town they grew up in or whatever. But be prepared that when something comes up, to find the answer in that moment, and give them that context that they’re missing. Right?

[Erin] I actually think that layering and backfilling that you’re talking about are actually the key things that I really want to talk about in this episode. Which is, how do the ident… Like, how does the lens of identity and community… How does that lay on the story? The reason I mentioned it that way is because sometimes I’ll read people’s work and they will have a fact about their character, they grew up in this neighborhood or they suffered through… They’re an orphan and they grew up eating from a trashcan on the streets. As people do in fantasy worlds often. And it’s like, I hear that. Then, when I read the story, if you had never told me that about the character…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I would never know it. It doesn’t feel like it has any actual narrative weight. So how do we give the identity of our characters narrative weight in the story?

[Mary Robinette] I think it is a lot of the… It winds up affecting the choices that you make. For instance, if I am… If I have to walk down a dark street at night, I am going to make different choices than a six-foot white guy who lifts. I will be evaluating things extremely differently. So, for me, this gets into something that we’ll be talking about later, it gets into some of the reactions that the character makes, and also the language that they use to describe things, the internal reactions that they have. All of those things are informed by their history, their experiences.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, as we’re talking about this, I can’t stop thinking about a meme that already feels dated, and by the time this comes out, will feel truly fossilized. But the whole, like, you didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree yesterday. Right? You exist in the context of all that came before. Right? Like, the thing is, is when a character feels like they fell out of a tree yesterday, that’s when it feels like a failure state. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon], like, you’re saying, like, you can say the detail out loud of, like, oh they grew up on the street. But then they walk into a restaurant and, like, order all the food and, like, feel like so comfortable in that. It’s like a diff… It’s like is that really a character who just came off the street? Right? Or, like, what is the context that led to that? So, it’s not that you have to prewrite all of the context before, but you do need the consistency of it. Like, when you introduce something, you need to make sure that that feels felt in the choices, in the wor… And how you’re describing it, and how they speak and what they do.

[Howard] This is a microscale version of the game that I’m always playing with the macro of worldbuilding. Where I have to look at the implications of the thing that I’ve put in my world. If this character is someone who grew up during the Great Depression, or lived through the Great Depression, they have behaviors that don’t make sense to me. Lot of hoarding of things that don’t necessarily need to be hoarded is something that you’d find from that generation. So I’m always asking myself, are there implications that I need to examine of whatever this back story is. Sometimes I invert it. I have the character do a thing, and then I ask myself, this is an implication… This was implied by something in their back story that I don’t know yet. What is that thing? Should I write that thing now, or should I just put a pin in it? Maybe have another character put a pin in it for me? Hey, why are you hoarding Mason jars? Why are you keeping Mason jars? And nobody answers the question. But now my readers aren’t going to pester me about it. Because another character asked the question, and now we know that it’s obviously justified, because someone else wondered why it was there.

[Mary Robinette] Can I offer a very specific example from something that I wrote where I had to backfill character? So, I have this whole Lady Astronaut series, and it started with a book… A novelette called The Lady Astronaut of Mars. In that, my character Elma, who in the novels is Jewish, is not Jewish. That’s not a decision I had made for her. I’m not even certain that she’s Southern. I think she probably is. But there’s a line in that, in Lady Astronaut of Mars, in which she talks about eating crawfish as a child. Which is not something that most Jewish kids who are observant would do. So when I went back to write Calculating Stars, and I had made the decision to have Elma be Jewish for a number of different structural plot reasons, I had to come up with the back story that would have allowed her to have that experience as a child. That then informed every decision that she made going through the story. And then every subsequent thing. And it… So it is something that I have both discovered, but also that I had to shape the lens through which she was viewing the world in order to have that be a… Make sense and have a consistency for the character. That her family grew up secular, because her father was in the military and they were trying to mask the fact that they were Jewish to outsiders.

[DongWon] What I love about this story is… there’s a little bit of a language we’ve been talking about this so far that almost makes it feel like a burden. Like, how do you keep track of it? How do you have this consistency? But what I love about it is the way in which history and identity and community are opportunities. Right? Like, you found a thing and that gave you an opportunity to make the character feel more interesting and nuanced and three-dimensional. Right? There… All of these elements of introducing aspects of the character’s context, of their history, of their connection, are storytelling prompts for you to then fill out your role more, to find plot in it. Right? It’s what I love about characters in role-playing games is that you don’t just say a thing or introduce a thing, then it’s suddenly, like, oh, the whole character’s descending from this one prompt that… Or turn of phrase that he used or an attitude that they had. Erin, you and I were in a game together recently, and I introduced a character who was extremely cantankerous…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And fought with everybody. So then the question kind of became a little bit, why is she like this? Then we developed a whole relationship of, like, oh, she was sibling with your character, and, like, all of these other things. The joy for me is finding that opportunity and letting that be the seed for character, story, conflict, all the things that we want to make the story work.

[Erin] Yeah. I think that, to me, like, identity is such an important thing. It drives a lot of things.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Trying to figure out, like, why a character is the way they are, and all the things that they carry with them, is a huge part of writing for me. I think it’s why I love voice so much. I think that one of the… A lot of times, we think of identity as noun based. It’s about the things. Like, this person carries this item or eats this food or goes to this place of worship or what have you. But I think that, Mary Robinette, you sort of alluded to this earlier, to me, the interesting thing about identity is identity as a verb. The way you make choices, the way that you, like, take action in a situation is going to be… Hoarding is like, that’s the verb. Do you know what I mean? Like, the Mason jar isn’t the important thing. It is the collecting, the keeping, fear of things being taken away from you. I think that really thinking about how can we take identity from feeling like a noun, which I think can sometimes make things feel more shallow, like, I added all the right nouns, how come this person doesn’t feel like they embody this identity? It’s because their verbs haven’t been changed.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Only the nouns have.

[Howard] There’s a nineties sitcom… I can’t remember the name, I don’t think it ran past one season. But it had Jenna Elfman in it. At one point, she is very upset that she’s going to this place and she’s not going to identify with anybody, she comes from lower income or something, I don’t remember. And her brother says, “You’ll be fine. Y’all were raised by the same TV.” I remember loving that line because in the nineties, we were kind of all raised by the same TV. But that’s no longer a thing. That’s… There’s a different set of com… We weren’t all raised by the same YouTube, the same cnn.com. The disparity of pop-culture background or the diversity of it is so significant now that you can’t all be raised by the same TV. So I now ask myself often, rather than what are the implications, or what is this… How is this one character different in terms of background, I ask myself how is everyone the same on any point, and why? What is it that they would all have in common? How could they possibly have all that in common?

[Erin] Which is a great time to say that something that all of our episodes have in common is a break. And we’ll be right back after it.

[Erin] All right. Thinking a little more about identity and community. So we’ve talked a little bit about what you do with it, but how do you, and I feel like I’ve said this in earlier episodes, how do you actually figure out, like, what your character’s identity should be? You talked about making a character Jewish for specific story reasons. Is it, like, when we’re picking the identity of the community of our characters, what are the things that we should be looking out for so that we can find those opportunities to make our stories richer?

[Mary Robinette] I have talked about this in previous episodes, the wonderful book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? This introduced me to the ax… The idea of axes of power. Which is why when I needed with Elma, I made her Jewish, was that I tried to think about where my character sits in axes of power. Where do they have power, where do they not have power? I try to make sure that all of my characters have at least two areas where they do not feel like they have power, where they feel subordinate in the larger society. Because that introduces vulnerability, but it also often introduces some of their strengths, some of the ways that they defined themselves. So that was one of the reasons that I did that with Elma, was that in Lady Astronaut of Mars, she’s older, she’s a caretaker. Both of those are sliders on that axes of power that are farther down. But when I move all of the way back to Calculating Stars, she’s young, she’s beautiful, she’s smart. And I didn’t have enough sliders that were lower on the power structure, and it was 1952. So I made that choice. But, for me, that’s what I start looking for, is where do they feel like they are lacking in power and where do they have power that they are unaware of.

[DongWon] I love axes of power as a framework here. I think kind of ties into how I think about it. Which is about stakes. Right? When you have a character… Plot derives from character in my mind, because of stakes, because of a character’s… How they relate to other characters, how they feel about them, how they feel about themselves. Right? So when you’re looking at what stakes do I want this character to have, what relationships are at risk by choices that they make, or what pressures are put on them by the world that puts these relationships at stake? That leads you to the point where you’re now asking questions about history and community. Right? Who are they connected to, what history do they have with that person, and why is that relevant for the story I’m trying to tell? Right? You get to plot by developing these stakes. But as you’re asking questions of what is this book about, why am I writing this book? I think that’s when you get to that layering in these pieces of history and identity and a sense of self.

[Mary Robinette] One of the other things that… When we were talking about community, one of the other things that I have begun using as a shorthand since we did the space economy camp is thinking about the idioms that they grew up with. Because those shape the opinions that we have. They are parts that we don’t… We often don’t interrogate because it’s like, well, everybody says, no such thing as a free lunch. But that’s extremely different if you grew up with that as your truism, that’s extremely different than somebody who grows up with their core idiom, their core truism, as a rising tide raises all boats. Like, those are two different ways of interacting with community. So I will often think about how the community defines that. Where the community sits with that. Like, if my character embraces that or if they push against it.

[Erin] One thing I really like to think about axes of power is who’s aware of them. So, one of the biggest things that, like… There are many definitions of privilege, but one of the definitions is the ability to ignore the axes of power, because you’re really high on it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So why do you care. Because I always think about… I know the book you’re talking about, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? I remember talking to friends, black friends, about it at the time, being, like, well, why isn’t it called Why Do All the White Kids Sit Together in the Cafeteria, because they do too. So, but it’s, like, no one ever asks that question because there’s a… An idea that that’s a default.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, that… Why wouldn’t they? That’s… They’re just… That’s just Jimmy hanging out with Jen versus, like, if I’m hanging out with somebody, then that is… Something is wrong there, something is off. So being able to recognize the axes of power and what your relationship is to them. Do you understand where you are in the world? Like, do you understand the axes of power that you’re on, or is it one that you either can ignore or that you’re in denial about? Like, what is the relationship? I also think it’s interesting to think about, like… I love relationships between individuals and structures.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] You know what I mean? So it’s, like, you and an axis of power, or you and community. Are you someone feeling, like, you’re in the midst of your community? Well embraced by them? Do you feel on the outskirts of one community, but the in in another community that you think is very core to who you are is also one that you feel at odds with, that’s a very different character than one who comes from the exact same community but who feels like they are the absolute, like… I am that community. We view things exactly the same way, we use the same idioms, we do the same things. So I think thinking about how your character relates, not just to other people, but two other structures, is a really fun way of looking at it.

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] One piece that I want to come back to is the idea of these lenses as a way to examine… Or a way the audience experiences the story. We’re talking about who these characters are, what their history, their tradition, their influences, so on and so forth. Sometimes I’ll have to ask myself whether the plot, mcguffin, action, the whatever it is that needs to happen to resolve things, could that have been done by anyone? Or can it only be done by someone who comes from this tradition? Because those are actually two very different stories. I like the story where anybody could have solved the problem, if they brought tools to bear and tried to solve the problem. But this character solved the problem in this way because of who they were. And that… For me, those are the stories that feel the most real. Those are the stories when I read them, I feel like I could have been that person. I’m experiencing the story as if I were there.

[Mary Robinette] You’re making me think of something, just tying it back to something that Erin was saying, which is that you’re using the tools that you have available, because of the experiences that you have. One of the things that I enjoy doing is thinking about this community, this connection. When you’re looking at how to bring that to life on… For the character on the page for the reader, I often think about the pieces of the community that imply larger pieces of the community. That if you say, oh, yeah, I had to do that on my Naming Day. It’s like that suddenly implies this whole… That there’s a whole thing about Naming Days. That then implies this bigger ripple, especially if your character’s like, oh, oh, my God, I had to do that on my Naming Day, my parents made me. It’s like, okay, so there’s a difference. It’s implying these levels of… That there’s more than one way to view the thing, there’s more… That then implies that there’s multiple groups within a larger group. Which I think is fun. I love that, but I also think that only works… You can’t do it with something that is existing in isolation. Like, you can’t just say, “Oh, yes. Oh, Naming Day, we all do this.” It’s gotta be tied to the emotions of the character. It’s the connections.

[DongWon] I mean, this to me is like the flaw of, like, a certain type of dystopian YA. Right? Like, that was way popular, was it was so focused on just, like, the one thing that was different and existed in isolation and just didn’t feel like there was other connections to that. Right? There wasn’t further context. So when a character came from a place or had an identity or any of those things, it felt very reductive in a certain way. Right? Like. So without the further context and complexity, it didn’t feel rich enough. Right? I think the ones that succeed very well, something like Hunger Games, does a great job of pulling in those other details, pulling in those other contexts around the central thing, and then ones that, I think, did not do as well were ones that failed to ask the further questions, failed to look at intersecting axes of power, failed to look at the ways in which this event connects to all these other events that happened in a person’s life. Right?

[Erin] I think that’s what makes it work when somebody uses a tool in an unexpected way.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] If there have been all these connections, you understand how they got there, and how something that character A sees as an oh, my gosh, an obvious tool I can use, character B would never recognize as a tool at all. Do you know what I mean? I love that type of thing where one character’s like, yes, it is… The answer is so obvious, and another character is like, I don’t even understand the question.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] And that is like such a beautiful moment of character, because even if we don’t understand that culture, that identity, that context, we do understand that there are things that we know that others don’t and things that we don’t understand that others live in.

[Howard] When you look at these connections between characters and society and traditions and economies and po… There’s this enormous network of things which as a writer, you can become very very oppressed by. Because drawing a matrix in which you have defined every point and drawn every line is nightmarishly difficult. The tool that I use… You treat that matrix as a net. Drop something onto the net. Where did it hit? You only need to define the threads where it landed. Those are what caught it. By defining those threads, those three or four threads, you have now implied the existence of the entire net, and the reader will believe in the entire net. Now you have to describe those three things well. You have to describe them in ways that make sense for the character, that imply the actual history of the character. But you only need three or four things to get us to believe that that whole web of your society, of your world, of your universe, from those three pounds of wet stuff between your ears, that whole universe you’ve created, we can believe it’s real. You just gotta give us three threads.

[DongWon] I think about it as a GM, I think about it in terms of [paduke?] the game of go, where you are not defining all the connections between all the things. But what you will do when you’re playing go is, as a strategic move, you’ll put a piece out at a distant part of the board from which you are right now, and it’s communicating I’m interested in that. I’m going to be making moves around that in the future. Hey, opponent, just so you know, we’re going to be fighting about that in the future, so whatever’s happening here, think about that, too. So, when it comes to worldbuilding a lot of times, I will just make a lot of stub documents with nothing in them, just a title of like this culture, food here, geography over there. I won’t fill those in until they become relevant, and as things start becoming relevant, then I’ll go and, like, okay, I need to think about this now because my characters are going over there now.

[Howard] Gotta tie this thread off.

[DongWon] Exactly. So, like the net you that you’re talking about, you have this disparate web, but don’t lose your mind trying to fill in all those details.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Take big swings when your character does interact with something. Define broad things. Reach for whatever their cultural contexts are and use those to keep building as they connect.

[Erin] To come back to something we talked about at the very beginning about weight, I think weight can often sound like a burden, but, to me, when you talk about building a net, it’s making people feel like your worldbuilding has enough weight to catch the story.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] With that in mind, we’re going to go to the homework. Which is to identify something from your character’s life from before the story begins. Identify… Especially if it’s something, a community, an identity, some way that they interact with the broader world. Write a scene in which that element of the character weighs heavily on the scene but is never explicitly mentioned.

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.