Can a character be too interesting?
In baking, everything must be in perfect balance for the recipe to work. The ingredients should be measured and precise, and even a slight miscalculation might throw the dessert off. And even though it’s possible to add unusual spices to a recipe, such as cayenne pepper, this should be undertaken with care. An extra pinch of cayenne may mean the difference between a dessert worthy of winning a baking competition and the one that ends up in the trash.
Writing a novel is the same.
When creating a story, all its elements -plot, characters, prose, etc.- need to be in balance. As a new author, one of the most difficult aspects of the whole process may be maintaining that harmony, especially when that extra pinch of cayenne looks really tempting.
When it comes to writing characters this often looks like an excess of backstory. Your protagonist fought their way through foster care, excelled in school while also being part of the cool clique, is a secret violin prodigy, ran away at 16 but still managed to finish school, knows how to hunt with a bow and arrow because a foster parent once showed them, and so on and so forth.
To be clear, these are all viable ideas for a character, and can be used to make a character more realistic and three-dimensional. But adding more “unusual” backstory does not necessarily make them more interesting. Instead, they become unrealistic and hard to identify with for the readers. Not many people (if any) have experienced something like the backstory mentioned above. Some of the events even contradict each other. When this happens, the reader is taken out of the story they were immersed in and might even scoff at the impossibility of the character. They may even put the book down.
How can I avoid writing too much backstory?
- Less is more
Choose to make your character a “normal” person. It is much more compelling from a reader’s standpoint to thrust a person into an unusual situation when they come from an average, run of the mill background. Is your character powerful or royal? Great! But unless you are trying to make them difficult to relate to, make sure that you are also presenting the reader with all the ways that the character is human.
It can be a stylistic choice to start on one end of the spectrum and slowly humanize a character but care and caution are advised.
- Imagine them in real life
Think of your character. Could you imagine meeting them? What would they do or say if they spent a day with you, whether this was in your world or theirs? What does their day-to-day life look like? Even the most evil of characters will need to use the bathroom at some point. They need to eat or sleep or whatever they need to do to function for their own species if they are not human. How do they do this? Who do they interact with? And if they don’t, how does that affect them? If all of your answers to the above questions are outside the realm of human experience, then how will your character manage to connect with this character?
- Only use it if it’s necessary for the plot
In the example of a character mentioned before, only a few of the elements played a role in the plot. The rest were used as a way to explain the character’s personality or abilities. This might look like the character suddenly revealing like they are an experienced blacksmith as soon as their armor needs repairing and then going hunting with a bow and arrow even though it has never been mentioned that they are able to do this prior to the moment they found themselves in the woods, starving. These instances are too convenient and a mark of lazy writing. Use only what backstory is necessary to further the plot, and make sure that it is at least hinted at in the beginning of the story, even if not outright revealed.
