TRANSCRIPT

So let's talk a little bit about backstory. You know, there's a great temptation, I think, as a writer to want to show your reader or your audience all the research you've done on your characters, and I want you to resist that urge. Backstory is there so that you can put yourself in the shoes of your character. You can think, “What would I do in this situation? What would my character do? How would I act if I were in their shoes based on their past? Based on the motivations? Based on what I know drives them,” right? We’ve talked about the desire line in the course. What pushes your character forward? What they're seeking, why they are who they are, what they think they're trying to achieve. Backstory is everything that happens before the cameras turn on. It’s everything that happens before we encounter your character in the story, but there's a fine line between backstory, the prep work you do, and a little bit of the information your audience needs to discover piece-by-piece, and exposition.

Exposition occurs when a character just gets up on screen and says how they’re feeling or where they’ve come from, and gives the audience something they feel they need to know in order to understand the story. In other words, exposition happens, or too much sharing of backstory happens, when we don't trust the audience or we don't trust the reader. So I want you to think about all the work you put in to getting to know your character as paving the way for meaningful scenes. You don't actually have to explain everything you uncover about your character to the audience. Instead, they're going to watch your character make decisions, they're going to see them in action, they're going to see them cower away from certain choices, and they're going to see them embrace other opportunities, and that will reveal to them who the character really is, not any moment where they stand up and say, “Here’s who I am, here’s where I’ve come from, here’s what matters to me, here's what you need to know about me in order to understand this story.” As a writer you're going to have to live in this dichotomy of doing months of research sometimes in order to understand your character and their motivations, and then being willing to let that go once you have what it takes to drive good scenes. Your goal is not to translate all of the backstory into the script or into your novel. Your goal is to use the backstory in order to create meaningful interactions that reveal your character’s motivations, and especially what they want.

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