I am on track, 2,018: two-thousand-eighteen-words for today.

Today is ‘B’ day. Backstory.

Pretty obvious right? The backstory is all the things that happened before your main story. That Backstory will explain why your character hates spinach or is afraid of the dark or hates worms.

Do you need any of this? I do.

The great thing about NaNoWriMo is that you can get out all that backstory. It will help you to work out your characters.

Working on your backstory you can mind-map your character’s family tree.

No info-dumping!

Use what is relevant to the story!

It helps so you can see why your character behaves the way he/she/it does.

You can even see the connections your character has to their parents, or aunts and uncles.

Example: If I need to see ‘why’ my character needs to carry a toad in his pocket. Maybe to remember the pond he fished in as a kid, and it was there that the bully named -Toad Killer- killed his pet toad.

I will write that story- that backstory for myself. Then, I will know why that character protects every toad he sees or why he hates ‘Toad Killer’. I won’t have to tell the reader the whole story, maybe just a mention of that backstory. Or it can be a complete story that starts with that backstory.

We see the backstory in every book.

Within J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books we find out his parents were killed and by who.  (Whom?) Through the series, we learn more backstory;  dished out in spoonful’s that keep us reading.

Don’t overthink- just write.

This was my take on ‘B’ backstory. Great back to writing!