Welcome to HEA Writing Week 2025 – Day Two!
Character is everything. Your story starts with the main characters, and they both drive the plot forward and give your readers emotional anchors to ground the writing. How do you write characters that feel true and believable? As we’ve said before, backstory is one of the most important considerations when writing, particularly when you’re writing romance. A backstory rich with important details from a character’s past will help readers care about your characters, make the story feel more true to life, and set up the characters for a moving journey that will give your readers a satisfying and emotional ride.
Let’s explore various ways you can build a backstory for your main characters and find out where and how to insert those story elements into your writing.
What Goes into a Backstory?
Writers craft their stories in different ways, from plotting to pantsing to everything in between. Some writers need to know every single story beat before getting into the actual writing, and others dive right in and let the story work itself out over multiple drafts. Regardless of your approach, it’s important for you to pin down who these people are that you’re writing about—their personalities, quirks, motivations and important past experiences that drive their actions and the plot. That’s why I recommend having at the very least a page or two (or a whole binder full of info, if that helps!) in your notes that digs deep into the main characters’ backstories and explains the following:
- Family life: Do they have siblings? Are their parents alive? Was their childhood stable and happy or traumatic and chaotic? Is their family close by?
- Financial status: Did they grow up with money or have they struggled? Do they have a steady job, or did they just get fired? Are they responsible with money or are they drowning in debt?
- What challenges have they experienced? This could be individual events that shaped them, like dropping out of school or losing a sibling, or it could be something systemic, like living with an illness or disability, or being marginalized in some way.
- Finally, what’s the Ghost or Wound from their past that sets the stage for the story? What are they motivated to overcome, and why is it difficult for them to move on?
How to Add the Backstory to the Narrative
Once you’ve established backstories for your protagonists, you need to figure out how to layer them into the main plot. Info dumping the entire past of a character in the opening or middle of the novel is usually the wrong way to go, and readers won’t appreciate being ripped away from the central story if you spend too long dwelling on the past. Here are three ways to create compelling backstory moments.
- Prologues: Not everyone agrees with me that a prologue is a necessary element to your novel, but I think they can be particularly helpful in suspense stories as well as in second-chance romances. Showing your characters reacting either together or separately to an incident that defines their goals and motivations is a great way to set up your narrative, particularly if you can succinctly show the Wound that is hindering your character from wanting to fall in love in the present.
- Flashbacks: We don’t need to flash to the past every time a character remembers how they felt before the story opens. But an effective flashback can do a lot of heavy lifting when you’re revealing a major emotional plot point. My favourite way to structure a flashback is to ramp up the tension in the narrative until it’s almost at its breaking point, then cut to the past. Adding in another tension-building moment will give extra depth and context to the bombshell that’s coming.
- Interiority: Sometimes it’s easier to drop in small nuggets of backstory information when your character is thinking about or reacting to something that’s happening in the present. Are they reminded of a moment from their past? Show how their reaction is similar or evolved from their previous experience. For example, say your character was bitten by a cat as a child and ended with an infection that landed them in the hospital for a few weeks. That’s a traumatic experience that may lead them to be less trusting or cause them anxiety around animals in general. If they’re out with their love interest and discover an abandoned kitten, how would they feel? Would they panic? Show their reaction and drop a hint as to why it’s so extreme. How does the love interest deal with this revelation, and how does their own backstory affect their reaction?
These tips on fleshing out your characters’ backstories can make your stories richer and ground your characters in real emotions that will resonate with your readers. Play around with different ways of building backstory, from super detailed biographies to quick sketches, and see how that informs your writing. Testing out different ways to deploy that backstory in your writing might help you resolve other elements that have been challenging. Getting the character’s past right is a great next step to level up your storytelling and get you on your way to writing the next great romance novel.
Let’s Go!
Today’s activity is to start shaping the backstories of the characters you created yesterday. We’ve prepared a worksheet to guide you. As we’ve written below, you most likely will need more space to expand, but this worksheet should get your wheels turning!
Download the worksheet here. Print or recreate it in your notebook and see what you come up with. Then pop over to the Write for Harlequin Facebook Community to check in with other writers working through HEA Writing Week.
Further Reading:
We have lots more about backstory on the blog. We’ve linked some of our top content from the archives to supplement your writing this week:
Don’t forget! Our live webinar on writing the modern hero is tomorrow. What are today’s readers looking for in lovable heroes? Romance editor Hannah Rossiter will delve into the contemporary Alpha Hero, explain how to navigate tricky tropes like workplace romances, and explore what gives readers the “ick” or makes them fall – hard! – for a hero. Join us at 10am EST tomorrow on Zoom.
