One of the most important parts of screenwriting is developing your characters, which is why I've recently written posts on character intros and character goals. As you develop your characters you'll undoubtedly think about the events in their lives that have led up to the point your story begins, and how those events have shaped the characters, their world, and the story itself. But how much of that backstory do you need to figure out? And how much should appear in your script?

What's the point of backstory?

We don't want our characters to seem like they just appeared out of thin air when they are first mentioned in our scripts. Even though they're our own fictional creations, we want them to feel lived in. It's like an undercover spy creating a false identity for a mission. It's not real, but it should feel real to others. Part of making our characters feel real is to give them a history, or backstory. This situates them in their setting and within a web of relationships. They have parents, siblings, bosses, friends, neighbors, significant others, and enemies. But backstory goes beyond creating a sense of verisimilitude, because our character's past experiences also affect who they are in the story and what kind of decisions they're going to make moving forward.

How much backstory do you need?

If the backstory is important, it seems like the more you have of it the better, right? Not necessarily. I'll get into some of the dangers of excessive backstory in a moment, but first I want to focus on what you need. In a nutshell, the only aspects of a character's backstory that matter are the ones that are going to affect the story in your script. Yes, it can be really fun to come up with detailed character bios and elaborate timelines covering their whole lives, but if it doesn't affect what the audience is actually going to see on screen then it's not important.

Where the backstory can be helpful is in helping you discover your character's motivations. In my character goals blog post I talk about the external goal and internal goal of your characters. The external goal is what they want in the story. You can think of this as the plot goal. The internal goal is why they want the external goal. It’s sometimes described as the “hole in the soul.” It’s the emotional or psychological need that they might not even be aware of at the beginning of the story. Backstory can help you figure out the character's internal goal. What about their past has helped shape this emotional or psychological need? This is important because that underlying need is driving your story forward.

Don't weigh your story down

One of the dangers of including too much backstory is that it weighs down your story and slows down your script. As writers, we are biased to think that our ideas are interesting. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it means that we need to be wary of the fact that just because we think something we wrote is interesting, it doesn't mean a reader will find it interesting. This is particularly true for backstory. You might have thought of some amazing anecdote or detail, but the reader isn't going to care about it unless it's relevant to the story they're watching.

The danger of procrastination

There's another danger with backstory, and it arises from the fact that writing is hard and writing about our writing is easier. Coming up with an in-depth backstory can feel like you're being productive, but at some point it can become an excuse to avoid actually doing the tough work of writing your script.

Avoid this danger by focusing your character backstory on the kinds of things that will shape their actions moving forward!