It comes from the book, The Writer's Digest of Novel Writing from the editors of Writer's Digest. I hope it'll help you guys as much as it has helped me! ---
Real People Have Memories
One of the things I noticed as I started working with science fiction was that so many of the main characters seemed to come from out of nowhere. They had no families; they all seemed to be loners and drifters who had no roots. This is fine, within the romantic tradition: Does Dirty Harry have a mother? There's no evidence for it. But it doesn't matter in romance, because the story becomes the character's past. That is, by the end of the story, you know all the things the character did earlier in the story, so that now he does have connections with other people.
To fully realize a character, however, you must give him a whole life from the start.
The most obvious way to tell a character's whole life, is of course, to begin with his birth. This is, however, the romantic tradition again. After all, no matter whether you're writing romance or realism, you have to begin the story at exactly the point where the main character becomes interesting and unique. If you start at his birth, then he must be bigger than life from the cradle. That's what John Irving did with The World According To Garp, but there aren't many stories whose protagonist is so interestingly conceived.
Instead, you'll probably begin your story when your main characters are already near adults, with a wealth of experience behind them. How can you give a sense of the past?
The most obvious technique - and therefore the least effective and most overused - is the flashback. The present action stops for a while as the character (or worse yet, the narrator) remembers some key event from days of yore. The problem with this technique is exactly that: the action stops for the flashback.
Time after time, I have seen student stories submitted to me as an editor, that begin like this:
Nora peered through her windshield, trying to see through the heavy snowfall. "I can't be late," she murmured. It took all her concentration just to stay at forty miles per hour. Yet the events of the last few weeks kept intruding, taking her mind off the road. She thought back to the last quarrel with Pete...
Cringe along with me, please. This flashback is not really giving the character a past, because the character has no present. The character has not yet been made important in the present moment - she is merely a stereotyped image, and a singularly dull one at that: woman driving in the snow. The flashback is not going to provide us with any additional information about the character - it will provide us with our only information. We have no anchor in the present moment, so we are soon hopelessly adrift in memory.
Here's a good rule of thumb: If you feel a need to have a flashback on the first or second page of your story, that's a clear sign that your story should simply begin with the events being told in the flashback. In that case, don't flash back - tell the events in the order in which they happened.
Sometimes, many pages into a story, there is a need for the character to remember a key event. Then a flashback might be justified. But it still has a serious cost. It stops the present action. The longer the flashback takes, the harder it is for the audience to remember what was happening just before the flashback began. So flashbacks should be rare, they should be brief, and they should take place only after you have anchored the story in the present action.
The Past As A Present Event
Slightly more effective is having one character tell another a story out of the past. If you set it up properly, the telling of the story, besides conveying past information, can also be present action. Take, for example, the hiding-behind-tapestries scene in James Goldman's Lion in Winter. Each of King Henry's three sons has come to King Philip of France, trying to make a deal with him to destroy all the others. Now Henry himself comes, and his sons hide behind tapestries as the two kings confront one another.
Provoked beyond endurance, Philip tells Henry a story about his childhood. But the story he tells doesn't stop the action - it is the action. Philip tells how he was homosexually seduced by Henry's son Richard, and how he went along with the act, though he loathed it, in order to be able to tell Henry about it now.
With the pain that this revelation causes Henry - not to mention Richard, behind the curtain - the story is doing double-duty. It gives us some of the past of Richard and Philip, fleshing them out as characters, but it also causes terrible emotional pain in the present, which strengthens Henry and Richard as characters, and Philip as tormentor.
Notice, though, that the story is not just any story. It is about pain in the past, Philip's pain. It isn't enough to just tell random stories from a character's past. They have to be stories that are important in the ways we have already discussed.
The Implied Past: Expectation
It is possible to give your characters a realistic past without stopping the action by giving them an implied past. There are several ways to convince the reader that a character has already lived a full life. One of the most powerful techniques is expectation. What a character expects will happen in the present tells us instantly what has happened in the past.
For example, if you're told that a child cringes when someone steps toward her with a hand upraised, you know at once that the child has been beaten often enough that she expects a beating. Without slowing the action, the author has given a sense of the child's past and told something of her pain.
The Implied Past: Networks
Anyone who has been alive for any length of time has made many connections with other people. Unless we are torn from our normal milieu, those connections are going to show up. You can reveal much about a character through the way other characters react to her (especially minor characters who behave predictably according to stereotype and don't draw undue attention to themselves).
Sometimes your characters' relationships will be important to the story, but sometimes they'll be there merely to add an illusion of a full life, or an occasional comic touch. The main value of the technique is that your characters won't seem to be puppets, existing only to act out the plot.
Using an implied past makes your story like a group portrait in which one of the subjects is looking toward something outside the picture and reacting emotionally to it. You can't see what he sees, but you know it's there. It makes the world of the portrait a larger, deeper, more believable place. In your story, the characters will be received, not as artificial people acting out their assigned parts, but rather as real people who live in a network of relationships. Though only a small part of that network is explored in your story, the reader senses that the rest of the network is there.
The Cost Of Realization
The tools of a realistic characterization are just as easily overused as the tools of romance. When romance is badly done, it feels melodramatic, formulaic, unbelievable. When realism is done badly, it feels pretentious, self-indulgent, boring.
This is because revealing the character's past and examining his motives takes time. The audience will expect that anything to which you devote a lot of time is important; it will amount to something in the story. There are only so many things in a character's past that are really important in the present story - if you keep going into the past, you are either going to repeat yourself, which is boring, or you are going to recall events that don't really matter - which, done to extremes, causes the reader to feel confused, disappointed, or frustrated.
Too often, in the effort to make a character believable, an unskilled writer will go into elaborate detail about things that don't matter at all. Endless explorations of thought to discover motives about things that don't matter are the hallmark of bad literary fiction, just as formulaic repetitions of bigger-than-life characters who have no soul are the sign of bad romance.
But the best romantic writers and the best realistic writers are not far apart. The good romantic writer uses the realistic tools of motive discovery and revelation of the character's past; the good realistic writer tells stories about people of heroic proportion who suffer real pain and pass through genuine jeopardy.
The trick is to find the precise balance. Look at how Dickens does it. In Great Expectations, when we meet Miss Havisham, we see only her eccentricity: She's an old woman who wears a tattered bridal gown and lives in a home filled with decorations for a wedding that never took place. This makes her instantly memorable. This is vital for Dickens's purpose, because he was writing a serial; the reader had to remember characters, not from minute to minute, but from day to day.
Once her eccentricity is established, however, he does not increase her importance by making her even more eccentric - that would make her comic, and she is too important to be farcical. Instead, he uses pain. Miss Havisham's niece treats the young boy Pip quite cruelly. Havisham sees his suffering with delight. "Does she make you cry? Does it hurt?" We realize that she is teaching the girl to be cruel, so that it is really Miss Havisham who is tormentor. Pip's pain magnifies them both.
Later, Dickens fully realizes Miss Havisham by giving us the story of her past. Her bridegroom jilted her on the day of her wedding. Her trust in him had been so complete that his betrayal caused her extraordinary pain. She stopped all the clocks in the house, and never let any of the decorations for the wedding celebration be taken down; the moment of betrayal becomes the center of her life from then on. She raises her niece to be beautiful and attractive, so she will have power over men, power enough to hurt them as deeply as Miss Havisham was hurt.
Now her motive is discovered, and though she is not altogether sane, she is understandable, believable, even deserving of some degree of sympathy. Dickens used her eccentricity to make her memorable for a day; he used her cruelty and Pip's pain to make her memorable throughout the novel; he used her past, her pain, her motives to make her memorable forever.
In my novel Speaker For The Dead, I used a similar pattern of Development. My main character, Ender Wiggin, has been wandering from place to place for many years. Now he is forced by circumstance to spend time with a family that has recently lost its father - a man who treated his wife and children cruelly. I knew I wanted Ender to take the father's place in the family and through his innate goodness, to transform the family into a whole and happy unit.
The trouble was the six kids. I knew their names and ages, but not much else, except for the oldest kid, who figured prominently in the plot. Time after time, I'd be writing along and discover I had completely forgotten to mention one of the children for several chapters. I had to keep looking at my notes, just to remember which kid was which. If I couldn't keep them straight, how could I expect the readers to tell them apart?
I couldn't solve my problem by simply eliminating any of the shadowy children's characters. To make the book do what I wanted it to do, they all had to be there. The family had to be large, and every member of the family had to be memorable and clearly differentiated. Each one had to stick out in the reader's mind.
All those children shared the painful experience of an abusive father - but each one experienced him differently. Their responses would therefore be different, I realized, and when Ender Wiggin meets them, he would first notice their eccentricities.
The youngest boy is methodically violent and uncontrollable. He attacks Ender with a knife when they first meet, and when Ender constrains him, he urinates on Ender's lap.
The youngest girl watches even the most outrageous goings on without a sign of interest, and almost never speaks.
Another boy, who was blinded and therefore uses artificial eyes, copes with stress by switching off his eyes and blasting music through earphones, so that the rest of the world simply ceases to exist.
The next oldest boy is ardently Catholic, and views Ender - with some justification - as Antichrist; he resents the way Ender heals his family more than he would have resented it if Ender had done them harm.
And so on...each child with an eccentric pattern of behavior. The eccentricities help the audience differentiate among the children right from the beginning. Gradually, though, as each child's individual past and motives are revealed, their eccentricities begin to fade. By then, I have given them new experiences with pain and jeopardy that will make them more memorable, and each child is found to have particular strengths that are vital to the family's survival and success, giving each child a heroic role to play. The children no longer need these eccentricities to define who they are in the readers' minds.
By the end of the novel, if my skill was enough to do all these things well, the audience should believe in and care about each of these children as an individual. Then, when Ender Wiggin chooses to stay with the family he has healed, the audience sympathizes with his choice. It is the proper conclusion to that part of the story.
(The Writer's Digest Handbook of Novel Writing, p. 66-74)
