No Character is an Island

by Alison Janssen

They're more like oceans.

The thing about oceans is that though blood gets dispersed in the water, it never really goes away.

Think about your character like this: He is a very small ocean when he's young and inexperienced. As he moves through time and experiences life, the coasts surrounding him widen, and the sea floor drops. His ocean gets bigger as his character grows, containing more saltwater.

Now think about the formative events of his life -- the stuff that happened to him before the story you're telling in your manuscript. The kinds of things that led to the quirks and traits he possesses in the the story you're telling. There was that time when he was twelve and he fell out of a treehouse onto a beehive and now if he eats food made with honey he absently swats the air and cries a little. The time in college when there was a fire alarm in the middle of the night, and it was the night he lost his virginity, and he and his girlfriend had to go outside in thier underpants and it was highly embarassing and so now when he hears fire alarms he reflexively checks to make sure he's wearing pants.

Imagine each of those events as a drop of colored liquid in the character ocean. The larger the impact of the event, the larger the drop, and the more viscous the liquid.

He forgot his bus pass Monday morning and so was late to work? Quarter-sized drop of cranberry juice.

He forgot his anniversary and so his wife made him sleep on the couch for a week? Baseball-sized drop of Yo-J (which, you guys, is seriously one of the best drinks ever invented and I don't drink enough of it because they don't sell it at the coop where I shop -- also, I once had an intern whose dad helped invent Yo-J and I kinda freaked out on her a little bit).

He forgot to lock the back door one night when sneaking out to go gambling, and an opportunistic burgler took advantage of the unlocked door, but was surprised by your character's sleeping wife, and in the ensuing struggle she's killed? Blue-whale-sized drop of oil.

As time goes by and your character goes on living, the cranberry juice, Yo-J, and oil will float, disperse, and eventually disappear, but at vastly different rates. The effects of a forgotten bus pass will be gone the next day. That oil representing his wife's death will be there for a long, long time, dense and terrible and overwhelming at first, and clumps may break off and drift miles away, to be unhappily encountered much later, when the character thought he'd been through the worst of it.

And it's not just the immediate, most recently dropped pool of liquid that will inform your character's actions, behaviours, and perceptions. Every drop of liquid, even when dispersed, will have changed the overall makeup of the character ocean. Wave patterns, currents, the flora and fauna -- everything's related.

Imagine that the other characters in your manuscript are animals in your main character ocean. They exist for him in the context of everything he's experienced so far. Say your main character's wife was a sea turtle, and the oil spill of her home-invasion death happened twenty years before the main action of your story. In your story, a beautiful bottlenose dolphin swims into focus, and wiggles her fins. For your main character, there's no removing this dolphin from the ocean that also contains the oily, decomposed molecules of his sea turtle wife. Yes, it's possible for him to move on, but the sea turtle will always be there.

It's not enough for your main character to have a great backstory -- you have to contextualize that backstory, let it color every bit of your main character, or else it's just a list of things that happened before, and your manuscript is a list of things happening now.