Rethinking a Character's Past

I read a blog post today on Writers Helping Writers that contained this sentence. 

"Before randomly choosing a trauma from the past, think about who your character is and how this trauma could make their story journey more difficult for them. Get really curious about this."

I often think about my characters' past lives. Sometimes I'll have a page or two of notes for a relatively minor character. It's the only way (for me) to have a character act purposefully rather than just doing something I need them to do to move the story along.

For the characters in the Jolie Gentil cozy mystery series, they had met for one year in high school and then again nearly a decade later. I had mapped out a number of their high school interactions so they could refer to them as adults.

Slowly I began to realize that those experiences really had shaped who they became as adults, I just hadn't done it intentionally. So I wrote a prequel, and as it evolved I learned a lot more about the adults they became. And they'd already appeared in six books!

A traumatic incident affected Jolie and Scoobie greatly -- in opposite ways. I suppose that makes sense -- easy and fun situations shape most people less than something dramatic (good or bad).

As a result of the prequel (written years ago) I have a character in the wings waiting for a spot in another book. Life does have its connections.

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