Speaker 1: A lot of what we do that makes things smooth or work, quote unquote, on screen, is all about characters making sure that it doesn't look like the author is doing things. This is why it's kind of dangerous in some ways to watch one of these streams and get the behind-the-scenes information, because it pulls that curtain back. You see how the sausage is made. And for a lot of us writers, we go through a period where it's harder to read books because now we see all the things that are being done rather than the story. For me, that lasted for a couple of years in college, and then I passed kind of beyond it to where now the way that an author is constructing a story is part of the joy. It's like I see a different layer. And I think I enjoy stories more now than I used to. But regardless, what your goal is going to be here is to make things that are intentional not look intentionally deliberate. Meaning when the reader is reading it like, oh, now's the part where they explain the backstory. You have kicked them out of the story. They are thinking about the meta-context of that story. What is going on there is really maintain the illusion. And to do this with characters, I found that I have to change my mindset a little bit about characters. I have to be thinking about the character, as I often say, being the protagonist of their own story, regardless of who they are, in the story I'm writing. And asking myself, what was the character doing before the book started? The book, there's not a beginning to the story for the character. It's just a natural evolution of their life. Maybe something interrupted their life, yes. But they don't know that they're starting a story generally when it starts. They should be living their life, and they should be interested in things that aren't directly related to the plot that you are going to be sending them on. And this just kind of plays into this idea of letting everyone be the protagonist in their own story. They don't have to be the hero, but they are the protagonist. They are the person taking action. And so Believable Backstory, for me, is wrapped up in this. It's wrapped up in understanding that a character is not just one role in a story. Not writing them to a role, but writing them to a personality, which means that they will wear different hats in different situations, like all of us do. They will act differently in different situations, and making clear their motivations that will let the reader understand that so that the character doesn't feel schizophrenic, unless indeed they are schizophrenic. Making sure that you know what this character would be doing. And I generally don't fill out a big dossier. I know some writers like dossiers where it's like this. You can find these online. It's like, what is your character's favorite food? What is your character's favorite movie? All of these sorts of things. And I don't generally do that. What I am looking for is the kind of general rubric of the character's life. If I know the fundamentals, then I'll be able to answer the simple questions. If I'm asked, what would this character's favorite movie would be? If I know the fundamentals of who that character is, I feel like I could answer that. So I am looking for driving principles, driving motivations in their lives, things that change the way they see the world. How is the way they see the world different from me? And all of this is part of the backstory. And you generally will have times where you kind of info dump on that, because you can't avoid it entirely. But the more you can avoid it, the better. So that if we can pick up from context that this is an experienced character who has spent a lot of time studying, from the way that they talk to someone that they meet on the street, rather than saying, she was a student at such and such university until blah, blah, blah happened. And then she became a student at this university. Picking those things up in context is a lot of what makes books fun to read. As a reader, being able to read and just get a sense for who the character is and what they've lived, and your job as a writer is to figure out how to do that in a way that makes it fun, makes it interesting, makes each character a little bit of a puzzle to figure out that the reader's subconscious is working on. Even while they are just reading about something else, they're picking up that this character's diction is just a little bit different. They choose different types of words and these sorts of things. That is what makes books fun. Maybe that's a long, rambling answer to your question, but hopefully it's useful to you.