Video Transcript (computer generated - may contain errors)

Sara Gentry: Hey, writers, I've got a real treat for you here today. I'm with Stuart Wakefield. Welcome, Stuart.

Stuart Wakefield: Thank you for having me. Hello, everyone!

Sara Gentry: This is just going to be a great conversation, because story depends on character, and Stuart is the king of character. So we are going to talk about all that good stuff. But let me introduce our writers to you just a little bit more, Stuart. So Stuart has 26 years of experience in theater, broadcast media and coaching, and he has developed a big, deep love of character. During that time his journey began with a passion for comic books, TV and diverse literature which led to a lifelong commitment to the craft of storytelling. He holds an MA in professional writing, and Stuart's latest novel Behind the Seams reached the semifinals of the Book Life Fiction Prize contest, congratulations.

Stuart Wakefield: Thank you very much.

Sara Gentry: Scoring 10 out of 10 across all categories, including character, of course. Additionally, his first TV show, based on celebrity characters, is due to air on the Uk's Channel 4, which is all sorts of fun. So, as you can see writers, Stuart has a lot of experience with character coming from multiple forms of media beyond just the novel. So this is going to be so much fun to dig into character.

Stuart Wakefield: I feel tired just listening to that. And very old.

Sara Gentry: Well, you know you should embrace all of that, and be proud of all the things that you've done.

Stuart Wakefield: All of the backstory that I have

Sara Gentry: All the backstory. Yes. So we're going to talk about backstory, because Stuart has a ton of knowledge in this specific area. And so just to give people maybe an idea of what we're talking about. I don't like to use terms that maybe people aren't familiar with. So can you tell us exactly what we mean by backstory when we're talking about that.

Stuart Wakefield: Yeah, of course. So if we boil it down to, it's kind of very essence. It's the history of events that takes place before the story begins, and personally I make 2 distinctions about that. So there's world backstory, and there's character backstory. And I encourage writers not to confuse world building with world backstory. But there are, you know, world backstories, kind of guess, part of world building. But often they can get confused. So in terms of world backstory, we're looking at things like culture, politics, any significant historical events. And world building, I think of more as developing a magic system. you know, kind of the rules of the world that are influenced by, but sometimes separated from the back story, the history of the world. And then, looking at character backstory, you're looking at the things that make that person up. And the reason we've done the world building and the world backstory is because you want that world to feel real and grounded. But you also want the people in that world to feel real and relatable. It might not be grounded. I think that's just the nature of people. So again, with them, you're looking at the events that affect them so people might be affected by political events or historical events. We are also looking at those smaller kind of experiences that might include trauma the way their relationships have developed over time, and also how they formed their beliefs. So we think about it as that kind of macro big picture is the world, then we can think of the character as the micro. And you're looking for that kind of Psyche and motivations. So that's the distinction I make between world building, world backstory, and character backstory.

Sara Gentry: I love that because the story that you're going to be reading in the novel is still going to be centrally based on probably one character, maybe a handful of select characters depending on how brave you're feeling with your point of view and things like that. But like still sort of being part of something bigger. But we probably don't care about the something bigger until we care about the something smaller.

Stuart Wakefield: Yes, yes, absolutely. It's that micro operating in the macro. And I'm sure that you know, we all feel like we are these tiny cogs in the big machine. And again, that's a good way to think about it. How does your cog interact with the other little cogs to make that big machine run.

Sara Gentry: Yeah, yeah, alright. So why should we care about back story? And why does it even matter, you know. Can't I just start a story on page one and find out what's gonna happen over the next 300 pages and be done with it?

Stuart Wakefield: I mean, I wouldn't say I wouldn't say that character backstory is important. I'd say it's crucial. You know, we need to understand about why characters do the things that they do. And you know the way we all operate in life now. And the way that we do the things that we do is all based on our backstory. Okay? So yes, we might have been affected by political events, but that's still our backstory and the way we've been, you know, I know there's the argument about nature over nurture. But you know significantly, a big part of the way we view the world is nurture, and then it starts to be the events. So you know how you are as a teenager is very well, can be very different, depending on how mature you are. You know, in your twenties, and then the things you go through in your thirties, and you know there's that book life begins at. So life begins at 40. Life begins at 50.

Sara Gentry: I know which book you're talking about.

Stuart Wakefield: Yeah, I remember my mother having that book kind of, you know, lying around. And you know we talk about. Oh, if I'd have known then what I know now.

Stuart Wakefield: You know you've all of this stuff is backstory that builds up and builds up. And again I think I mentioned before, you know, backstory makes somebody feel real and relatable. And again, you want your reader to connect with that character, so they need to understand them. So, even if your character does something stupid,  like in a horror film, they go down into the basement, you know, and everybody shouting, you know, in the movie theater, you know. Don't go in there. Don't go in there. If that character has a good reason for going down, we'll kind of forgive them, and I think a lot of horror films they kind of try to get away with, well, you know, they're just stupid kids. But if you do give them a good reason to go there. So a lot of this conversation, I'm going to talk about Alien. Okay. But I've just seen Alien Romulus. And you know, I've seen some horror films recently that you know the kids go into the haunted house for a reason you know they might be to, you know. Put it on social media, or something like that. In Alien Romulus, the kids go onto a big derelict space station. But there's a really good reason for them doing that, and it's almost like a heist. But you understand why it's really rooted in their back story. These kids are. These kids are very unhappy, living on this planet with no sun, you know, there's somewhere else that they can go, and if they can get some particular resources from the space station, that's kind of their ticket out of the life that they have. So we have those scenes where we see them living on this sunless rock that's kind of being terraformed. So they're not just these kids who were just breaking into a space station for the fun of it. You know, we understand, and we start to connect with them. And chances are we've all felt like we're in a difficult point in our lives where we don't want to be like our parents, that we look for something that's going to get us out of our situation. So for me, those kids and alien Romulus, I kind of felt connected to and they weren't, I'd say one of them. Maybe 2 of them were there just to be killed right? But you get a good understanding of the others, and you get a sense, a sense of their backstory, and they start to mean something to you. And I think if you have characters who are relatable and sympathetic, living in a world that feels grounded, it's much easier for your reader to connect with them and understand the decisions that they make. Even if they're even if they're kind of stupid ones, you know their motives are clear and they become compelling. And those are really important things, for you know a reader to to get in on the story with.

Sara Gentry: Yeah, I totally agree with that, because if we don't have a clear understanding of why people are behaving the way that they are, then their behavior just seems incredibly random, and even that in and of itself can be its own backstory. If that's the kind of character that it is like, I'm sure there are some personality, you know, frameworks and disorders and whatnot in which people do behave completely, randomly. But yeah, we like to think that there's a sense of meaning behind what's happening.

Stuart Wakefield: Yeah. And and you know, like they can feel flat. And as you were saying, they can feel inconsistent. Yeah. And you know, if you've ever had a friend do something really stupid, you know, one of the phrases you might use is, well, that was out of character. Okay. But then one of your other friends said, Yeah, but you know this thing happened to them that you didn't know about. Suddenly, you're like, Oh, oh, okay. There's a character in - okay, let's go back to the original Alien film - there's science Officer Ash. So you've got Ellen Ripley, warrant Officer Ripley and Science Officer Ash, and Ash turns out to be a synthetic and he's working on behalf of the company to bring back the alien specimen. So quite early on when the when Kane gets infected by by the alien, the face hugger Ripley knows the quarantine means that they have to stay off the ship but they bring him back, and Ash lets them on. So he overrides this directive. And as the story goes on, Ripley becomes more and more suspicious of Ash. Not that he's a synthetic, because she doesn't know, but what is he doing? And then she discovers that he is a synthetic okay? So there's all of that horrible scene. Then when we go to Aliens and Ripley is on the ship with all the colonial marines, she finds out the Bishop is an Android, a synthetic person, as he prefers to be called, and she has a very visceral reaction to that. Now we get that because we've seen that she's been kind of, you know, betrayed in that previous film. Then in Aliens 3, there aren't any synthetics at all unless you count the other bishop at the end. But I'm not going to get into that. But when we get into Alien Resurrection, the 4th film, that's a clone of Ripley. So she has some of Ripley's memories. But when she meets that android, she has this sort of vague kind of suspicion, but because she knows that she's not a clone. She doesn't think of herself as a real person. So when she's talking to call, she's got a slightly different OP like opportunity to that. So we get this very clear thread, particularly from Alien to Aliens why Ripley has such a visceral reaction to Bishop after everything that she's just gone through with ash in the previous film. So again, that backstory builds and builds and builds. And also we need to understand within the container of the story, because, as the character moves through the story. They are accumulating more backstory. So again, as those things build up, and I know you and I are both strong structure nerds and stuff. But you're looking for that cause and effect, and that all of that is based on our past experiences. Okay. I'm selling my house at the moment, and 3 of our buyers dropped out at the last minute because they were lying about their financial situation. All of those people happen to be the same nationality. So when our house went on on sale for the 4th time, a part of me was like, I don't really want somebody from that nationality to view this house because of all this other thing that's happened. And I had to then suddenly check myself. I'm like, actually, I'm becoming racist. Okay. But all of your experiences. They start to build into your belief system. And we see Ripley's belief system, particularly between alien and aliens kind of grow, and it doesn't feel flat or inconsistent. We understand why she is the way she is. We understand why she goes back to the colony because she wants to wipe these aliens out when she feels for the people who could be in the position she was in in the 1st film. So that's the beginning of only one of the alien stories I will be telling today.

Sara Gentry: I mean, we can see pretty quickly how this could become very complex, and we certainly need to be able to follow the main character on a journey, and the best way to do that is to understand them well, and depending on what type of story you're writing. Maybe your antagonist. We would also need to have a good understanding about. But like we could really get into the weeds here with all these characters who are in our books so like what do you typically recommend writers do with managing like a cast of characters? How much about the back story? Do I need to know? For you know my side character.

Stuart Wakefield: Okay, well, I have over 30 characters in Behind the Seams, and well, I had a few novels under my belt already. And there's a particular author, British author that I love called Judy Cooper, and she has  easily 30, 40 characters in any one novel. But she wrote like chronicles of novels, and it's got to the point now where she's having to have a glossary in the back with all of the names of everybody and a little bit of background, and how they kind of relate to each other, because for 15, 20 years, her readers have been following those stories, and she brings characters in and out of subsequent books. And I'm doing that with the world that I have, for Behind the Seams. So Behind the Seams is about 2 people who fall in love during the making of a fashion design reality, TV show. So if you've seen Project Runway or Next in Fashion. Think that. So think of those 2 contestants. So I had to do work on those people. Okay, I had to understand who they were for them to be able to fall in love, and I was very much pitting kind of opposites attract. So one comes from the north of England, where I was born. The other person comes from the south. One went to a regular school, one went to a private school. One is a shovel road tailor, the other one is a very successful fashion design student. You know, one doesn't have a lot of money. One is absolutely loaded. So I needed to do work on them because I needed to know. How do they function in different scenes? You know, in what scenes might the one who doesn't have as much money feel threatened or the one who's more educated? At what point might he feel embarrassed about how much he knows all the money that he has so constantly looking for the way they fitted together, and I had the broad brush strokes down. But I knew I needed to do more work, particularly in a romance, because it's so much about personality and the way people can mesh together, or find a way to mesh together, because I could do kind of like that. Not enemies to lovers. I guess this is competitors to lovers.:But there are those, you know, what's driving them to be on the TV show. Those were very different things. So Kit, he was doing it to make his grandfather proud because he learned to sew from his grandfather. Barker is trying to make a name for himself because his father is a bit of a Tearaway. He sleeps with women. There's been this huge scandal. So Barker is trying to make his own way in life to kind of get away, and he uses the TV show partly to restore the family name, but by the same token he has these moments where he doesn't like the exposure, because it's not going the way he wants to go and the press is starting to paint him like another version of his father. So you kind of need all of that stuff to go on. So I had to do quite deep work with them, because they are driving the conflict, and they're driving the themes as well. Now that leaves me with 30 other characters. Okay, so you need to know just enough for them to make them feel like they are contributing in a meaningful way to the story and you know enough about them to make their behaviour relatable. So I'll give you an example of a kind of a side character. So there's a scene where one of the challenges is to redesign a hotel workers uniform. So the contestants are taken to a very like swanky, and if you have that word a very posh, you know. swanky hotel in London, very famous, called the Mayfair and the scene is told from both points of view. So when Barker walks into the foyer, this is a place he's very comfortable with. He's been to perfume launches there. He's got drunk. He's taking drugs. He's gone on to these kind of meaningless events there. So it's familiar to him. So he doesn't see the things that Kit sees when Kit walks in. So Kit is quite poor, so he finds the foyer quite threatening. He's not used to the marble and the gold  even though he's wearing a beautifully tailored suit, he feels out of place. So he notices things that Barker doesn't notice, because Barker's used to that world. He just lives in it, whereas this is all new to Kit. Then there's another character called Caspian, and Caspian just happens to be in the hotel because he has a thing for older women. And he's just bedded this woman, and he's come down to the foyer to leave, and he sees Barker and he and Barker went to school together. So Kit sees Barker with Caspian, and things have already happened between Barker and Kit by this point. Now Kit sees this beautiful black man talking to the guy that he's, you know, starting a relationship with, and he immediately feels very threatened by that whereas when we look at the scene from Barker's point of view, he went to school with Caspian. He's known Caspian for years. So when they meet, you know, they hug and they talk, and all of that kind of stuff. So when Kit comes over, Barker and Kit need to try and get away from their production crew. I know I know this is long, but bear with me, so they need to find a way to be together. So the only way they can do that is to get away from the producer. So Barker has a brainwave and says to Caspian, you like older women, don't you? The producer happens to be an older woman. Caspian's a bit of a gold digger as well. So Caspian is quite happy to have to distract the producer so the boys can get away. So all we know about Caspian is. He went to school with Barker. He likes older women, and he's a bit of a gold digger. We only know 3 things about him, and that's all we need to know for him to function properly in the story. And then the only other time, he doesn't even appear on the page. But the only other time he comes back into the story is when Barker needs somewhere to live after the show is finished, because unbeknownst to everybody, he's penniless and Caspian has gone away with some sugar mummy, and Caspian lets him use his

apartment on the proviso that Barker looks after his dog, and I called his dog Sterling. It wasn't originally going to be called that. It's going to be called Hugo, but he calls a dog Sterling, because Caspian loves money, and I thought like British sterling like it makes sense. So again, we only know these like 4, 5 things about Caspian. I didn't have to do anything like the work that I needed to do for him. Bearing in mind I had to have a production crew, cameraman, the other contestants, I put some more work into the judges on the show. Then you have like family members. I mean, I needed a big cost of people because I didn't see how I could write a novel about 2 people on a reality TV show without having produces the other contestants. Like all of those things, I couldn't get them on and on their own in a cabin where they're snowed in. It just wasn't going to work that way. So I had to do different levels of work for different people. But I always knew, kind of when to move on. So it's that thing about you need to do just enough for them to function.

Sara Gentry: Yeah, I love that advice because I think that building character backstory can kind of get into the territory of like world building where people just, you know, pitch their tent and and spend years sometimes doing the thing that is happening off camera, as opposed to, you know, moving ahead on their project. So I think that just enough advice is really good.

Stuart Wakefield: Yeah, I've written this down. This is the question that I say to writers. And I'm reading this off the screen. What's the bare minimum I need to know about the character for them to operate believably in this story? Yeah, the minimum viable backstory. So you know, Caspian has an impact on a scene. When you really stop and think about it. You don't know much about him, but you infer things because, you know, he went to a private school, so you know he's probably rich, you know. You infer all these different things because you've seen Barker be the product of that private school as well. So characters can infer other things. Also, you know, side characters can play a function. You know, in Romcoms we often see, like the sidekick, but we also see those people perform a function. So what I love about a lot of like romances and Romcoms is that the 2 leads often don't kind of see the attraction, and I love that moment when when everybody else in the room is like Whoa, like what's happening with you 2, and they're like, what are you talking about? And they're like, No, there's definitely stuff going on. So again, you can use those side captors to have functions. But you know you don't have to write reams and reams of who they are. And I see a lot of people, you know, publish these lists, and, to be fair, I have one as well on my blog. I have like 70 plus questions you need to know about about your character and I’m debating whether or not to take it down, because my other blog posts about character get a lot more kind of response, and people find them. I think one of my most popular podcast episodes is how to build a real, relatable character for your romance novel. And there's a sister. I haven't posted it yet, but is how to build a love interest as well. That's a counterpoint. And you're looking at aspects of their personality. It's not how tall are they? What color are their eyes? I mean, those are still important, but it's not what builds up a character necessarily.

Sara Gentry: Well, writers. Stuart here has just so much information, knowledge, and a lot of resources available to writers on all sorts of topics, but specifically also on character. And I encourage everybody to listen to Stuart's podcast. Do you want to talk about that for just a second?

Stuart Wakefield: Yeah, so it's called Master Fiction Writing. Available on all good podcast platforms. And there are episodes on Youtube as well, thankfully, you don't have to look at my ugly face. I have a very different relationship with being on camera than when I was younger. But anyway.

Sara Gentry: It is a fabulous podcast and highly recommend it. And also you have this tremendous course called Emotional Echoes, that specifically goes into character, backstory and writers. I would be happy to endorse this course just because of what I know of Stuart and his coaching abilities and things like that. But I have also worked through, I am working through this course myself, and it is a fabulous course that I hope people will take a look at here.

Stuart Wakefield: That's really good to know. Yeah. As I say, you know, it was not just about building character. It's about how to get that backstory come through on the page. You know, both in the narrative itself. But importantly, kind of in the dialogue as well. So yeah, I really loved putting that course together.

Sara Gentry: Well, I dug into it because I was having trouble like I knew that one of my characters had an issue around something, but I couldn't figure out why. So that's what brought me into the course, and I found it to be very helpful. 

Stuart Wakefield: Good.

Sara Gentry: So yes, writers definitely check that out. And where can people find you like to connect with you online?

Stuart Wakefield: Okay. So the best place to go is my website, which is thebookcoach.co and there you'll find, obviously, the services I have. But you know my blog posts, which you know some of them are doing very well. 7 and a half thousand views on some of them. So yeah, you know. That’s the place to find me. And from there you can get to, you know socials and get in touch.

Sara Gentry: Awesome. Well, I want to thank you so much, Stuart, for this conversation and for your time today. 

Stuart Wakefield: Thank you very much. I could have easily talked for another hour. 

Sara Gentry: Another time!

Stuart Wakefield: Exactly Character Backstory, part 2.

Sara Gentry: Excellent! Alright! Thank you so much for joining us writers. We will catch you next time.

Stuart Wakefield: Thank you. Bye.