Backstory Essentials

Two weeks ago, we did an episode on lazy writing and came upon this blog talking about plot holes, character under-development and other story-level sins. It picks mostly on Wonder Woman 1984 and Star Wars Episode 7, two films I (Kasie) admittedly liked. But it’s not wrong and it actually makes me cringe to think about how right the author is and whether these scripts needed more work before they went into production.

If so, what does that say about all the crap I’m publishing? Don’t we think movies that actually get made and especially those with ginormous marketing budgets and hype are actually better than my own novice indie suchness? Maybe not.

In any case, the section on exposition caught us as particularly interesting because it’s been a while since we did exposition in the “what not to do” approach during NaNoWriMo in episode 166 and a little more recent, but not much more so when we took on origin stories for the Christmas episode 170. 

Today, we’re going to approach exposition from a character backstory angle, specifically focused on those things the writerhas to know but the audience doesn’t. Let’s start with an experiment.

Link to the show notes here.