Post #156 February 11, 2019

“Building Character Backgrounds and Bios”

Recently, even as I have been working on my new series Time Jumpers, I have been doing character bios for a novel coming up in 2020.  This led me to some ideas about how to build believable backgrounds for your main characters.  I do this in novel-length work so I can keep characters straight and consistent and give them a history to refer to from within the story.  I also do it to try and get inside the heads of my characters and understand what makes them do what they do.

Below is the opening from one of my character bios from Time Jumpers:

Jump Commander Nathan Golich

Age: 35 terr (35 Urth years)

Height: 6’2”

Weight: 185 lbs

Hair: Completely bald

Face: Hard cheek planes, angular with a prominent chin, with chin dimples

Other Distinguishing Features:  Droopy black moustache; piercing hard brown-black eyes; big ears and big hands.

A Short Biography:

JCDR Golich is executive officer of the 1^st Time Displacement Battery at Kinlok Island, on Seome (Storm to the Umans) and second in command to Jump Captain Dringoth. Golich was born in 2779 (U(rth) time), month of Half-Crescent (written as 2-1/2 C-79) in a small village called Nomad Township on Keaton’s World.  Father was Kennard Golich, deputy mayor of Nomad and formerly a life-support-systems engineer.  Mother was Mariska Golich, pilot-officer aboard one of many airships (skyships) that ply the dense atmospheric skies of K-World between communities.  Nathan has one sibling: sister Naomi, now a master chef at one of Nomad’s best-loved restaurants (the floating restaurant Tsunami), which drifts about K-World’s one large body of water…Loch Lithgow.

And it goes on from there.  For this character, I have about 3 pages of this kind of detail.  For others, I do more, sometimes up to 8-10 pages. So why go to all this bother?

Golich is a major player in Time Jumpers.  I want to know where he came from, who he is related to, why he is the way he is and some detail on major events and influences on his personality as he lives his life.  I want to know his background.

For major players, I like to describe them physically and then go into some detail on their early years.  What formative influences made them the way they are?  Did a parent or sibling die or abandon the family?  Early influences are profoundly influential in how we develop and grow.

I describe their schooling, who their best friends were, maybe a favorite memory from growing up, a trip or an encounter with someone who changed their life, for good or bad.  All this forces me to develop ideas on the world that this character grew up in and how it may differ from ours.  It’s all part of filling in the gaps of my knowledge about this imaginary world. 

Later on in the bio, I describe best friends in higher education, favorite adventures, influential and formative occurrences.  Let’s see what happened to Nathan Golich in his teenaged and young adult years…

K-World has long been known for the ferocity of its weather and Nathan learned early on how to survive in the sudden storms that could pop up.  The planet is some distance from its sun Sturdivant 2180, but not so far as to provide adequate shielding from the sun’s occasional bursts of intense radiation.  All K-worlders learn from an early age about when and how to take shelter from the Fires in the thousands of caves and man-made shelters dotted around the land and in the cities and towns. 

When Nathan was 11, his mother Mariska was caught in one such Fire (a severe type known as a Level 2 flamer) while aboard a skyship cruising toward another town.  The ship caught fire and went down in the Loch with no survivors.  Nathan was devastated.  To this day, he associates the Loch with the death of his mother and becomes quite nervous around storms and large bodies of water.

It was partly to compensate for the loss of his mother, that upon ‘graduating’ Net Tutor and succeeding in the Downloads, that Nathan applied to and was accepted into the Skyship Academy and went into training as an apprentice pilot.   

From ages 17 to 24, Nathan served as apprentice, later full pilot of several skyships in the Sky Service.  His favorite ship was K-Max, which mostly made runs between Nomad Township and the capital city of Nestor, several thousand kilometers away.  The Nomad-Nestor run was a real challenge for any skyship pilot as it crossed some of Loch Lithgow and also large mountains, a desert (‘The Dunes’ or ‘The Sand Sea’ with its mesodonts able to fly and take down unwary ships) and even swamps such as ‘The Shivers’, for the way the waters always seemed to tremble under seismic disturbances and strong winds.

This kind of detail gives me a lot to work with in the episodes of Time Jumpers where Golich appears.  Sometimes, the detail of these bios even suggests future stories. 

But you have to be careful with this kind of detail.  No reader wants to suffer an info dump as you describe every little thing that happened to your character.  Work these details into the story when and where the opportunity arises, a little at a time.  They add texture and realism to your characters so that readers feel they have an actual history with all the twists and turns we all have.  It makes your characters come alive and allows readers to identify with characters…hey, something similar actually happened to me.

I do character bios to give me some idea about who these imaginary people are, to be consistent and believable with how I portray them.  I recommend doing them to some degree for all your main players.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on February 18, 2019.  See you then.

Phil B.