Backstory as Behavior: Pathological Maneuvers and Persistent Virtues
By David Corbett | March 11, 2022 |
Last month (“Explanation vs. Fascination—And a Woman in the Corner Opposite“) we explored how to use moments of helplessness to “look behind the curtain” of your characters. The context of that exploration was the need to make our characters fascinating by resisting the temptation to explain them.
But simply exploring moments in the past won’t by itself overcome the temptation to narrate those events in some form of flashback or backstory reveal. We need to take our exploration a step further by showing how those moments generate behavior.
Before we begin, though, take a moment to reflect on how you yourself deal with stress or conflict.
- Do you drink a bit too much when fearing judgment, ridicule, rejection—or bordeom?
- Do you jabber away when you meet someone you’re attracted to—or fall into nervous silence?
- Does loneliness prompt eating, drinking, or spending binges?
- Do you lash out when you feel criticized or threatened?
The psychologist Anna Freud referred to such patterns of behavior with the technical terms adaptations or defense mechanisms.
The novelist Elizabeth George (in her fiction guide Write Away) refers to this type of pattern of behavior the Pathological Maneuver. Personally, I love that term, not just because it’s more colorful. It reveals the fundamentally maladaptive nature of the behavior in question.
The maneuver is pathological because it demonstrates how the person is not dealing with the underlying emotion prompted by their experience of stress, conflict, judgment, and so on. And the episodes of helplessness we explored last week, especially those linked to fear, shame, guilt, betrayal, or loss are precisely moments characterized by stress, conflict, and judgment.
To see how such episodes generate habitual behavior—specifically, here, Pathological Maneuvers—consider these examples:
- Because the character’s moment of greatest loss involved not just a devastating breakup with the man she thought was the love of her life, but also a moment of greatest betrayal when he married her best friend, she has developed such a profound fear of failure and rejection, colored by a stifling sense of shame, that she no longer tries to date men she is actually attracted to, but instead devotes herself to “projects” who most likely will never leave her. If the romance ends, it will be her decision that breaks things off.
- Because the character’s moment of greatest shame was losing a position she had been told she was going to get—only to watch as the whole office learned it was going to a woman she herself had hired and trained—she no longer pursues what she truly wants, but instead settles for what is easily achieved or simply provided, while resentfully retreating into a carping sense of victimhood, fueled in secret by drink.
- Because the character’s moment of greatest sorrow was the agonizing death of his mother from cancer when he was seventeen, combined with his father’s subsequent descent into alcoholism, he never allows himself to get too deeply involved with anyone else, because it just awakens the pain of loss, a pervasive sense of guilt over being unable to help his father, and his fears of his own mortality.
- Because the character was raised poor, she suffered not just deprivation but frequent incidents of mockery and shaming. (If we’re creating this character, we’d flesh out the worst of those incidents.) As a result, she has become obsessed with success, works herself to the bone, secretly takes delight in bettering her competition (better they feel ashamed than her), feels suspicious of anyone making demands on her time (including friends and family), and basically lives in secret terror that without that constant, unrelenting focus she may slip back into poverty.
- Because of being bullied and even abused as a child, he now lashes out with irrational rage at anyone who triggers his fears of being victimized—including not just enemies and competitors but loved ones.
Not all Pathological Maneuvers follow such a reactive trajectory; some take unpredictable turns:
- Return to the character whose mother died of cancer when he was a teenager, and his father subsequently turned to alcohol to numb the pain. The son has refrained from any deep emotional commitments, resulting in a loneliness so severe he too has developed a drinking problem, which he cynically explains away as “like father like son.” In one of his drunken stupors, his elderly neighbor suffers a heart attack and is literally calling out to him for help, but he is too wasted to respond.
- The character’s most terrifying moment came when he watched his drunken father beat his mother nearly to death. Unfortunately, he learns the wrong lesson from this experience, and grows into a man with a hair-trigger temper, living by the credo: The angriest person wins.
- The character’s moments of greatest pride revolved around being the class clown, typically cracking jokes at others’ expense. Unfortunately, she too learned the wrong lesson from this, and now deals with uncomfortable feelings, not just in others but herself, through deflection, making jokes instead of actually facing the anxiety, nervousness, or discomfort in the moment.
As these examples indicate, moments of helplessness often develop into a pattern of behavior that is characterized by:
- Avoidance, deflection, projection, denial, settling for less.
- Acting out, self-injury, irresponsible risk taking, casual sex, substance abuse or some other form of over-indulgence.
- Unconsciously modeling one’s maladaptive behavior on someone else’s that seems to get them what they want.
- Some form of abusive behavior toward others, exemplified by a selfish regard for one’s own wants over any concern for others, or a disregard for the pain one causes.
Pathological Maneuvers are the collection of behavioral traits that reveal the false sense of safety, control, empowerment, or concealment that allows the character to ward off the depression, self-hatred, or anxiety she feels when she recognizes that she is not the person she truly wants to be, or living the life she truly wants to live.
However, just as there are self-damaging habits of behavior, there are also beneficial ones: Persistent Virtues.
Following the same methodology we used above, let’s turn now to moments of courage, forgiveness, pride, trust, and love or joy and examine some resulting habits of behavior that have consequently developed.
- Because the character’s moment of greatest bravery involved rescuing a driver from a burning car after an accident, he has confidence that he will not panic or freeze if called upon in the future to act decisively in the face of danger. (But he also realizes that one of the reasons he acted so boldly was the fact the driver was a very attractive young woman, undermining absolutely certainty in the selflessness of his courage.)
- The character’s most significant encounter with forgiveness involved her stealing money from her grandfather when she was twelve years old, after which the old man first made her admit what she’d done and return the money, then made her sit with him silently on the porch for several hours, during which time the full impact of his forgiveness and love gradually sank in. Because of that experience, she understands not just her own weakness—a reckless fascination with transgressing boundaries—but what it means to be loved regardless, which has given her a quiet self-confidence and mindfulness that has helped her resist, if not exactly overcome, similar temptations.
- The character’s moment of greatest pride—a good deed no one else knows about—came when he was a lonely ten-year-old boy with a pronounced stutter whose parents argued constantly. He was, as always, walking alone to school when he spotted on the sidewalk an envelope with several hundred dollars in it, together with a deposit slip. He went to the address listed on the slip, and when no one answered the bell he simply nudged the envelope through the mail slot and once again headed off to school. When he was reprimanded for tardiness by first the principal then his parents, he said nothing in his own defense, savoring the secret sense of vindication he experienced. This devotion to undisclosed acts of virtue has remained with him into adulthood, not just for the sake of doing good. Whenever he is badgered by bosses or loved ones or even strangers, he recalls that moment of silent victory he experienced as a stammering ten-year-old boy and takes heart from the fact that absolutely no one knows the real truth about him.
I have deliberately made my examples of Persistent Virtues a bit more complex, as it has been my experience that moments of pure joy, pride, courage, etc., not only are rare, they seldom filter forward in time without serious transfiguration. Life is simply that way—as most athletes will tell you, losses always register more profoundly than wins, and our moments of triumph quickly acquire a certain weather-worn sheen.
Using this methodology will allow you to envision opening scenes for your story where the character, by exhibiting the Pathological Maneuver or the Persistent Virtue—or both—implicitly indicates her troubled or confidence-boosting past without belaboring it through a detailed explication of backstory.
This manner of revealing backstory through behavior allows you to show rather than tell how the past has shaped the character as your story begins. The unique, problematic, puzzling, or just plain odd nature of that behavior will create empathy, intrigue, or both, forcing the reader to wonder what in the past has produced the curious thoughts and actions exhibited by the character.
It also allows you to reveal how the character changes simply by showing how her behavior changes.
Depending on the demands of your story, revelations concerning the actual moments of helplessness underlying her behavior can be woven in at appropriate places in the narrative—usually when the character is reflecting on a certain unforeseen or unfortunate turn of events. This is the most natural place for the character to wonder what it is about her personality, her circumstances, or her past that has led her to this place, and what changes she may have to make to turn the matter more to her advantage.
However—and this is an important point—it is by no means necessary to reveal to the reader or audience the underlying events or factors that led to your character’s behavior.
Sometimes leaving unanswered the question as to what caused that behavior lends intrigue or poignancy to your portrayal, and explicit explanation would only undermine that.
It is up to you as to how much explanation is necessary, and unless confusion is created by its omission, it’s generally best to keep backstory explication to a minimum if not leave it out altogether.
How has a moment of adverse helplessness in your character’s past developed into habitual behavior you could describe as a Pathological Maneuver? What form does that behavior take? What events in your story will reveal the self-destructive nature of that behavior? Will the character have to change that behavior to achieve her main objective in the story?
How has a moment of positive helplessness in your character’s past developed into a Persistent Virtue? How firm is your character’s command of that behavior? What has tempered it over time? How will that virtue be tested in your story? Will it prove sufficient for the character to achieve her main objective in the story? If not, what other psychological reserves will she be able to draw upon?
David Corbett (he/him) is the author of seven novels: The Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime (a New York Times Notable Book), Blood of Paradise (nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar, Do They Know I’m Running?, The Mercy of the Night, The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday, and The Truth Against the World. He has also published the story collection Thirteen Confessions and the novella The Devil Prayed and Darkness Fell.
David’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in a broad array of magazines and anthologies, with pieces twice selected for Best American Mystery Stories.
His non-fiction has appeared in numerous venues, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Narrative, Zyzzyva, MovieMaker, The Writer, and Writer’s Digest.
He has taught both online and in classroom settings through the UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program, Book Passage, LitReactor, 826 Valencia, The Grotto in San Francisco, and at numerous writing conferences across the US, Canada, and Mexico. In January 2013 Penguin published his textbook on the craft of characterization, The Art of Character (“A writer’s bible that will lead to your character’s soul.” —Elizabeth Brundage), and Writer’s Digest published his follow-up, The Compass of Character, in October 2019.
Quite simply: one of the best posts ever, especially your zinger of a final line: “Unless confusion is created by its omission, it’s generally best to keep backstory explication to a minimum if not leave it out altogether.”
I’ve become aware—in my own writing and in the writing of those I’ve mentored—of a compulsion to tell the reader the entire backstory, as vividly as possible, to ensure that the protagonist’s behavior is fully “explained.” Otherwise, we worry that the character’s motivation won’t be clear or strong enough.
Your approach is so liberating, and makes complete sense! You’re suggesting that the way to show that the motivation is strong—wait for it—is by having that motivation infuse her behavior in the present, without having to break the immersive experience of the scene by a side-trip into the past, which usually means leaving the ongoing story to spend time inside the character’s head.
Egad. I feel lighter already. “It also allows you to reveal how the character changes simply by showing how her behavior changes … without belaboring it through a detailed explication of backstory.” Of course!
Another aspect of “show, don’t tell,” and “less is more,” and “trust the reader.” Enduring truths that many of us (well, me) keep wanting to complicate, which only weakens the reader’s experience.
Thank you for this post, Dave. It’s a keeper.
Hi Barbara: I too must confess to being susceptible to the tidal pull of backstory. And I do believe there are times it is more than a narrative luxury— or a sign of lazy writing. And even with backstory revealed behavior may remain enigmatic. But when possible, using this approach does preserve the immersive experience of the present. All the backstory work is still there, it’s just lurking under the surface. Thanks for being the first to comment. You kicked us off with a great “And we’re off!”
P.S. Punctuation matters: And even with backstory revealed behavior may remain enigmatic.
Should be: And even with backstory revealed, behavior may remain enigmatic.
(I’m reminded of the famous juxtaposition: “Let’s eat, Grandma!” vs. “Let’s eat Grandma!”)
Hi David, so much food for thought here. As a writer whose characters have thus far sprung from pathological maneuvers, I was fascinated by your list of persistent virtues, one of which tripped my story trigger. I can’t tell you which one right now, lol, but I’m running off to take notes. This post is full of sound story wisdom—and prompts. Thanks!
Me too, Kathryn :) David thank you for this post. Because I write for kids, I don’t have much backstory but rather the seeds of their future pathological maneuvers or persistent virtues :) These are the events that shape them and it’s fun thinking about the kinds of people my story-kids will grow up into.
That’s an excellent point, Vijaya. For young characters these moments of helplessness will shape them for the long term. I can’t help but imagine that we begin to see the beginnings of that development by story’s end. (I also think your point about who the characters are in the future dovetails well with what Don says below.)
You’re welcome, Kathryn. Praise from you on matter of craft, ho ho, is praise indeed. Seriously, glad I stirred up the juices. It’s my reason for being.
Ahem: “matters of craft.” Typing too fast. Sorry.
David this is a fascinating post. Thank you. There’s lots to chew on here.
Sometimes leaving unanswered the question as to what caused that behavior lends intrigue or poignancy to your portrayal, and explicit explanation would only undermine that.
True, but my beta readers have yammered at me to know why this character does this or that until I finally had to explain it.
A Civil War general’s father who was a Revolutionary War hero bankrupted the family and squandered all his mother’s holdings and land. This impacted him so much as a child that honor became paramount to him in his adult life.
Captain Richard King of the King Ranch was apprenticed to a jeweler at the age of five. He loved the beautiful jewelry and longed to learn how to make it one day, but was relegated to cleaning and sweeping. No, he would never be a jeweler. He ran away and hid on a steamer. The captain kept him and he learned how to navigate and went on to be a riverboat captain in the west. He showered his wife and daughters with beautiful jewels. His wife, a minister’s daughter, covered the lovely diamond earrings with enamel.
We are all products of our raising or events in our lives. I think we’d be foolish not to recognize that in the players in our stories.
Hi, Julia: I goofed and my response to your comment is below, not here where it should be. My apologies.
Superb. One of the best, if not the best post on developing characters I’ve ever come across. Thank you! It will be put to good use in my current WIP.
Thanks, Anne. Very kind of you. Best of luck putting all this to use.
A fascinating discussion, David. You reveal me to myself, in the way your argument makes use of the Freudian model. I developed a dependency on this same model, but have tried in recent years to resist it. Not always with success, because it is so elegant, and at the same time learnable and useable.
You ask us to identify an adverse or positive helplessness, and how characters develop from it. In the story I’m just finishing, a small event occurs in the protagonist’s childhood. He is given a puppy for Christmas, but loses it for several moments in a snow storm. This event is not relied on to develop or reveal the protag’s character (the puppy isn’t another Rosebud). But it serves as a shock that can later be seen as the first step on the much later path that will lead the protagonist out of his deeply flawed pathology. Dismissive of feelings as an adult, he is cut off from others. He has relied on language as a defense mechanism, but when he is isolated, and then forced to look after a dog, a new defense replaces language, and opens the way to reconnecting with people.
Reading you can be a little risky: Like Freud, it sometimes threatens to be too influential. But I look forward to taking the risk at every opportunity.
Thanks, Barry. Oh, how tempting it would be to say, “Sometimes a puppy is just a puppy.” In your case, obviously not. But does that make it Freudian, or merely human?
Let me add here that I’m in now way suggesting this is THE canonical approach to character. A great many of the writers I admire have little use for backstory whatsoever: Kafka, Borges, Kundera, Calvino, Pinter. They instead focus primarily if not solely on the character’s existential situation in the present. What I’m proposing here is one way, not THE way. If it smacks of Freud — his daughter is mentioned in the post after all — well, yeah, sure. Sue me.
BTW: By this: “But does that make it Freudian, or merely human?” I didn’t mean to refer to the puppy as “it.” Rather I meant your use of this technique to connect the past to the present.
But you did say it, didn’t you? And you can’t even smoke a puppy, I didn’t mean that you were offering anything canonical or super-Freudian. Besides my own point of view was heavily influenced back when existentialism was all the rage (existence precedes essence, etc), so I’m no believer in strict determinism, i.e., backstory.
Hi Julia:
The point isn’t whether the past forms us or not but how best to use that in our characterization, and how much of it needs to be explained to create a compelling portrait.
Your example concerning Captain King — I’d ask myself whether such information is truly necessary. I can’t say without knowing the present-day plot but that’s the question always at hand. Such past events often merely appeal to the writer’s self-indulgent wish to announce, “But wait — there’s more!” If it’s truly necessary, of course leave it in. But it’s obtaining that eye for necessity that’s the key issue.
As for so-called beta readers: beware. Anyone who’s been in a writing group knows there are members whose offerings are gold, others not so much. Some raise issues simply to hear their own voice. As for the term itself: I don’t know where it came from but I’d be delighted if it crawled back into its hole. It’s demeaning — as if there are more important “alpha readers” down the line somewhere.
Thanks for chiming in.
David,
Of course, we have to pick and choose what is important to the story. As Diana Gabaldon says, “Don’t reveal something to the reader until they need to know it.”
If I were going to write a book on the Kings, I would probably include something about the jewelry because it was important to the Captain when he had become financially stable enough to buy her those diamond earrings. This went back to his childhood of loving the beautiful jewelry as I said. She, a Presbyterian minister’s daughter, would not wear something so ostentatious and had them enameled. It wounded him deeply for her to dismiss his sacrifice.
As for my beta-readers. I agree. In my case, I have whittled them down to a pretty solid posse.
As for the term, it’s my understanding the “alpha” readers are the critique partners who see the rough first draft and help you get the thing whipped into shape before the beta readers see it. Like beta testers for software or games I guess.
Revealing backstory through behavior. I like that. Nowadays, backstory sometimes seems to be an end unto itself. Revealing it becomes the whole story. In our Age of Complaint, I’m not surprised. We want the world to know how we’ve been hurt. We want to be heard. I get that. But after our hurts are aired and we’ve told that part of our stories–what then? What’s the new story we’re waiting for?
The part of your post that sticks with me is the anecdote of the grandfather and granddaughter on the porch. She stole money from him. He makes her confess, return the money and then sit with him on the porch for several hours…”during which time the full impact of his forgiveness and love gradually sank in.” (Or, in clinical terms, her shame recedes leaving room for self-acceptance.)
That episode fills me with strength. To do what? And what, I wonder, will the granddaughter go and do? What is she ready for? It is excellent to understand what makes characters the way that they are. Their behavior then becomes realistic. We have the satisfying reward of understanding them, but that is not story.
Story is what follows. How much backstory do we need for a tale to work it’s effect upon us? Less than we may think. A great many timeless novels do not treat their characters’ backstories with reverence. People simply are observed–accurately–the way that they are. We believe in them and therefore what they do feels real to us.
We relate. We are stirred. We project ourselves into their stories. We participate emotionally. We replay scenes in our minds and project what we would do instead. We imagine. We can do that because we understand. It doesn’t take much, just a little demonstration of human weakness and virtue. A revealing action. A memory.
Now that I’m thinking about it, what if there was a “rule” (I know, I know) which said that backstory is disallowed in novels? What if all that was allowed was a single memory? One to tell us all we need to grasp a character? That further understanding has to be earned through observing? That the reader must do some work too? That readers have to be be given room to imagine? Imagine that!
Your post got me going today. I miss you too, my friend.
I wonder, Don, if you would like a co-credit for today’s post. Because everything you just wrote went off like a gong inside my head. Thanks.
This line in particular — “the reader must do some work too” — reminded me of something the actor-director Peter Riegert once told me that he learned from one of his mentors: “The audience has a job to do. Get out of the way and let them do it.”
We’re moving to NY next week! Hudson Valley, but still only 2.5 hours from Manhattan. Maybe we’ll see each other more in the Big Apple than we have on the sprawling west coast.
Thanks, David, I am at point in my rewrite that requires I consider or follow much of this advice. The few hours in my protagonist’s life that have formed much of her unconsious decision making, happened in childhood. I use one simple phrase woven throughout the story to let the reader know those moments are once again fueling her thinking or haunting her. I don’t want to take the reader by the hand and say “watch for the blinking red light”, as it were, but to infer that event is now embedded in her choices. Thinking that might blend with what you are saying here.
It does indeed blend in, Elizabeth. In responding to Barry’s comment above, I was thinking how easy it is in film to suggest with an image an entire incident full of resonance. How wise of you to use one phrase in this same fashion, as a touchstone moment. (And I love the red blinking light analogy.)
Another great post, David. (You ever thought of writing a book on this stuff?) My challenge as a writer concerns a character’s own awareness of how past experiences affect current behavior. As a reader, I’m turned off by a character who thinks to herself, “I was raised poor, therefor I am obsessed with my very lucrative career” or “I have a savior complex because I was unable to protect my mother from my abusive father.” As others have pointed out, the revelation and change in the character should be part of the story.
Simple motivations like the ones you describe do indeed diminish the character. Unless we get the sense that there is more going on with the character — cross-currents of conflicting motivations, which the conflict between Pathological Maneuvers and Persistent Virtues can help provide — such simple formulations, “Because of that, now this, period” can only disappoint.
Great idea on the book thing.I’ll hop on that.
David”
I read your “My First Thriller” interview at LitHub. Are you familiar with the Johnny Cash song, “I Been Everywhere”? Seems like it was written about you
I know that song well, but cannot claim to have covered even a fraction of that territory.
Thank you, David. I like to tell my students (and myself) that backstory is like the hand of a god, the mysteries of which we don’t need to see. To explain that mystery lets the air out of the story and we lose our fascination with what is transpiring on the page. We don’t want our readers to stop leaning in. Every bit of this post had a wealth of great info but I think I’ll clip the last line and post it on the computer.