Is your character’s backstory trivia or lore?

Lore is not just for fantasy world-building. Here’s a look at how it can add depths to your characters that you can plumb for story.

Trivia vs Lore

For the purpose of this article, trivia is random, isolated facts about the character (height, weight, scar on their left shoulder, etc), but they don’t (necessarily) interconnect to create a character’s background story as just a list. Lore, on the other hand, is the story of how that fact shaped some aspect of their personality, actions, reactions, or habits.

Trivia: His mother died when he was seven

Lore: Though his mother had a long, drawn out illness, he treasured when she read with him and was devastated when she died when he was seven, leaving him to read his books alone. So now he craves to connect with people through books, attending book clubs and talking about what he’s read.

The trivia states a fact. The lore shares a story about why this fact matters to him, and how it has created the attitudes, activities, or habits of today.

This trivia vs lore concept applies to nearly all the other factual things you can develop about your character.

Developing your character’s lore

Think not just about the adult the character is now, but the child, adolescent, and younger adult stages of life that they grew through to now. Think about how a fact became.

When did his growth spurt suddenly make him so much taller than girls? What’s the psychology of a person at that age? What matters to them generally, and what mattered to him specifically? How did this growth spurt alter his connection to those people or things?

Technique: Find an isolate fact in your character sheet and expand it into a mini-story, using all the things a story needs: characters, a goal, and conflict.

Thwarted goals or devastating outcomes will lead to what K.M. Weiland calls their “wound.” But there’s also happy ending lore: goals made where there were challenges, yes, but they were met and success was achieved. That sort of thing provides kernels of hope, or optimism. Because while failure is an option, they realistically know that success might be possible, whether it might need the right preparation or attitude, or advice or help from someone. They’ve actually experienced the process of success and know that there are possible controls over it.

Example

He’s not just taller than six feet (trivia), but he’s always been taller than every woman he’s ever met and it makes him feel awkward around them since he grew half a foot in middle school and got stretch marks (lore). Or, she loves red (trivia) because it was the color of her favorite childhood toy, a stuffed dragon she kept through every single move (lore).

How to use this in your writing

Regardless of whether you’re a plotter or a pantser, you can pause at any point and work out the lore tied to one of your character’s trivial facts. Working on your character’s background story details is a chance to figure out not just who they were, but who they are now as a result of the stories tied to the facts.

Bonus effect: If you’re stuck for a plot point, pantsers — or even plotters whose stories have gotten away from them — plumb your trivial facts for the stories behind them — just look over your character sheet and expand another fact — it might be a skill or a lack of a skill — into a mini-story.

Example

You’re looking for a way for your two characters to connect. You’ve already put them at a bookstore. You’ve already decided they both love books. But how to get past the small talk into the deeper talk that fosters connection?

Our guy meets a woman at one of these book club meetings. What begins as general after book club coffee talk, gradually they realize they love a few of the same authors, but some different authors. Then, a few meetups later, they realize they actually love exactly the same book from childhood — they see it advertised on the children’s reading circle as they pass to go into their own book club meeting. Him for the memory of reading it with his mom, and her for the red dragon featured in the story. This connection makes that deeper, moving them along the romance arc on something specific rather than generic.

All genres

While this post may sound like it only works for romance, the trivia vs lore technique can work for any other genre, too.

Mystery: what impacts the detective about the case can be discovered through expanding a trivial fact into a full-blown lore. Science fiction: the solution to a problem could be formed because the character had something happen in their backstory that taught them “consider this.” Historical or fantasy fiction: use the fact that no civilization or group of people was ever a monolith and have the character exposed to some different thought or different way at some time in the past. It may have been shoved aside as irrelevant then… But thoughts and ideas never die. They can be buried, or pushed out by other concerns at the time. But they will always, always germinate in a body, and can grow into doubts that form the foundation of a decision decades later, where they provide the reasoning for doing something different than everyone else.

And who knows? Maybe your little backstory becomes useful as a reader magnet.

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~ Lara