Medium NaNoWriMo Writing Prompt #2
Everyone has a back story; Everyone has humanity
In honor of National Novel Writing Month 2016, Medium is offering a weekly writing prompt now through the beginning of December to spark your imagination and help you write fifty thousand words in November.
Imagine this: A scene. Dialogue, action, internal monologues, third person scene setting. It’s all happening.
Smash cut.
If you had to choose a single moment that you would present to an outsider of your novel, what would you choose to showcase?
This week, write the back story for each of your central characters, limited to a single scene each. (Yep. These words count.)
Here’s my main character’s back story for my NaNoWriMo 2014 novel.
The wheels on Casey’s bicycle are going so fast the pedals offer no resistance as her legs pump them. She clicks the gears on the bright red twelve-speed, but even bumping into the fastest gear doesn’t add pressure against her sneakers. The road slopes gently to the left and the hill steepens slightly. Wind whipping into her eyes, welling tears up and streaking them back towards her ears, Casey leans into the speeding bullet of a bike, raises her butt off her seat slightly, and hunches over the handle bars, head pointed down so that the wind slicks over her bicycle helmet.
One hundred yards ahead, Randy’s forest green bike cuts a corner tight across the front lawn skids to a stop in the driveway next to the Thompson family home, an elegant three story brick square with a neat lawn and picturesque white picket fence that separates it from neighbors on three sides. “I win!” Randy screams at the top of her lungs, chest still heaving from the effort of the ride.
At the other end of the street, Casey sees her father’s black sedan turn the corner and start towards the house. He hadn’t been gone five minutes — some emergency at work — and his absence was the only reason they’d been able to venture up the steep hill. Her father was constantly afraid that they’d break their necks riding down the incline (he always spouted that the grade was almost 30 percent which, from what little Casey knew about angles, didn’t seem that steep at all.) Casey froze up, instinctively, her arms stiffening on the handlebars of her bike. The front wheel jittered slightly at the quick motion, and she sat up, losing speed, feeling flushed from both the ride and the sudden jolt of fear of being caught in a forbidden act in front of her father.
The sedan stopped in front of the house next to their own, a looming gothic mansion that made their substantial structure look quaint by comparison. He beeped his horn once, a quick staccato, and then a longer, more vicious burst. Casey applied her brakes a little too hard, the tires of the bike squealing on the blacktop as she slide into a stop -
- and then the entire brick building exploded, red pieces of masonry flying outward, a mushroom cloud of dark, black smoke pluming up from the black shingled roof, the windows exploding outward, tinkling screams of glass scattering across the lawn, the fireball expanding outwards, scorching the grass, cracking the limbs and trunks of smaller trees lining the yard, consuming the bushes, licking the edges of the picket fence and smearing a greasy black tongue of soot over the white paint -
Casey was screaming, her bike on top of her, blown back by the force of the explosion, her skin scorched and her clothing reeking of fire and melting plastic and burning wood. Thomas was out of the car, a phone pressed to his ear, shouting instructions into the speaker, sprinting towards the husk of a house that crackled red, flames licking through every broken orifice that once were windows, doors, were now new gaping holes from where pieces of the building were crumbling away.
On the driveway, through smoke-stinging eyes, Casey saw the twisted metal of a mountain bike and a charred lump of her sister slumped over the melted tires.
You choose the time, the place, the format: Whether it’s a flashback, a narrated memory, or something that happens in the thick of the plot, this scene should not only illuminate the what and the why of your characters, and how they got to the point where they exist in your story, but also show us the core of their humanity (yes, even the bad guys).
Share a moment of backstory in a response, or if you’re feeling less bold, hitting that recommend heart tells us this helped you.
But most of all, keep writing!
