The Ghost of Your Hero’s Backstory, Part 1
The ghost haunts the hero’s judgment.
Once you learn about ghosts, you see them everywhere.
Seriously. As soon as you know about the ghost, you’ll be reading a novel or watching a show, and you’ll be like, “Boom! That’s the ghost!” And you’ll be right.
This is another kernel of wisdom from another writer.
The ghost!
I love it.
I got the concept of the ghost from John Truby in The Anatomy of Story (2007).
I have the 2007 paperback of John Truby’s book, and on page 272 he writes, “I rarely use the term backstory because it is too broad to be useful.”
He defines the ghost as “an event from the past that still haunts the hero in the present. The ghost is an open wound that is often the source of the hero’s psychological and moral weakness.”
He says the ghost is like the hero’s “internal opponent,” “the great fear that is holding him back from action.”
The concept of dilemma, which I got from Alan Watt, clarifies for me the function of the catalyst. (See “The Dilemma in Act 1.”) Likewise, the concept of the ghost, which I got from John Truby, clarifies for me the function of backstory.
The function of backstory is to affect the hero’s choices in the present drama.
If you’re writing a novel, you don’t need to go on for twenty pages about the hero’s general biography. Who cares? You need to isolate a moment in their past that affects the character today.
Oh, man, that’s such a relief! I don’t have to write backstories for all the characters! I don’t have to bore my reader with exposition! Backstories are general. A ghost is specific. I can focus on the ghost, on one powerful moment of the past that haunts the hero to this day.
The ghost haunts the hero now.
In fact, when you think about it, you’ll remember that you’ve seen a hundred blurbs describing the story of a book or movie that start with “Haunted by X, the hero must face their fears again when . . .”
Just check out the teaser for Top Gun: Maverick (2022).
“After 30 years, Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell still pushes the envelope as a top naval aviator but MUST CONFRONT GHOSTS OF HIS PAST when he leads Top Gun’s elite graduates on a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those chosen to fly it.”
So what is this past? What is this ghost?
The ghost remains a potent factor in the hero’s current life. The ghost matters because the hero has not resolved this element of their past.
The ghost embodies a particular unresolved trauma in the hero’s past.
And the hero has to face this trauma in order to escape its influence on the hero’s life today. The hero cannot grow or move forward unless and until they face and overcome the effects of the ghost on their psyche. We’ll see the hero grow when we see them overcome the ghost of their past.
Usually, this happens when a hero gets caught up in a similar event in the current story.
If their ghost is the traumatic experience of near drowning when they were a child, the hero will likely end up at the mercy of a villain trying to drown the hero in a lake.
If their ghost is the failure to save a victim twenty years ago, the hero will again face that situation. This time, the hero overcomes fear or guilt, embodied by the ghost, and makes a different judgment, demonstrating that they are free of the ghost. This moment of overcoming usually happens in the final act.
For an example of this, just watch the aforementioned Top Gun: Maverick. And you can read any decent thriller, mystery, or procedural (or watch the movie or series), and you’ll see just how often an event in the hero’s past (be it the past of a detective, cop, or private eye) haunts them personally as they work on a current case that dredges up if not also directly involves their past trauma.
Once you know about the ghost, you’ll see it everywhere.
The ghost is not just a symbol of sadness or grief. It’s not generic or typical. It’s not just a random bad thing that happened to them. It’s often a bad outcome the hero feels responsible for. They screwed up. They failed tragically. They made a bad decision, usually out of fear. And a similar event is going to traumatize them again and keep them from acting unless they can overcome their fear of repeating their same mistakes.
A ghost can be an excuse for revenge, like for Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride (1987): “You killed my father. Prepare to die.” But the ghost really takes its toll not externally but internally. A ghost is the effect of the past on the hero’s personality. The hero can’t grow until they deal with the ghost of their past.
Speaking of Inigo Montoya, I should point out that he is a minor character, not the hero, which reminds me that the ghost is also a good strategy to use for many of your characters, not just the hero. A ghost can help explain a character’s motivations, and characters differ in how they react to their ghosts. One character might seek vengeance while another seeks justice. Another may live in denial. One might be a perennial optimist; another, a cynic. In any case, characters other than the hero can have arcs in which they deal differently with their ghosts.
The ghost often comes up in the logline, as with Top Gun: Maverick, to define the nature of the eventual transformation of the hero.
The ghost is what the hero fears. It’s what they need to overcome. It’s often an expression of an internal flaw: they need to overcome this ghost to move on in their life. It’s not just the event but their own failure to process that event. They live in denial, act out in anger, surrender to depression out of guilt or cowardice, and maybe even isolate themselves in apathy, sarcasm, and cynicism.
See Rick in Casablanca (1942) for an example of the wisecracking cynic hardened by heartbreak.
We often relate to characters suffering in this way because most of us have our own ghosts: a failure, a mistake, a humiliation. We acted rashly or selfishly. We made a wisecrack that hurt someone’s feelings. We hesitated to stand up for someone. We broke someone’s heart. We wish we could roll back time, take it back, and get another chance to do the right thing.
Or maybe we have a persistent character flaw that we have yet to overcome—pettiness, resentment, impulsiveness, cowardice, laziness—and because we nurse an old wound, we still, to this day, give into that flaw even when we have every opportunity to choose differently.
Something bad may have happened to us—an act of violence, a childhood of poverty, a dream crushed by an overbearing authority—and that bad thing shrunk our spirit and stunted our growth. Maybe we are still awash in anger and resentment; we have not yet faced our trauma. We have not identified it, defined it, and called it out. Until we do so, the ghost wins, and we scrape by day to day, gnawing on the bones of a meager life in the shadows of what we did not dare to become.
A hero with a ghost can embark on the adventure of a story, and bearing witness to the hero overcoming that ghost, we can see our own potential for facing our fears, forgiving ourselves and others, making better decisions, and living our genuine lives.
I like thinking of the ghost, when developing the characters in my story, because a ghost (and not backstory) is embodied with purpose.
The ghost lends a unique, personal motive to the hero, which means we as the audience have a means to sympathize with the hero and a way to anticipate, nervously, what’s going to happen in the story.
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