A client in the early first-draft stage wonders whether he should spend time writing character backgrounds. It’s a good question.
Personally, I have probably tens—maybe hundreds—of thousands of words in character interviews, backgrounds, childhood stories, 360-degree “performance reviews,” horoscopes… so you’re not going to hear from me that you shouldn’t do it.
I’d just caution you that while some of that material wound up subtly on the page and some of it was worthwhile exploration, a lot of it was resistance—just a way of writing while not really writing. There’s also some risk of creating material that you love but that doesn’t belong on the page, which might later be a struggle to cut.
But you do need to understand your characters—what they want and need, and how those wants and needs came to be—and in that sense, character backgrounds are worth spending some time on.
One additional word of advice, and I wish I’d understood this MUCH earlier in my own writing process:
Stories aren’t real life. Characters aren’t real people.
They have verisimilitude, not actuality.
Real people are all over the place in their wants and needs, while a character in a story must be driven by a single overarching need. The need comes from the internal genre (arc) of the story you’re telling. Little particulars like their hometown or their favorite color or the car they drive can certainly come into the picture (that’s the specificity that gives rise to universality), but it’s the want and need that drive their actions and choices, and it’s their actions and choices that make the story.
So…if character sketches and backgrounds help you create well-rounded, “real” characters whose wants and needs have real-feeling roots, then it’s a worthwhile thing to spend some time on.