I’ve become a tad introspective about the Rules of Writing. You know the ones, my authorial friends; thou shalt not use adverbs, thou shalt minimize adjectives, thou shalt not reveal Back Story in the first chapter, thou shalt mesmerize your audience from the first word.
If your hero is up against a villain, better make sure that villain’s powerful. Sure, you need conflict to make a story. Or should I say, an interesting story. But the writer of a post iI just read used Voldemort and Sauron as her two examples of good villains.
My brother Fred and I were very close as we grew up in Perth. One abiding consideration was that our older siblings were much older than us so we were thrust together. We were roughly three years apart in age, but that translated to two years at school.
Characterisation is at the heart of any really good story as far as I’m concerned. Real people dealing with real situations. Or sometimes (as in speculative fiction) not-real situations. That’s when creating believable characters becomes absolutely crucial. If your characters aren’t believable, your reader won’t relate to them.
I’m busy at the moment doing some massive rewrites of early work and I’ve also spent some time doing some beta-reading. And backstory is the thing that sticks out.