While visiting Georgia this past week, I took time to have lunch with two old, dear friends: one of my closest pals in high school and our mutual favorite teacher.

We were reveling in our reunion and how good it was to reconnect with people who knew us from our past, who had played important roles in our lives, when our teacher, Mrs. Corley (who insists we call her Connie now, but we both stumble over it every time), true to her English-teacher roots pulled up a quote about long friendships by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of the book The Little Prince, and read it to us.

Here’s part of it*:

“Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak.”

Relationships Make Us Who We Are

The friendships and key relationships we form in our youth are both testaments to who we once were, and such a part of what shapes us into who we become.

As we sat at lunch catching up, for example, I remembered all the reasons I liked my friend back in high school: her simple genuineness and authenticity, so meaningful to me at a time when it felt like both were thin on the ground.  I remembered how easy I always felt with her, as if no more were required of me than to just be myself—another feeling in short supply for me in school, when I was a drama geek and word nerd and felt like the things I was weren’t enough for any of the in-crowds.

Mrs. Corley was the first teacher I had who taught her students how to think for themselves, not just parrot back correct answers, and made us feel our opinions and interpretations had validity and import. She took us seriously at a time when it felt that not a lot of adults did. And she seemed to see something special in me that made me begin to believe that maybe it was actually true.

Finding “my people” in high school made my experience at that tumultuous time infinitely better. As it can be for many of us, high school was not my halcyon days—in some ways it was the nadir from which I have slowly grown ever since into the confidence and comfort in my own skin that I longed for then.

I realized, reminiscing with these old friends over lunch, that those days were when those acorns were planted, as Saint-Exupéry says. Thanks in part to these two friends I felt seen in high school. I was known. It was okay to be me. “Me” might be an okay thing to be.

I spent most of my visit in Georgia over the weekend with the people from my past—between the lunch with my friends, a relative’s wedding that reunited me with people I hadn’t seen in decades, and a visit to my family, where we all, of course, revert to some degree to the people we were in childhood, juxtaposed against the ones we have become since.

I am who I am in no small part because of all these people. The “me” I am now was forged in those fires—what I like about myself and the things I deplore; the habits and quirks and predilections I have; what resonates with me and what strikes a jarring nerve; how I react to things and how I think about them.

Your Characters’ Past Shapes Their Present

Fully developed characters don’t spring from a vacuum any more than we do as human beings. They, too, are a product of all the experiences, all the relationships, all the interactions they have experienced before readers join them in the pages of your story.

The trick is balancing how much of that readers need to know versus what you may know about your characters, as their creator. As the author you should always know more—but that doesn’t mean you have to create an exhaustive “character bible” about their entire lives, or put all of it on the page. That’s overwhelming, and not all of it is germane to the story you’re telling.

Fully developed characters don’t spring from a vacuum any more than we do as human beings. They, too, are a product of all the experiences, all the relationships, all the interactions they have experienced before readers join them in the pages of your story.

But if you want your characters to feel real and fully fleshed, it’s worth considering the factors and people who helped make your characters who they are now—and how those relationships may still play a role in their lives in the current story.

For instance, in Kate Quinn’s The Alice Network, one of the protagonists, Charlie, undertakes a quest to find out what happened to her favorite cousin. It’s her driving motivation throughout the story, and pursuit of that goal is the direct cause of every event of the plot in her storyline.

So readers need to understand why her cousin is so important to her, and Quinn shares that with glimpses of their childhood bond, and why the two girls clung to each other amid the vicissitudes of their respective immediate families—which means readers need a sense of those family dynamics as well as the two girls’.

In the present-day story, Charlie flees her overbearing mother and controlling father to seek her cousin who went missing after the war. Stakes rise even higher with the fact that Charlie is pregnant from one of a series of meaningless relationships she had in college amid her overwhelming grief for her brother, who committed suicide after returning home from the same war—more legacy in the present from Charlie’s past. That means we have to have a sense of each of those characters, too, and the relationships among them and Charlie.

None of these secondary characters are main ones—and only Charlie’s mother actually appears on the page in real-time scenes. But each is essential for setting up her character, her arc, the plot, and the stakes. Cardboard-cutout “prop” characters won’t work—readers won’t care and won’t invest. We need to “see” these people, feel the tenor of the relationships, viscerally understand their impact on Charlie and how they continue to affect and shape her character and her actions.

Use Your Own Life to Inform Your Characters’ Lives

I’m a big fan of what psychologists tongue-in-cheek call “me-search”—plumbing ourselves and our own experiences to better understand our work. It’s a direct, visceral way to learn to know our characters, who they are, why they do what they do, and how to flesh them out fully on the page.

Read more: "The Best Character Tool You May Not Be Using"

Who are the people who have shaped you, helped create your values—either through inculcating them directly in you or in reaction against what you saw and didn’t want to emulate? Who played a meaningful role in your life, even if they didn’t play a starring one, and how? I had Mrs. Corley for only a few classes in high school, but decades later she remains a profound impact on my life, my character, and my career. I can almost trace a direct line from my passion for editing to the enthusiasm and joy she brought to analyzing literature in her classes, and the efficacy she made me feel.

How did your family influence you in ways that reverberate today and affect your choices, actions, reactions? What friends helped you define your idea of friendship that dictates the ones you have today? What mentors did you have, and how did they help shape the life you currently lead, the person you are now? What lessons did you learn—and from whom? Who left scars, and why—and how do those wounds impact your life now?

In creating your own stories, consider questions like this for your characters. Not all elements of their past will be relevant to the story you’re telling—but you might find buried treasure to mine in discovering your character’s central wound, in defining and deepening who they are and how they behave, in delineating what motivates their actions, what shaped their goals, what creates the stakes for them as they pursue those goals.

• If you already know how you want your character to be, to behave, to act in the story, then mine backward to make them feel cohesive and real: Where might those traits have come from? Where in the past—and with whom—are their actions rooted? Which of those people still play a role in their lives in this story, and how do they continue to affect and influence your character’s actions, choices, arc?
• Or, if your character development process starts from the ground up, then extrapolate forward in putting meat on the bones of their characterization: Use the information you know about their past to bring depth and verisimilitude to their actions and behaviors in the present. How might moving away from family, friends, and school at a young age, for instance, impact the way they form relationships now (or don’t)? Or how might their upbringing as one of five kids in a big, outgoing family shape their choices and actions with their own partner and family? How might a neglectful, disapproving parent shape their psyche, their vulnerabilities, their longings?

Read more: "Working Backward to Create Fully Fleshed, Compelling Protagonists" 

Even though the holy grail of story is always to move it forward, as Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That’s true for all of us—and our characters—our pasts inextricably threaded into the weft of the tapestry of our lives.

Don’t expect to plant the acorn of your characters in the morning and sit under the shade of their oak in afternoon. The relationships from the past that may have contributed to who your characters are in the story you’re telling can give them roots that help make your characters feel vivid, fully fleshed, and real.

*The full text of Saint-Exupéry’s quote is about the gradual loss of our old friends with age, and to be honest it left the three of us feeling a bit weepy:

“Bit by bit… it comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this one garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true mourning, which, though it may not be rending, is yet a little bitter. For nothing, in truth, can replace that companion. Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak.

“So life goes on. For years we plant the seed, we feel ourselves rich; and then come other years when time does its work and our plantation is made sparse and thin. One by one, our comrades slip away, deprive us of their shade.”