Mapping A Character's Backstory

Marcus' excellent post about the nature and emergence of streamtelling, as opposed to the beginning-middle-and-end-dominated craft of storytelling, made me think about the role of back story in the formation of a character. Any writer who's ever developed a complex, rich and interesting character -whether it's for games, novels or film- has had the pleasure of mapping out the character's back story, i.e. its history, background and life leading up to the point where the story picks up on him/her.

As explained here, questions you should ask yourself when writing your character's back story are as specific as "What did your hero eat for breakfast? What does he carry in his wallet? What was the most traumatic experience of his life?". Detail matters. The more detail the back story contains, the fuller the character is likely to become, and the more interesting the resulting story.

The DGRs seem to be a perfect way to construct such back story. Their retweets give insight in their daily thoughts, actions and routine. They don't immediately reveal the major plotpoints or events in a character's life, but reveal their life little by little, thought by thought, retweet by retweet. By streamtelling -derived from the neologism "to streamtell"- these detailed dots, a writer can build an interesting back story to a character over time.

Great characters don't emerge overnight, they emerge over time, through detailed exploration of their background and lives. DGRs enable a writer to construct such back story through social intelligence.