Backstories are world-building for the campaign. Honestly, your prose isn’t going to come up. Hear me out.

Your character backstory isn’t a book, or a novella, or even a short story. It’s a character backstory, a reference document for the ways in which your character has interacted with the world in the past. Once you embrace the paradigm shift, writing a backstory becomes a lot easier.

Let me demonstrate.

Easy to Reference

• Bold words are easy to read. Adding details afterwards is great, but being able to vertically scan down a list makes finding details during gameplay much easier. No one likes waiting for someone to find the name of an NPC. If they’re also an Important NPC, the scene is undermined by the Friction of looking up the name.
• Headings organise information. Making someone read a long document to get a brief overview is a bad practice. Make scanning reference documents easy. Add headings.
• Make names findable. Put names in italics. Suddenly, no more shuffling through papers trying to find the name of the strict nun who raised you as an orphan. Instead, look at your Childhood section, scan down for Catholic Schooling, then over for italics, and you’ve found the name of The Penguin.

Easy to Expand

• Add details easy. Instead of figuring out how to restructure a paragraph to add more details… throw in another bullet and some detail text.
• Update with new details fast. Keeping track of details is hard. Especially when you should be concentrating on the scene in front of you, and then the game is over, and you’ll get to it later… or add a brief bolded description and fill in the details later.
• Copy-paste shared experiences. Ludicrous, I know, but what if everyone wrote their backstory in a way that made building shared experiences easy, so that in Session 0 people could agree on details? Then copy the details onto their own backstory sheet? Madness.

Easy to Write

• Just the facts. No prose, no worries, use the energy to figure out character motivation, influences, and ways to contribute to the story.
• Easy to draft. Outlines are easier to write than first drafts, let alone final drafts. Suddenly, getting to Session 0 with a relevant backstory is easy. Changing details to better suit the group? Also easy. Whenever possible, remove friction.
• Fill a format. The fear of the empty page is reasonable. Creating headers (Childhood, Rising Struggle, Professional Training, etc.) makes it easy to picture life stages, removing the empty page. No novel necessary.

Conclusion

Making an interesting character is intimidating enough. Forcing yourself to also write interesting prose can be a strain too far.

By all means, if you love creative writing, do it and enjoy yourself. Just let the decision be an active choice, rather than the default.