One of the good things about Ayn Rand is that she wrote a lot, and one of the bad things about Ayn Rand is that she wrote a lot. What she also did was wrote a lot about her characters and the story behind them that didn’t make the published version. After I first read Atlas Shrugged and finished it 18 years later, I reread the introduction in my version that explained the lengths Rand went through to document the history of her characters. There was even one character, a priest, that she tried to fit into the story but ultimately rejected it because she said she couldn’t make it believable (if only she thought similarly about her other characters).
When I first read about that, I was baffled. Why would someone spend so much time writing something that no one will see? It wasn’t until I finished the second draft of my current work in progress that I learned that managing a coherent and partially comprehensive history of a novel’s characters — for the author’s eyes only — was a common practice. Go to any writer or author blog and do a search for “backstory” and you’re sure to get something. To use a common metaphor, readers see the tip but the author should be able to see the whole iceberg.
I had the history of everyone in my novel in mind but I didn’t put it in writing, which was a big mistake. After completely gutting literally half of my novel’s text I had to rework some scenes and overall themes, some of the characters’ history had to change, too. This was for the better since a lot of the history of my protagonist, which gives birth to her motivations, was clichéd. Badly, badly clichéd. Though I had everything about her memorized and having the backstory handy would have made it easier from the the get-go since I could weed out the badly, badly-clichéd elements of her past before fleshing them out and making the ugliness more official. I would’ve also been spared the amateur mistake of having to explain everything in the novel; with a backstory you can more easily pick and choose which parts of the characters’ past to reveal as the plot warrants it.
Lessons learned and all that. Now if Rand would’ve done something about the Francisco d’Anconia speech…