The video is good overall, but what I liked was how it explained the concept of the "Ghost" in terms of character backstory. The video quotes John Truby's The Anatomy of Story and describes the Ghost as an important moment in the character's backstory "that still haunts the hero in the present... an open wound that is often the source of the hero's psychological and moral weakness." While stuff like that is really obvious when it comes to writing, hearing it explained always causes one to reflect on its use in writing, and how one has used it in their own.
Back when I took Creative Writing class as an undergrad, I learned pretty quickly that I had a problem with going too much into detail regarding a character's backstory. Our first writing assignment had a word limit of about 3,500 words, but my first draft amounted to roughly 5,000 (!). The most valuable lesson I learned was that a backstory doesn't need to be super-detailed, but rather just a glimpse at the defining moment that explains the main conflict of the tale, what hang-up still causes doubt or inner conflict for the character.
In my short story, "Tik-Tik," the protagonist's backstory was that she had become pregnant not too long after sleeping with her boyfriend - I can't recall exactly how long, but in my notes she was still able to hide her pregnancy. Being part of a relatively conservative family, and a high schooler who saw someone close to her become ostracized for being a teen mother, her natural response was to delay telling her family about it (and being Pro-Life herself, abortion wasn't exactly an option). All of this is explained only through one or two paragraphs, and a few sentences and conversations that allow the reader to telegraph what the girl's situation is. The main conflict, however, is that she believes herself to be stalked by a Tik-Tik, a type of Aswang that feeds off of the unborn fetuses inside pregnant women. Whether or not there really is an Aswang stalking her, or if it's just her guilt grating on her mind combined with being in a rural, legend-haunted region of the Philippines, is left ambiguous until the end. The emotional conflict inside her is what drives the story, but it was a later addition that I added in around the sixth draft or so - adding in a compelling backstory just made things more engaging.
I pulled off a similar use of backstory in my Madoka Magica fanfiction, "Prayers and Wishes." Being fanfiction, it may or may not be contradicted by canon later on, but as there was still a hole to be filled, I decided to have fun (relatively speaking) and speculate. The crux of my fanfic was Episode 10 of the show, specifically the scene where Homura makes her wish to go back in time and save Madoka's life. There's a moment before she makes her wish where she glances down at Madoka's body, before wiping the tears from her eyes and standing up. I found myself wondering "What was going through her mind at that moment? And is there any reason why she would give up her soul to save a friend?" Well, the solution to that was obviously because Madoka was the first person in her new school to be nice to her; but then I wondered, did she have friends before she transferred in? And if she did, did something happen to that friend that she blames herself (if someone wrongly) for? And so came the character of Aiko Fukui, inspired loosely by Helen Burns of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, a girl who befriended Homura during her time at a Catholic orphanage, and who Homura was forced to watch slowly deteriorating, with no power to change her friend's fate at all, an event that still haunts her in the fic's present day. Since I was writing fiction based off of an existing property, I naturally had to work backwards, essentially reverse-engineering a story out of what was already shown in canon. The story is far from perfect, but it was a lot of fun, and a nice distraction from writer's block.
Backstory's are always fun to write; they get into the minds of the characters and allow people to sympathize with them. And they make a story's conflict have an emotional force that makes people eager to see how the characters handle what they are dealt with.
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