So, I'm dragging the finale of my back story out sentence by sentence, all the while it's kicking and screaming that it's not good enough, that I should trash the last 10,000 words I've written and redo them.

But I slog on anyway. That's what rewrites are for.

But to my main point.

My two main characters (two brothers) are, in this first very rough draft, the same people they are at the end as they were at the beginning. Now, when I do eventually return to this back story to try and turn it into a publishable manuscript, how I present these two brothers at the beginning needs to be very different than how I have them now.

I didn't really worry about this lack of character progression because I was more interested in nailing who they become. And what better way then to write as much of them as those people as possible.

It will actually be easier for me to work their character growth and development backwards. I have enough of a solid story structure to know the key events that I will use to make those forward leaps in their characterization journey.

It may sound strange but working the plot from beginning to end and then reworking the characterization from end to beginning seems to be what this particular story needs.

The WIP I finally hope to return to in May will not use this technique as I've had the luxury of writing the key characters in situations much later in their lives. So, I've a built in construct to build my characters this way.

Since I move around the time line quite a bit I think this is something I've just fell into development-wise. I know not every story I'll write will have this luxury of back and forth character development and revelation, but that's fine. I've worked on other stories where everything I'm writing is made up as I go, including all of the world building.

I just find it interesting to be working with characters as I jump in and out of their rather long lives at various times back and forth along their time lines.