Using Tragedy as a Crutch

This post won't be a review of a single book but instead a trend I notice in some authors or books. One thing some authors (the ones who aren't as good) that pump out a lot of books very quickly like to do is give a character a tragic back story. Because with throw in an imprisonment or, as awful as this is, a rape they think this makes a character different from all their others. Christine Feehan is a good example of using this crutch. She uses almost the exact same personalities for her male and female characters. She seemed to have run out of tragedy and slipped straight into horror with her characters. Yet none of them are really flushed out, because it's just a recycled character with a different history. Of course with her Carpathian series (and if you aren't familiar with Feehan it's just a fancy name for a vampire that can also do about a million other things, think Superman compared to Flash) she really does have the same history but with a couple new things to 'spice' things up. And I have read up to book number 19 so I know what I'm talking about with her series.

Feehan isn't the only author to do this, Gena Showalter also sometimes slips into this (but don't get me wrong, I do love Showalter). But as a reader/writer I find character development one of the most important things to story telling. If a character is weak, then the plot is weak. And giving them a tragic back story doesn't automatically flush them out. Small things matter like if their parents were married or if they divorced, if they moved around a lot, did they have a lot of friends? The reader doesn't need to know this but the author sure does, and if they don't then how can a reader feel connected to such a flat character. If they aren't flushed out they don't feel like a real person and instead stay on the pages instead of coming to life in our heads.