The interface to enter a backstory for your sovereign is sorely lacking in polish and usability, because, quite frankly, the interface was never actually finished.  The random name and backstory for a sovereign at the start do work, which is great, but if I want to actually modify the backstory, there are lots of problems:

1) The scroll bar doesn't work.  It's not hooked up to the text area at all.  You can click the arrows or drag the tiny little bar around, but there's no point, because it doesn't do anything.  The scroll bar doesn't even scale in size if text is put into the field.  It does, however, go to the part of the bar you click on, so the basic user interaction is all present.

2) The text itself flows beyond the visible bounds of the text area.  It will go as far right as the right edge of the scroll bar (there is a visible border there), and as far down as the buttons to save, go back, or go forward.  These bounds might scale based on resolution (I'm using 1920x1200), but either way, the text is way out of them.

3) It's not possible to select text, let alone cut or copy with hotkeys.  Paste, however, works fine.  The cursor instantly moves to the place you click.  Speaking of the cursor, it doesn't flash or anything.  It's just a vertical black bar.

4) Hitting the enter key pretty much makes the interface bomb out.  Not only is a newline not inserted, the text is scrolled all the way above the screen.  It is retrievable by clicking near the top of the text area.

5) The text scrolling is pretty rudimentary.  The text area picks a word to start displaying at, and then it keeps going.  A nice, good line wrap would be much better, especially if the line wrap doesn't count the cursor as taking up space, as the Galciv one does (Scroll in a small description box in Galciv.  You will not get the same words on each line.  I forget if this applies to Galciv, Galciv 2, or both.).  In fact, clicking somewhere near the top and making the text scroll multiple times without repositioning the cursor can cause the entire text area to be a big giant black blob.

Edit: Pasting with Ctrl+V *can* insert newlines.  They are read as /two/ characters if hitting left and right to scroll, presumably \r and \n.  Also, the text will go to the bottom of the entire interface with the help of newline characters.  Without them, I got the text to about the bottom of the back/save/next buttons.  I tried to copy and paste just a single newline from this edit window a few times and got a crash.  Here's the crash dump: http://www.mediafire.com/file/cj1bc0kc81kxkf5/Elemental1_06-2010-08-29T21-18-38-36.zip

Edit: 6) Hitting the button to go to the main menu and then hitting the create sovereign button again does not update the backstory at all, except that the sovereign's name is changed to that of the previous random sovereign.  Changing the gender of the sovereign updates the name and gender-specific pronouns, but I would assume that each sovereign name, whether randomly generated or from a list, is associated with a new backstory.  In fact, it appears that there's just the one default backstory, and the first time the user goes into the Sovereign Creation interface, there is no name listed in the default backstory at all.

tl;dr: The entire GUI for entering a backstory for one's sovereign is unfinished.  Please finish it!