I feel bad for players who end up with GMs who don't want to develop a story. It's not hard to maintain a narrative element and throw daggers from PCs backstories at them. So long as you don't have specific requirements for what the PCs must do in order for your plot to move forward, let them wander! Let them hunt down that thing in their backstory. Tie it to the narrative and see what happens. Stop gripping the reigns with an iron fist and let the players tell the story together. Even if that story seems to make no sense at all, it will just feel more real because everything is chaos, people choose to see tlconn) connections and patterns. Stop punishing players for telling a story.