Ever get halfway through a story you’re telling and realize your listeners need a bit of historical context, some backstory, to understand what’s happening?
I went to a party on Saturday night, and while everyone was getting hammered, I went around and hid bits of raw meat all over the house. Beef, chicken, eggs, you name it, whatever I could find in my dad’s fridge. See, the girl hosting the party had spent the last school year terrorizing a friend of mine: spreading rumors, blaming her for vandalism, stuff like that. So anyway, several weeks go by. Party girl complains at lunch, loudly, about a stink in her house that nobody has been able to find. That is, until her mother finally got frustrated enough to call a professional home cleaner, and let’s just say that old meat no longer resembled meat when they found it.
Did you spot the backstory in the above paragraph?
Without knowing the party host had been terrorizing a friend, the narrator appears to be making mischief for the sake of making mischief. Worse, the narrator comes off as a complete and utter jerk. With the backstory, however brief, the narrator comes off more as a rebel, someone exacting revenge on behalf of a friend. The backstory is needed in the moment to understand the contextual landscape of the information being provided for the events at hand.
And when it comes to backstory, placement and effective weaving is key to giving your reader enough information without overwhelming them with a history lesson.
So, how can you craft artful backstory?
What is Backstory?
Backstory is a literary device that allows you to tell your reader what happened before page one of your story, and it influences your plot, themes, subtext, and characters, including character fears, motivations, values, goals, and worldview. Because backstory takes us back in time, though, it always disrupts the present narrative no matter how it’s delivered.
Exposition (which I used in the example paragraph above), dialogue (including internal thoughts), and flashbacks are the primary tools of backstory delivery. Authors wield backstory for lots of reasons, but knowing when to include backstory, and how much, often comes down to two critical questions:
- Does the reader need this information?
- Does the reader need this information right now?
If the answer to either of those questions is “no,” you likely have fluff, not effective backstory, and it can probably be cut without much damage, except the damage done to your pride if what you’re cutting was one of those blessed darlings everyone’s always talking about.
Avoid Backstory in the Opening Scene
When readers first encounter your story, they’re not generally looking for history lessons. Instead, they’re looking for the story that starts on page one. For this reason, most modern writing advice suggests avoiding backstory altogether until at least the second scene or second chapter, depending on the scope of your writing. And there’s a simple reason for this common suggestion:
Readers don’t yet care about your characters, so they don’t yet care about their backstories.
Modern readers are typically seeking emotional connections to the stories they read, and building those emotional connections means investing time building relationships between your readers and your main characters. Getting to know those main characters in their lives today, as if the reader could walk outside and meet them on the sidewalk, is a great way to make introductions. This is why many speculative fiction stories begin in medias res, in the middle of things, the literary equivalent of learning by doing.
Readers learn about the characters, and, thus, learn to care about them, by watching them navigate their day-to-day lives without expository details. Readers will catch up as they pick up bits of backstory over time to inform their understandings of current events.
If you do need to include backstory in the opening scene, ensure the backstory you include is absolutely critical for reader understanding of what is happening in the present timeline. And note that understanding doesn’t require a play-by-play of the events leading up to whatever is happening. A simple line of dialogue like, “I knew I should have grabbed my wallet,” probably works better than a paragraph detailing the ceramic plate on table in the front hall where your character happened to leave said wallet.
Now, there are plenty of novels that frontload backstory, and the frontloading method can work well when the backstory is necessary for long-term understanding, especially if the backstory comes back for the Boss Battle. Novels like The Three-Body Problem and The Passage come to mind (though, both of those novels are parts of a series, which is telling on its own).
Exercise: Open a standalone novel (or a few) on your shelf, preferably one published in the last fifteen years or so. Using a method that works for you (highlighter, margin comment, sticky note, dog ear, whatever) mark all the bits of backstory you find in the opening scene. What percentage (approximately) of the opening scene is backstory? Do all the bits of backstory help or hinder the reading experience? Why? Use what you learn to inform the types and amounts of backstory to include in your opening.
Don’t Rely on Flashbacks To Do the Heavy Backstory Lifting
You’re walking down the sidewalk and spot a piece of trash in the gutter that is just the right shade of blue. Suddenly, you’re transported to a time twenty years in the past to the day when such-and-such happened while you wore a shirt of that same color.
Flashing back to a time before is something that happens to us all. Memories recalled because of present stimuli send us all on a thought tangent or two from time to time. But if we’re honest with ourselves, these memories are brief, a flash of color and light and emotion, and they’re over. An entire memory is condensed into a handful of seconds that passes by unnoticed by those around us.
Your characters have these tangential moments, too, but if they’re detailed ad nauseum via offset flashbacks (not just being told as a story in the past tense), that instantaneity of the past memory gets lost, and the memory is inadvertently propped us as something more. Sometimes the expectation of “more” is the problem, especially if that memory doesn’t return for readers later with great importance.
Now, I’ll admit to having a personal bias here, because most flashbacks are unnecessary. In dual-timeline novels following characters in the past and the present with purpose, flashbacks aren’t offset as flashbacks at all. They’re part of the story itself. And while some stories are told entirely in flashback, like Heart of Darkness, the flashbacks read as a tale being told from a person who lived it. They aren’t offset and italicized in the middle of the chapter disrupting the narrative.
If you find yourself writing lots of offset flashbacks, you likely have a deeper storytelling problem, even if you haven’t identified it. Excessive flashback use may indicate that you don’t actually know your character well enough yet and may be using flashbacks as a get-to-know-them exercise. This, of course, is great for a first draft, when you’re telling yourself the story, but it’s not so great once you get to the final version of the story, the one you tell to readers.
Beyond knowing your characters well enough, excessive flashbacks can indicate you’ve chosen the wrong point of view, the wrong perspective character, or the wrong beginning for your story, all of which should be addressed as major issues outside of flashback use.
In fact, the only real purpose for a flashback is when the memory itself becomes the catalyst for advancing the plot in the present timeline. Almost any other use of flashback disrupts the storytelling enough that it can be excluded or broken into chunks and artfully weaved using the range of methods available (we’ll get to these in a moment).
Exercise: Find a novel on your shelf with lots of offset backstory structured as complete scenes, preferably a novel that alternates present with past flashbacks. Look at a selection of scenes from the novel, a flashback sandwich where the flashback is smushed between two scenes set in the present. How does the flashback inform each of the scenes it touches? What piece of information or story thread is woven through all three scenes? Could you remove the flashback scene and retain the meaning by adding an extra sentence or two to one of the scenes in the present? What would be lost if you did? What would be gained or opened up for interpretation?
Use All Backstory Delivery Methods Available to You
If all the backstory in your story is delivered by exposition — telling the reader about the past via omniscience or via internal thought structured as flashback — the backstory, no matter how potentially gripping, will fall flat. When readers encounter large chunks of text that take them out of the present moment, they often give themselves permission to take a break from reading, which means your book gets closed, and the lights get turned off. Varying backstory delivery methods keeps the revelation of information over time new and fresh, so the reader never feels like they’re being info-dumped on.
Just like readers want a healthy mix of setting, ideas, characters, and events, backstory is best served through a healthy mix of exposition, dialogue (including thought), and action. If you do need to divulge lots of backstory at once to give context to something the reader is about to encounter, make sure the divulgence makes sense for the character in the present moment. A conversation that highlights certain key points in a character’s backstory may be more powerful than a soliloquy or monologue (or the dreaded, As you know, Bob, conversation), which can derail the narrative.
Characters are people, and people aren’t always forthcoming about their pasts, nor do they always share complete information, even if they choose to share. Sure, sometimes a person will perform a tell-all that quickly devolves into TMI gossip, but most of the time, they slip in, even subconsciously, just enough to provide hints at their interiority. After all, a well-placed side comment from a good friend can say a lot using few words.
When your reader needs insight from the past that they can’t quite get naturally from the present, creatively including that insight in a sentence or two is probably enough for your reader, and that inclusion can be handled via a brief conversation, a momentary recollection, or a stray thought.
Exercise: Look at the novels you’ve already selected and analyzed. What type of backstory delivery was most predominant? Did the predominant delivery method work? Why? Did you note any backstory that seemed excessive or unnecessary? What about it didn’t work for you? What can you learn about artful inclusion of backstory from the novels you selected? Are there still open questions?
TL;DR: Too Much Backstory May Break Story Immersion
Humans spend a good majority of their time processing their interior states. What happened to them and how they feel about it. What they want and don’t have. What they’re anxious about. How they could have misplaced their house keys. How they’re going to manage tomorrow’s deadlines. Why that stranger’s comment from twenty years ago still stings. You know, all the good stuff. Many readers, though, choose fiction to take a break from all that introspection, at least their own introspection. They want fantasy, or a thrill, or whimsy, or skin-prickles, or a good cry, and they can get all that and more from a well-wrought fiction.
Spending all your time telling what comes before the story, though, means the actual story being told takes a backseat to the past. And nobody wants to be stuck in the past and unable to move forward. That’s how we devolve into anxiety monsters and become lifelong curmudgeons afraid of being hurt. Instead, start the real story, the story you need to tell, on page one. Pepper in backstory bit by bit, when necessary, to provide readers with context while avoiding detailing everything under the sun.
Realistically, readers probably need about a quarter of what you know about your character, so choose the quarter of your character’s history that gives the most insight into who that person is and provides the clearest and most articulate motivation for what they’re doing and how they will change over time.
So, how do you handle the artful inclusion of backstory in your novel? And, do you have an example of backstory handled well? Share in the comments, and help fellow writers wrangle their backstories.
Happy writing.
<3 Fal
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Fallon Clark is the book pal who helps you tell your story in your words and voice using editorial, coaching, writing, and project management expertise for revision assistance, one-on-one guidance, and ghostwriting for development. Her writing has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine. Check out her website, FallonClark.com, or connect with her on LinkedIn or Substack.
So true! Thanks for the article.
I drove cross-country with my son and golden retriever and it was an adventure and transformational, too. We ended up in California for ten years before coming back to the northeast. That journey had such an effect on me that two of my science fiction novels were immersed in elements of how it had altered my perceptions. The temptation to add back story or the history of one of the characters, an alien, was almost impossible to overcome in one book until I finally stopped trying to explain him and just, whenever he was in a scene, let myself experience who he was in that moment. Eventually, the back story returned in the last third of the book where it served to explain a critical point in the story. I have been conscious ever since of how much it matters not to lose the reader.
I love the humility of discovery in what you shared here, Regina, and I think you’re right on the mark when you say you “stopped trying to explain [the alien] nad just . . . let yourself experience who he was in that moment.” This is the path to artful backstory inclusion.
Thank you so much for covering this topic! It’s a tremendous help in improving my craft as a writer.
I’m thankful you asked! Well all get better when we help each other, so if other topics for exploration come up for you, let me know. 🙂