You’ve spent hours, maybe months, developing a rich background for each of your characters and the world they inhabit. As the creator of your story, you are omniscient. You know why your characters behave the way they do and how their past has fashioned them into who they are. And now your job is to somehow bring out those bits of history through your story.
The challenge is to learn ways to do this so the information comes out organically and doesn’t feel as if a dump truck has just unloaded six tons of rock on a reader’s head. Many writers give in to the temptation to tell readers everything they think they need to know up front. They figure the more readers know about a character, the more that character will resonate. But all that backstory just slows the action down. Tell the reader just enough for the scene to make sense. You can fill in the blanks later.
Sure, there may come moments in life when a friend sits you down and, in an hour-long monologue, tells you his life story. Or details how his planet was terraformed and attacked by an ancient race. Or explains his entire family tree back fourteen generations. But even in real life, chances are you will fall asleep mid-babble and wish you had stayed home under the covers.
Readers sometimes wish they could run on stage in a novel and tell the author to stop dumping information. “Just let me watch the story!” they scream. “Stop telling me all that boring stuff.”
Boring? We authors think all that backstory is not only riveting but essential. Surely readers want—no, need—to hear it all. And the sooner they do, the better they will understand and enjoy the novel.
But honestly, that’s far from the truth. Too much backstory is a fatal flaw in fiction, but just the right amount will enhance the story, engaging and informing the reader while not interrupting the present action.
This is how seasoned fiction writers handle backstory masterfully, and you can to!
Weave It In
Backstory is essential, but we must write it in such a way that it does not feel artificial, forced, or so out of balance with the rest of the story that it breaks that spell.
Ultimately, the key is to weave backstory so that it is always an underlying part of a scene, not a break from it.
That means sprinkling it in dialogue when it feels natural for the character to be talking about a past incident. Same goes for a thought that pops into the character’s head while they are doing something significant and useful to the scene. While dialogue is an excellent way to incorporate backstory, it needs to be in the right context.
We never want to dump a ton of information that seems forced because it has nothing to do with the scene’s present action.
The key to backstory is your scene’s purpose. If some bits of backstory are important or would help advance your plot, by all means shine a light on them.
Consider Your Scene Type
What type of scene are you writing? If it’s a low-energy, contemplative scene in which your character is doing a lot of thinking and processing (because of action in the prior scene), then her mind may jump back to past events more readily than in a high-action scene in which she basically has no time to ponder such things.
I often edit and critique scenes that show a character doing something very important with a ticking clock, yet she seems to be spending ten minutes reflecting on some past event.
If your character is freefalling off the side of a building, praying she will land in that big bin of blankets and not the sidewalk, she isn’t going to think of all the times she fell growing up and her various past injuries. She’s, at most, going to see her life “flash before her eyes” (but don’t be that corny!) before she gets to the ground in a few seconds.
Make Sure You Have Enough Backstory!
You may feel backstory is evil, since so many people warn against using it. But use it we writers must! We just need to take care not to overuse it.
Oftentimes, inexperienced novelists, in an attempt to leave out the backstory, do not include enough. Readers end up confused and frustrated if they don’t get some backstory, especially in the first scene or two of a novel. This is not often discussed, but it’s a big problem in first novels.
Leaving out important past details about characters can greatly weaken your story! We need to develop compassion or empathy for your protagonist, but if you don’t tell us enough about him and his past, what he’s gone through and struggled with, you risk losing reader engagement.
For me to care about Jeff when he’s fumbling his job interview, I need to understand how his father’s abuse and dismissal of him has wounded him.
Again, as a reader, I don’t want an info dump. I just need to hear a few thoughts in his head that put his emotional state in perspective. Sometimes even one line will do.
Do Your Homework!
The best way to get the hang of sprinkling in backstory effectively is to grab your favorite novels (preferably cheap paperback editions from a used bookstore) and a yellow highlighter pen and mark up all the lines of backstory the author includes in her scenes. Great writers will have a nice little sprinkling throughout, with maybe an occasional larger passage (a paragraph or two) when it’s needed and in just the right place (and usually not in the opening scenes).
Pay attention to these rules in particular as you study other works:
- The backstory needs to be brought out in an organic or natural-seeming way through the POV character. Instead of dumping in a few lines here or there at random from a list of key past details deemed necessary for the reader to know, an experienced author will slip in these points triggered by the present action or dialogue. For example, if I need the reader to know my character was injured in the war twenty years ago, I may show him reach up to a high shelf to grab something and get a stab of pain in his shoulder, which triggers his memory of how that bullet sliced through his muscle. As he rubs his shoulder, I’d have three or four lines, max, of him thinking of the past—in a way to get across all the info I need at that moment—then get right back into present action.
- The information needs to be pertinent and important to the story. You may have pages of information about each character’s past (which is a very good thing before you start writing your novel). Of course, you aren’t going to use all that backstory. In fact, you may use very little. The purpose of developing rich, detailed pasts for all main characters is to make them real. But for the most part those details inform the character’s mind-set, personality, attitudes, fears, dreams, and goals. The author needs to know all those little details, but the reader doesn’t. So when adept writers bring out bits of backstory, they make sure every bit counts, either to reveal something about the plot, build the world, or create empathy and understanding of the character—the last being extremely important.
- Just enough information is given to provide what’s needed in a particular scene, leaving much unexplained. What can’t be shown through a character’s eyes during the action of a scene can be brought out in dialogue, direct thoughts, or narrative (which, in either first-person or third-person POV, is still essentially coming through a character’s head).
Backstory isn’t evil. It’s essential to any great story. The trick is to learn how to wield it proficiently.
Readers want mystery. They don’t want to be told everything (and more), and especially not all at once, at the start of a story. A few hints of mood, a few lines of dialogue, or a brief direct thought can go a long way to revealing much about your plot and character motivation. Tension is built by curiosity—by readers wanting to know what is really going on, what might happen next. If you take all the mystery out of your scenes, you’ll lose reader interest.
It’s important that you, the writer, know everything about your characters and the world you put them in. But your reader doesn’t need to know it all, even if you feel they should. Conversely, don’t hold back too much of your character’s background and motivation. You want readers to empathize and understand your characters’ motivation. And a key to understanding anyone is to learn about their past. So work to find a balance with backstory.
Got any tips or pet peeves about backstory? Share in the comments!
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