Tagged: backstory

Everyone Is the Hero of Their Own Backstory

Backstory can be tricky to manage. How much of it to show, and how to present it, are thorny questions. It’s really a matter of drawing a line between those things that you as an author need to know, and those that the reader needs. What goes into that second category is the difficult answer to come up with. Some say that the reader needs no backstory whatsoever, while others say it all depends.

But we’re going to focus on the other side of the equation today. So, which things must you, the author, know about your characters’ backstories? All of them. All the things.

Our approach is to flesh out everybody’s backstories during our preliminary phase, which mostly happens while walking the dogs. (If they get bored with all the exposition, they never complain.) What we’ve learned is that there’s a lot of value in knowing the detailed history of even a very minor character. Naturally, it helps us create vivid depictions, and it allows all the cast members to show up ready for work. But in addition to these fairly obvious gains, digging into secondary and even tertiary characters’ pasts has produced a few interesting outcomes.

  • Minor characters have morphed into major characters.
  • Minor characters’ peccadilloes have answered questions about major characters.
  • Important world-building notes have emerged.
  • We’ve spotted useful plot connections and subplots.

Just remember: now that you know Marcel got in trouble when he was in third grade for trying to cheat on a test, you’re not obligated to tell anybody else.

The Backstory Conundrum

Too much backstory can be a major problem. No argument about that. What might be worth arguing over is the trend toward saying that any backstory is too much backstory.

Here’s the thing about backstories: everyone has one, and most of them aren’t very interesting. By definition, they’re made up of the stuff that went on before the story kicked off. Often the details are things that the author needs to know, but the reader does not. That’s a hard distinction sometimes.

First, go ahead and write out the backstory. As stated above, it’s stuff you need anyway. Get it down, so it’s not buzzing around inside your brain distracting you from the real story, and so you can refer to it.

Okay, now: does it belong in the finished manuscript? There’s a simple test for that.

The first question to answer is, is it relevant? If it is, then move on to the chart.

 this backstory is… Predictable Surprising
Tedious No. No.
Interesting No. Maybe.

 

Be brutally honest about these questions. The reader doesn’t need to know that your criminologist was in a spelling bee in third grade. (Unless she now uses a spelling-based meditation technique to clear her mind and see how the clues connect. In that case, this reader would be curious about where such a trait came from.)

More important, the reader also doesn’t need a detailed overview of your criminologist’s studies in law and forensics at a respected university. Just give us passing mention to confirm that, yes, she went to school. That’s expected. However, if she pulled twenty successful bank heists and was never arrested, which is how she knows so much about crime, well that’s different. Passing mention would feel like cheating. We want to go along on one of those heists.

Even when you can honestly tell yourself that it’s a maybe-means-yes situation, bear in mind that every paragraph of backstory is a paragraph that’s diverting from the main plot. If the writing sizzles your readers will happily follow along — to a point. (Just show the climax of the spelling bee, rather than the whole thing. Definitely skip the training montage.)

It’s great to have a partner to discuss backstory with. Helps keep it in perspective. How do you approach backstory in your writing? How do you feel about it in your reading?

Our Plot-to-Backstory Ratio is Now Favorable!

r-avatarNow that our note-taking has reached the point where we had to order refills for our favorite pen, Jen decided it was time to get everything from the steno pad typed up and organized. Which led to the happy surprise discovery that the preponderance of our notes have to do with the actual story, rather than the backstory.

During our conversations from which these notes are generated, we tend to spend a lot of time on the stuff that’s led up to the point where we will join the story, the “how did they get that way” of our various new cast members. While it’s vital for us to have a sense of history with these characters, we’re acutely aware that hardly any of the details will make it into the manuscript, and so we became concerned that these rabbit holes were distracting us from plotting the story.

Getting a rough plot laid out really didn’t take all that long. But as soon as we started drilling down on a story beat, we had to answer questions that hinged on backstory, and that meant coming up with said backstory. Then we’d climb back up and look at another story beat, which necessitated another round of backstory development. A few such sessions quickly resulted in continuity problems within the emerging backstory, and resolving those sent tremors up into the plot. It’s taken a few iterations, but the first half(?) of the plot is now stabilized pretty well.

The metaphors above might suggest pickaxes and helmets with lamps on them, but our tools of choice during this work are in fact two kinds of wrenches.