How much backstory can you include in the opening scene?

So, this post is here because of a recent comment by Mary Catelli, in which she commented that past perfect can be a sign of trouble in the opening scene. Which is one hundred percent true, NOT THAT YOU CAN’T USE IT AT ALL, but you really ought to notice you’re using the past perfect and ask yourself why and whether it’s a good idea. And that remains true throughout the novel: if you’re using the past perfect, why, and is that a good idea? And in general I would say that if you NEVER use the past perfect, that’s a problem, because that verb tense exists for a reason and if you don’t know how to use it properly, you should learn. BUT, if you’re putting a whole paragraph or scene into past perfect, why? Are you sure that’s a good idea?

Because there are only two reasons to do that, I think —

A) You’re summarizing something that happened in the past, or

B) You’re in a flashback.

And while sometimes you do want to summarize, that’s usually when something that happened is trivial both in plot terms and relationship terms. If anything was important, than probably it should be on the page in story-present.

And flashbacks can be useful, but are almost always more difficult to handle smoothly than not having a flashback, so you sure want to concentrate on smoothness if you use one. And part of smoothness involves verb tense and deciding how and whether to slide from past perfect to simple past and back again.

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Now, past perfect is the verb tense that goes: I suddenly realized that no! The villain had actually been Esmeralda! She had been working against us the entire time!

This is a verb tense that puts a FINISHED action in the past; and when we’re talking about writing a novel, then if the novel is written in the past tense, the simple past is acting as story-present, while the past perfect is true past, or finished past. King Arthur had drawn the sword from the stone is story-past. King Arthur drew the sword from the stone is story-present. Mary provided a link to this excellent substack post where she goes into all this and why it’s a problem to use the past perfect when you shouldn’t:

Jane came downstairs with the sword Excalibur glinting in her hand, which she had retrieved from its box where they had put it.

If [verb tenses like this] are in the beginning of the story, possibly the first line — either these stories are starting too late, or the characters are giving their backstory much too early. In the middle of the story, they are telling events out of sequence, which is less than ideal, and in the end, they are also distracting the readers from the drama of the climatic moment, but in the beginning, where you still have to hook the reader, establish what is going on, and limit confusion, they are a serious problem.

Avoiding the tense does not avoid the problem as such, since history can be festooned about a sentence with different structures.

At their centuries-old castle, the once-prominent noble family gathered to hear the will of the ancient patriarch, a general granted the ducal title by the king, dead long after his wife and many of his children.

I like all this, especially the note that the author might pour the past into a sentence without using the past perfect and that this still means there is a focus on the past, not on story-present. So the question is, are you telling the reader about something that happened in the past, or are your characters moving forward in story-present? Which they should be, most of the time, and Mary notes, correctly, that you can sometimes find yourself skipping the action and then reporting about it for no reason in the world. It just happened, oops, who knows why.

For me — and I noted this in the previous post — it happened because I was in a hurry to get to the next important scene, or the next scene I thought was important, and jumped over other scenes I thought were unimportant, and then discovered that I was reporting about those scenes using past perfect. Realizing this happened constitutes the solution: go back and put in the scenes rather than just reporting about them. I think this is usually how this problem happens for me and how I solve it.

Mary’s post, linked above, is a good one, and of course if you poke around, you will find other posts about this, such as this one: Hold Back the Back Story.

Some writing instructors say things like “no back story in the first fifty pages.” Some editors will be so bold as to say they would be happy if they saw NONE in the entire book. Maybe that won’t quite work for your book, but it’s sad to say that countless scenes start with a line or two in the present, and then, whoosh! There you are reading about the character’s early life or marriage or something she did right before the scene started. Which should make you ask: Are you really starting your story in the right place? More often than not, the answer is no. That’s what second and third drafts are for—throwing out your first scene or two.

Which, sigh, showcases a second common problem, which is overgeneralizing to the point that your writing advice becomes insanely stupid, which this is. I mean both the “no backstory in the first fifty pages” as well as the “no backstory ever,” and ONCE AGAIN I would suggest that novice readers pay attention to what actual authors do in real novels, because OBVIOUSLY THIS IS STUPID ADVICE. Also, I think writing coaches and editors may fall into this mode where they start to fault judge, basically, and throw the manuscript away the first time they see a “had,” and this is by no means helpful to anyone.

The actual, and much better, advice here is: IF you start with backstory, then you should ASK YOURSELF why and whether that is working. And if the answer is YES, then yay, and move on. It’s just that you should probably ask yourself that question. And fine, it’s true that usually you do not want to pile a lot of backstory into the opening scene, not because someone told you not to, but because this really doesn’t work well. But it’s up to you to decide.

But the linked post also includes this:

In an exercise [Donald Maas] had us do, we went through the first thirty pages of our novel, removed every single instance where we used back story or informative narration, and then chose only three brief sentences containing a “back story fact” we felt we really must include in the opening chapters so the reader would “get” the story.

And I think that would be interesting, but unnecessarily strict. I also think it would be as well to note up front that this is unnecessarily strict and you’re doing it because it’s interesting, not because it will actually turn out to be a great idea.

All right, let’s take a look at a real novel beginning and note the backstory, especially the past perfect.

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Beside the coals of the dying fire, within the trampled borders of our abandoned camp, surrounded by the great forest of the winter country, I waited for a terrible death.

I had been waiting since midday. Before long, dusk would fold itself across the land. The Lau must surely come soon. I faced south, so that my death would not ride up behind me on his tall horse and see my back and think that I was afraid to face him. Also, I did not want to look north because I did not want to see that trodden snow and remember my brother leaving me behind. That might have been a different kind of cowardice. But I could only face one direction. So I faced south.

The fire burned low. My brother had built it up with his own hands before he led our defeated warriors away. Now it was only embers, and the cold pressed against my back. I wished I could build the fire up again. Mostly that was what I thought about. That was as close to thinking about nothing as I could come. It was better than thinking about the Lau. I hoped they came before the fire burned out, or I might freeze to death before they found me. Even an Ugaro will die of the cold eventually, without fire or shelter.

I tried not to hope that I would die before they found me.

Then I heard them, the hoofbeats of their horses, and there was no more time for hope. I held very still, though stillness would not protect me now. Nothing would protect me. I was not here to be protected. They came riding between the great spruces and firs, tall dark men on tall dark horses, with the Sun device of their banner snapping overhead in the wind.

***

And, something I very specifically remember doing with this opening is, in fact, pulling out some of the backstory. Some of the backstory went into the story later and some, I think, disappeared forever, because I did cut this novel hard at the sentence level. Regardless, I obviously did not remove ALL the backstory, because that would have been unncessary at best, stupid at worst. Let me look at that again. Yes, cutting those backstory lines would have been stupid. That’s my opinion. Donald Maas isn’t going to change my mind.

Anyway, 1500 words later, we get this:

***

The Lau are not a brave people, but they are so many they do not need to be brave. When they fight, they stand in close formations that Ugaro cannot break. When we attack their lands, we are quick, striking at undefended farms, then disappearing into our forests. Sometimes they pursue us across the river that marks the border between their country and ours, but not often, for we have taught them better. In the winter country we can evade them and stay out of their reach, and harass them by shooting from a distance their bows cannot match. During the long cold, they must be especially cautious, for our land itself becomes deadly to them. Yet this time they had come in force, disregarding the risk that snow might begin to fall heavily enough to weaken them and hinder their retreat. This scepter-holder was braver or more reckless than most of his people.

***

This isn’t backstory. This is worldbuilding. This is BY NO MEANS the first bit of worldbuilding. It’s the first bit of worldbuilding that isn’t embedded in story-present as a detail. It occurs, as I say, 1500 words into the story, or about five pages. Only a tiny bit of this is in past perfect; most of it is a statement about the world. It’s as condensed as possible given that the world is being built at all. The next paragraphs are in story-present, but they are description, therefore worldbuilding. But not pure description, because those paragraphs are also building Ryo’s character by putting him into the setting.

The above paragraph also shows a different use of verb tenses, because the story is being told in simple past tense, while the backstory is being indicated by past perfect, and at the same time statements about the world are being made in present tense to indicate that these statements are describing the world as it is in story-present.

Which I guess leads to a basic statement that verb tenses should be taken seriously.

***

I wish I had right here in front of me an example of a paragraph where the author should PLAINLY have used past perfect, but did not. This happens a lot, and it’s jarring. I feel editors who get oversensitized to past perfect and backstory may perhaps either miss the OBVIOUS misuse of simple past where the author should be using past perfect, or possibly, some of them, may actually encourage or force the author to use the simple past when it CLEARLY ought to be past perfect.

Here’s an excerpt from Past Tense by Lee Child because I was amused by the idea of using a novel with this title in this post. I’ve only watched the first season of Reacher, by the way; I tried reading the first book, but this is one of the rare instances where I much prefer the TV series to the book. I’m going to bold the two past perfect verbs in this two-paragraph excerpt. This is close to the beginning, but not the opening paragraph.

***

He walked inland a mile or so and came to a county road and stuck out his thumb. He was a tall man, more than six feet five in his shoes, heavily built, all bone and muscle, not particularly good-looking, never very well dressed, usually a little unkempt. Not an overwhelmingly appealing proposition. As always most drivers slowed and took a look and then kept on going. The first car prepared to take a chance on him came along after forty minutes. It was a year-old Subaru wagon, driven by a lean middle-aged guy in pleated chino pants and a crisp khaki shirt. Dressed by his wife, Reacher thought. The guy had a wedding ring. But under the fine fabrics was a workingman’s body. A thick neck and large red knuckles. The slightly surprised and somewhat reluctant boss of something, Reacher thought. The kind of guy who starts out digging post holes and ends up owning a fencing company.
Which turned out to be a good guess. Initial conversation established the guy had started out with nothing to his name but his daddy’s old framing hammer, and had ended up owning a construction company, responsible for forty working people, and the hopes and dreams of a whole bunch of clients. He finished his story with a little facial shrug, part Yankee modesty, part genuine perplexity. As in, how did that happen? Attention to detail, Reacher thought. This was a very organized guy, full of notions and nostrums and maxims and cast-iron beliefs, one of which was at the end of summer it was better to stay away from both Route One and I-95, and in fact to get out of Maine altogether as fast as possible, which meant soon and sideways, on Route Two, straight west into New Hampshire. …

***

What do we see?

A) Lee Child doesn’t consider it important to avoid all past-perfect verbs in the opening chapter. That’s worth noting, possibly, though I wouldn’t hold Lee Child up as a stylist. But he writes natural, straightforward prose, and there are those past perfect verbs. And also —

B) Cutting the “had” from those verbs to create simple past-tense verbs would confuse the meaning of the sentences, and this would be stupid, and any editor or copyeditor who wanted to do this would be wrong. And also —

C) Wow, there’s a lot of words being spent on description about a possibly unimportant character plus the highway route. The guy isn’t named, so he may never become important and we may see him only here, in the intro of the novel. Or, possibly, he will be named shortly and will turn out to be at least moderately important; I don’t know, I haven’t read the book.

What are those words doing? Anything? Well, yes, they are building Reacher’s character. He’s supposed to notice stuff and he’s supposed to judge people accurately. This is him doing that. If an editor said, Move it along, let’s get going, action!, this would probably be inappropriate advice. Same with You’re starting in the wrong place, cut your first scene. Though I don’t know for sure because I haven’t read the book, only the opening paragraphs.

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The tl;dr version: Verb tenses should be taken seriously. All the verb tenses. And if you want an exercise that will force you to pay attention to the effective use of verb tenses, then I suggest you write a time travel story and play with verb tenses such as “We aren’t so much awaiting them as we have been were awaiting them.”

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