Let’s talk Backstory

A writing friend wrote me in some distress yesterday because she’d been told that backstory was forbidden and against the rules and to be avoided at all costs in writing a novel.

I have two reactions to this. First, there is NO SUCH THING as a hard and fast rule in writing. You have permission as a writer to do whatever you need to in order to tell your story in the best possible way. If that includes backstory, so be it! Second, there’s nothing wrong with using backstory, although I do have a couple of caveats regarding backstory.

Okay, a quick definition for the new writers among us. Backstory is when you pause in the middle of the current action of your story and digress into describing something that has happened to the character in the past.

Note the words “pause” and “digress”. Those should be warning bells to any writer. Pausing means stopping your forward movement. As in slowing or even stopping your pacing. We live in a fast-moving, on-the-go world, and readers are exceedingly impatient at anything that slows down a story. Inserting backstory into your book can kill your pacing if you’re not very careful about how you do it.

The trick is to keep your digressions into backstory as short as possible. Tell us what you need to, but don’t wander around in endless reminiscences about the past that are not germaine to the current story you’re supposed to be telling. With my apologies to Tolstoy, this is why that whole middle section of Anna Karenina that’s essentially a treatise on the state of farming in Imperial Russia really had no place in the book.

Another potential land mine with backstory is where in your book you use it. Too many authors start their book with backstory. They feel a burning need to catch the reader up on everything in the past that they need to know to move forward with the story. Yeah. Don’t do that. Except in rare cases (remember my no such thing as hard and fast rules comment?) it’s usually a terrible idea to start the reader out in the past.

Why? Because if you’re in the point of view of the character whose past we’re exploring, they’re obviously alive and kicking in the present time. They survived whatever trauma you’re describing in their past. There’s no suspense in it. There’s no question of “Will they make it out of the mess? Will they be okay?”  That’s an elaborate way of saying Backstory KILLS your forward pacing in an opening.

Remember, openings are about sucking the reader into the story as quickly and deeply as possible. So fast and so far they can’t put your book down. Backstories do none of this. It’s fine to make references to past events that the reader doesn’t understand, yet. It plants the question of, “What was that guy/gal referring to when he recalled that moment when XYZ happened?” Or  ”Who is XYZ whom the character just remembered with such terror?” You can drop in tiny hints at backstory and even confuse your reader a little. They’ll frantically read forward to understand the events unfolding before them and around them.

So what purpose DO backstories serve? Usually, they tell us something about the character that makes us understand why a present situation has such a powerful effect on them, or why the character is acting in an otherwise inexplicable manner in the present time. There are, of course, other reasons to devolve into backstory.

How should we use backstory, then? Once you’ve actually got your present action moving along, you’ve planted a bunch of questions in the reader’s minds that will pull them forward all the way through the book to find the answers, and we’re in love with the characters, or at least in firmly in like with them, then you can afford to reveal a little more to the reader about what makes the characters tick. You can drop in bits and pieces of backstory here and there to flesh out the person more fully. Sometimes, a bit of backstory may be a single sentence or even a phrase in length. As the character floats in an out of the present and of recollection of the past, you can insert glimpses of their backstory as appropriate.

Full-blown scenes in backstory are often differentiated by being printed in italics in their entirety. I also find that doing it this way makes me vividly aware of how long the backstory scene is running. Page after page after page of italics is a warning to me to winnow down that backstory scene to its essential and most important moments and to toss out all the rest.

So, in summary. Backstory is fine as long as you remember that it kills pacing. Be careful where you use it and how much of it you use. But don’t be afraid to use it if your story calls for it. We can all climb down off the backstory bridge now and get back to our regularly scheduled writing…