The Tricky Art of Backstory
AUTHOR: Jody Wallace

Whether you?re writing science fiction, historical or contemporary romance, one aspect of worldbuilding all writers must master is the tricky art of backstory. These are not the days of Melville and Hawthorne, of Austen and the Bronte sisters, or even of the revered Tolkien. Frame stories are primarily a conceit of literary fiction, and long reminiscences tend to send contemporary readers elsewhere. As observed by Renni Browne and Dave King in Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, ?Thanks to the influence of movies and television, readers today have become accustomed to seeing a story as a series of immediate scenes? (3). In the romance genre in particular, the current storytelling style calls for streamlined text mostly free of big blobs of ?she remembered the time-isms?.

That being said, your hero and your heroine both have pasts -- often tortured pasts -- and those histories shaped them and continue to drive their actions. Thus to reveal the full personality of the character, you feel compelled to relate his or her history. How can you give your reader enough glimpses of backstory so they can understand the main characters without resorting to telling instead of showing, that most villainous of all writing indiscretions?

One technique I see quite frequently is the prologue. A novel usually begins in the thick of events with a punchy first line, situation or image. Because meandering beginnings are no longer in vogue, the easiest way to show what has come before is to plunk on a prologue. A prologue is much easier on a writer than weaving so many details into the text of the story in a natural fashion. But how much of that prologue is really necessary to understand the characters and their motivations?

If you would like to avoid the ubiquitous prologue, try this. Write your prologue. Then, when you revise, chop it off. Chances are you filtered enough information from the characters? histories into the text that the prologue isn?t required. If you didn?t, see if you can, using a minimum of additional words. As Ben Bova says in The Craft of Writing Science Fiction That Sells, ?only those background details that affect the story?s

development and resolution should be in your final draft? (44). This may or may not work for your particular story, but it?s worth a try. The result could be a stronger draft that doesn?t rely on an expository mass to explain the building blocks of the here and now.

How else can a writer work backstory into a novel? Another method is the judicious use of flashbacks, with an emphasis on judicious. Nancy Kress, in her essay ?Using Flashbacks?, warns that flashbacks can disrupt the flow of the narrative and cause readers to become disinterested. She classifies flashbacks by length, with the longest being a frame story, where the entire novel is told as a flashback, the middle lasting a chapter or more, and the smallest and most palatable to today?s genre readers being a flashback that is a couple paragraphs, tops.

Author Margaret Chittenden makes another important observation about the use of flashbacks in one of the very useful tips and essays on her site. ?Be sure the time covered in the flashback can be accounted for in the present? (http://users.techline.com/megc/tips/97aug.htm). You don?t want a flashback that is several paragraphs long when the character is in the middle of something where she didn?t actually have much time to spare. A large chunk of backstory in the middle of a conversation -- if a character contemplates how she is going to respond -- might clarify matters, but it definitely disrupts the back and forth of the dialogue.

While small flashbacks are valuable, overuse of them can lead to infodumping. The Turkey City Lexicon defines an infodump as a ?large chunk of indigestible expository matter intended to explain the background situation?. In fact, infodumps can be anything from backstory to technical details of starship drives to long explanations of how magic works. Although you may have imagined an extensive upbringing for your character, try to sneak in only the parts that are applicable.

Small flashbacks can take the form of introspection on the part of a character, and these introspections often use trigger elements. Something in the hero or heroine?s current setting initiates a memory, a memory that is pertinent to the situation. This can create a satisfying parallel that clarifies a character?s motivations and goals. But again, apply flashbacks and introspection with caution. ?Constant interruptions [to the narrative] are just as annoying on page as they are in life,? claim Browne and King (77).

Flashbacks and backstory can also take the form of dreams. Dreams can be prophetic, upsetting or revealing. If a character has a traumatized past and the author wishes to show how deep the agony runs, it is fairly typical to give that character nightmares and have another character witness them. Frightened moans from a hero or heroine in the dark of the night can be a quick way to get the other partner into the bedroom for some sexual healing. In many instances, dreams, like a prologue, make it easy for the author to transmit desired data in a single chunk instead of complicated dabbles. I have to admit, as a reader this is not a method I enjoy because I feel it is overused.

If you?ve used up your quota of flashbacks for the novel, another way to relate backstory is through the use of dialogue. If one character would realistically tell another the tidbits you wish readers to know, dialogue is a very workable tool. Of course, care must be taken that the conversation is genuine and no one pulls an ?As You Know Bob? (Turkey City Lexicon). This involves characters telling one another things they both already know just so the reader can be brought up to speed. Your protagonists must continue to speak naturally and the things they say to make sense within the story itself. Browne and King mention that this technique, when ill-used, can produce stilted dialogue (64).

A final and excellent example of inserting backstory and, in particular, speculative details can be found in chapter 4 in Orson Scott Card?s How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. Card points out that whatever you say in an sf/f story, particularly when you have readers experienced with the sf/f genre, is going to be taken at face value and can contribute to worldbuilding, if done correctly. ?If your viewpoint character is a participant in the strange society you?re trying to reveal to your audience, he wouldn?t suddenly start noticing things he?s taken for granted all his life. So you have to reveal information very carefully, and usually by implication? (89-90).

How does this translate to working with backstory? Card observes that sf/f writers drop in information casually and only explain the details later, if they cannot be implied from the story itself. Imagine a sentence or paragraph that contains a word you don?t understand. You can usually decipher its general meaning from the surrounding words. If you drop background information into a narrative in that fashion, dribble by dribble and rarely in chunks, the narrative continues at a fast clip and retains a reader?s attention.

And you probably only need dribbles. A writer should be like the person behind the curtain -- someone readers pay no attention to because they are so caught up in the spectacle of your creation. If authorial ploys like routine nightmares, unnecessary prologues, awkward flashbacks, as-you-know-bob dialogue and infodumps become evident to the reader, that writer risks the crash and burn of suspension of disbelief. When it comes to backstory as a personality illustration, it?s more convincing and absorbing to have characters defined primarily by action, reaction and interaction in the current storyline.

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Abbreviated and Not MLA Style Source List:

Bova, Ben. The Craft of Writing Science Fiction That Sells.

Browne, Renni and Dave King. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers.

Card, Orson Scott. How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (Writer's Digest Genre Writing Series).

Chittenden, Margaret. ?Flashbacks?. Her Website.

Doyle, Corbette. ?Backstory without Boredom.?

Kress, Nancy. ?Using Flashbacks.? The Writer's Digest Handbook of Novel Writing.

Jody Wallace would like to thank fellow MCRW member Corbette Doyle for writing the article ?Backstory without Boredom?, from whence this idea sprung.