Is Back Story Really That Bad?

by Linda Thorne

Ever since I started writing, I’ve been forewarned about the disastrous side effects of backstory. I know it’s essential to any story line, so I’ve taken the skeptics words to mean use it as little as possible, drop tidbits of the past only into the present, keep it low-key, and, when possible, keep it out.

I can practice the advice in short stories, but in writing my debut novel I had to break a few rules to keep the plot line intact. I remember treading cautiously into this minefield called backstory, keeping the naysayer warnings front and center in my mind.

In my work in progress, avoiding backstory has turned out to be impossible. Totally. The inciting incident occurs thirty years in the past. I tried adding it in pieces, adding it in present-day conversations, but it’s the inciting incident. Too me, it's essential for the reader to be there when it happens thirty years earlier.

So, I started thinking. What about all those books I’ve read and loved that had backstory? If avoiding backstory is the norm, maybe the norm is wrong or doesn’t apply in certain situations.

After All These Years, by Susan Isaacs is a New York Times bestselling novel I read some time ago. I liked the book so much, I went to the library and looked for another written by the same author. I checked out Isaacs’ Lilly White. Where her bestseller, After All These Years, had only the necessary amount of backstory, Lilly White was almost fifty percent backstory. Isaacs presents her story line using one chapter for Lilly White in the past and, in the next chapter, the present. She continues this pattern of shifting from a chapter in backstory back to a chapter in present time until close to the end when the past turns into the present and the climax chapters begin. I loved it and thought this tactic pure genius.

I've read other books with at least one chunk where the reader is taken back to a past time and place.

Two examples come to mind. There’s a fair-sized segment in The Blood in Snowflake Garden, by Alan Lewis that delves into a fictionalized historical event. The Blood in Snowflake Garden is Lewis’s debut novel and one that got him a TV movie option. Another example is Chester Campbell’s recent book, Hellbound. Campbell uses even less backstory then Lewis, but his fast-paced novel stops for a chapter to give the reader  
background on one of the characters. For some reason it didn’t seem to stop the flow of the story. I found the backstory in both these books interesting and necessary.

So, as I move through my work in progress, A Promotion to Die For, I write backstory because the story line will culminate with my character bumping up against circumstances surrounding an event that happened to her thirty years earlier. I don’t need to use half a book of backstory like Susan Isaacs did so well in Lily White, but I will have to dip into the past in several spots including the inciting incident scene that transpires in the very first chapter.

I think those who warn against using too much backstory are often correct, but I think there’s always exceptions to every rule, especially in writing. When I need to use backstory in A Promotion to Die For, I plan for it to appear deliberate because it is. I am doing everything I can to avoid anything that comes across as an info dump. I’m writing backstory that, not only knits its way into the present, but also claws its way there hoping that’s how the reader will see it.

I have it right in my head. I’m just hoping it works in my book.

http://www.lindathorne.com/

First Chapter Back Story - what's too much?

Last weekend, I took a class about back story in a first chapter.  I know, the first answer to how much back story to add is none. Except...

The reader wants to know your character. They want to know your heroine's (We'll call her Deb) track record with men. They want to know she's a twice-widowed woman who in both cases has been a suspect in the guy's untimely death.  Especially if she's walking up the aisle to husband number three.  Her soul mate. The one who got away in college.

The trick is how much information to bring.  Is having the police detective from the suspicious death investigation sitting in the pew as she walks into the church filled with family and friend enough?

Deb's goals right now, first page, is to get through this wedding ceremony without freaking out. Ultimately, she'd like to have a marriage that lasts more than a year and where the man she loves doesn't leave in a hearse. Especially this man.

Christie Craig (award winning romance and young adult writer) says you have to show some back story because our characters, like us, are who we are because of the events and relationships in our past.  And we can't care about Deb as a reader, until we realize she's not the black widow everyone (except husband #3) believes her to be.

And we have to believe in Deb's motivation to marry this guy instead of just shacking up and hopefully keeping him safe. Maybe his job (a pastor, a senator, a principal) requires him to be 'respectable' in the community. And Deb loves him enough to try one more time.

Which we all know, isn't going to work. Which is the promise to the reader.

What do you think? Is romantic relationship status one of those must have's in a first chapter? Or could you have waited until the reception to meet the grizzled police detective who's convinced of Deb's guilt?

Lynn

HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED by Earl Staggs

Once he’d figured it all out and knew whodunnit, Adrian Monk, everyone’s favorite OCD TV detective, would say, 

“Here’s what happened.” Then he would tell how the crime occurred. As he described it, the audience viewing at home saw the event take place on the screen exactly as it happened in the past.

What better way to let an audience know what happened in the past than with both a narrative retelling AND a visual reenactment?  They can do that in movies and on TV.  Writers do not have that luxury, but we still have to tell our readers, “Here’s what happened.”  

We call it backstory.

We have different ways of presenting backstory. We can have the narrator stop telling the current story and tell the backstory. If it goes on for a long time, however, we run the risk of boring readers and tempting them to skip over the “info dump” completely. Imagine Monk telling what happened without the visual reenactment. His show would never have lasted as long as it did.

One way to bring in backstory -- our version of a visual reenactment -- is to “show” what happened before, complete with dialogue and action exactly as it happened. That requires, first of all, a clear transition to the past so readers aren’t confused about where they are in the story. Once that’s done, the scene plays out just as it did before. Here’s an example, beginning with a transition:

Jane would never forget the day Dan left. She’d walked in the door and saw his bags packed in the foyer. She’d hurried into the dining room to find him sitting at the table.

“What’s going on, Dan?” she asked.
“I can’t take it anymore.  I’m leaving.”

When the reenactment is finished, another clear transition is needed, of course, to bring readers back to the present without confusion.

Another way to work in backstory, and a favorite of mine, is to bring it out in dialogue between two characters as part of the current story. Like this:

          Jane knew Margie had something on her mind and waited for her to speak.

Margie took a sip of her wine and set her glass on the table, rotating it slowly with her
hands. After several moments, she said, “Jane, you never did tell me why Dan left.”

                “I’m not sure myself. I came home and saw his bags packed and sitting in the foyer.”

                “Didn’t he say anything?”

Jane turned to the window and looked out. “I asked him what was going on.  He said he 
couldn’t take it anymore and he was leaving.”

Another method is a quick flashback.  Here’s how that might be done:

Dan had left two years ago. She’d entered the house to see his bags packed and sitting in the foyer. When she asked him what was going on he said, “I can’t take it anymore. I’m leaving.” She still didn’t understand why.

A short flashback like that is not a major intrusion to the current story and chances are, you won’t lose
the readers. It lacks the immediacy and drama of a reenactment, however.

In a story called, “That Night in Galveston,” I used a slightly different form of flashback. Amanda Barnes is kidnapped by a crippled, disfigured man with a gun and forced to drive to a vacant warehouse. She doesn’t remember the man and has no idea why he wants to kill her. As she drives, little bits of information she’d wiped from her memory from twenty years before flash from her subconscious mind. Here’s one of them:

Darkness. . .waves crashing against a pier. . .sounds of an amusement park in the distance. . .someone down on all fours. . .screaming. . .begging. . .

Shortly after that one, there’s this one:

Three men standing over him. . .yelling. . .kicking. . .swinging something. . .

Amanda is pulled into the past even further when something flashes from before she ran away from home and hitchhiked to Galveston.

A thick, burly man entering her bedroom. . . holding a finger to his lips to say, “Don’t wake your mother. We don’t want her to know our secret.”. . unable to breathe under his weight. . .biting her lip to keep from crying out from the pain he caused her inside. . .

This altered flashback method worked well in this particular story. It was a graphic, dramatic, and efficient way to bring out the backstory. I liked it so much I gave it a name: “backflash.”

In many of our stories, we can’t get away from backstory. We have to tell our readers, “Here’s what happened.” Part of our challenge is to do it in such a way that readers are not confused or bored and with minimal interruption to the current story.

(If you’d like to know how Amanda escaped her fate, “That Night in Galveston” is one of the sixteen stories in my collection, SHORT STORIES OF EARL STAGGS. You’ll find more information about it over on my website: http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com/)

Or go to http://www.amazon.com/SHORT-STORIES-EARL-STAGGS-ebook/dp/B004YR8D7W