Mary Rosenblum, your web editor, has published three SF novels, four mysteries as Mary Freeman, and more than 50 short stories in multiple genres, as well as nonfiction! She also teaches writing, and has for many years.
Embedding the Backstory
by Mary Rosenblum
When we begin a story, we’re faced with a blank slate. Our readers know nothing about our character, our setting, or our plot. We need to give our characters a stage to play on…but we’re told again and again how critical that strong hook opening is. So how do we hook the reader and yet create characters and a setting they can love, without sacrificing that strong opening?
The Skeleton Comes First!
The most common mistake made by novice writers is to start with the backstory. After an interminable page about aged Anne, her miserable divorce, the ungrateful children who constantly make demands, and her grief for her dead father, we finally get to the story…if we haven’t given up and moved on to another story by then! Yes, we need to know all this, but don’t present it to the reader in a large and indigestible lump! Spread it out. We readers are pretty patient. If you give us a detail at a time, we’ll snap them up and avoid that indigestion! Start with a strong opening. Forget the backstory for now. Open with a strong action scene, dialogue, a tense moment between characters. Okay, this is your skeleton. These are the bones of the story, but they’re pretty stark. We don’t know much except what is going on in front of us, but once you have the skeleton, you begin to add the ‘flesh’. Let’s start with Anne, struggling to lift the heavy hood of her SUV in the pouring rain, her joints aching, stranded on the side of the freeway. We have an immediate crisis – she needs to get the car going and get out of there, she’s getting soaked, and her arthritic fingers just can’t handle the stiff hood latch on the SUV. That’s your backbone.
Now Flesh It Out!
So what do we want the reader to know here? Let’s see…divorce, ungrateful kids, dead Dad. So now we begin to sneak those details into the scene. Anne’s struggles with the car, her fear that she’ll be hit, the cold reality of the pounding rain…this carries our bits of backstory effortlessly. Anne winced as the semi roared past, a wall of dirty spray washing over her as she cowered against the fender of the Explorer. Icy water soaked through her jeans and once more she struggled in vain to release the hood latch. The rain was pounding down, now, raising a mist on car’s roof. Denny had kept the MG of course, had ‘graciously’ given her the Explorer in the settlement. Her knuckles burned like fire and she squeezed her eyes closed as the cars rushed by, refusing to cry. What was wrong this time? ‘You don’t need another car," Brett had said, as patronizing as his father had always been. "The Explorer’s nice and safe, Mom." The catch finally released but the hood weighed a ton and she couldn’t raise it. No strength in her arms anymore. Unbidden, an image of her father came to her, frail and waxen at the end, broken-glass guilt glittering in his eyes, because he couldn’t do anything anymore. "Oh, Dad," she whispered. "I understand, now." She gave up, let the hood chomp closed, nearly taking her fingers. They didn’t want to spend their money on her, only wanted the property, after she died. Anne put he head down on the fender of the steel monster and let the rain mix with her tears.
How Much is Enough?
This is the fine line we all have to walk. How much is enough? Backstory is like an iceberg. We see that white tip floating above the surface of the water, but underneath the surface lurks four fifths of the iceberg’s mass. That’s what backstory is like. Four fifths of what we know about our characters lurks beneath the ‘water line’ of the story. Only a small part of that entire mass of information actually makes it into the story, but because we know it, it gives our characters the weight of verisimilitude. It keeps that iceberg tip upright and floating. We all want to include everything – all the wonderful details of the world, the character, her past, his brief intense relationship with that wild and creative girl in eleventh grade… But we can’t put it all in, not without drowning our immediate story in backstory. One rule of thumb is this: Does the reader have to know this for the story to work? Is it critical? If the answer is no, or a waffling maybe, leave it out.
Another tip-off is that when you find yourself explaining…leave that out, too. For example, you might find yourself going on at length about how Jennie was in Girl Scouts for years, how she hated the uniform, loved the outings even though her mother complained about having to drive her around, and dreaded the cookie sale every year because her friend Roseanne, whose father ran a company, always sold more cookies than anyone and won the prize, and everyone knew it was because her father made his employees buy them. That’s a page, right there! Now if this is central to the plot and resolution, okay, that much might work. But if it’s only backstory, it’s too much. You might have Jennie notice a kid selling Girl Scout cookies at a mall and in a sentence or two give us this: A man bought a box of Shortbreads. She’d been a Girl Scout, loved the camping with crazy Ms. Amos who had once eaten rattlesnake and knew how to use a flint and steel. Roseanne, the rich kid in the troop always won the most-sold prize for cookie week. Her Dad let her sell them at his company. Of course she won. Jennie pulled her jacket hood up against the snow and raced for the car. That’s all you need. It enriches Jennie’s character and isn’t long enough to slow the story. The bit about her mother isn’t important to this story, so you leave it out, along with all the details about her Girl Scout career. Tip of the iceberg…
When Do You Stop?
So how long should you continue to add backstory? When do you stop? Well, you certainly don’t want to be layering in backstory as your character rushes to the climax of the story! There is a point in every story where we know everything we need to know, and the plot can run itself out from here on, with no further backstory needed. You will come to recognize this point. It’s like cresting the final rise on a hike or a bike ride and realizing it’s all downhill from here! But that takes practice. As your character enters the climax scene we should know everything we need to know in order for that climax to work. Even if you’re creating an O’Henry-style ‘twist’ ending, where our perception of events is suddenly altered, all the backstory should have been planted solidly by then. You don’t want to be explaining your character’s motives (which is what backstory does) as you are wrapping up the story! We need to understand those motives before we get to this point.
It’s Not the Movies!
Don’t forget that prose fiction is interactive. We leave our readers room to imagine, so that our stories are a shared effort. We set up clues that guide our readers and their world isn’t all ours. It’s theirs, too. That is, I believe, what makes prose fiction stronger than any visual medium, be it a play, video, TV, or movie. So give the readers some backstory – that iceberg tip – ballast it with everything YOU know, and give those readers leeway to help create this lovely rich world. If you do that, they’ll be your collaborator forever, and remember your story because it’ll be partly theirs.
How Do You Know?
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