The Shocking Truth About Info Dumps
By Lisa Cron | March 10, 2016 |
I’m continuing to write about backstory because it continues to be a topic that confounds writers — and not just any old topic, but a seminal topic. Because backstory is the heart of your novel, without it you will just have a bunch of surface things that happen. In fact, you not only need to create your protagonist’s story-specific backstory before you shove her onto page one, that very backstory will be on the first page. I’m betting you don’t believe me, which is why this month’s entry is all about how backstory is very often right there in the first few pages of your novel, and how it often goes on for pages.
And here’s the shocking thing, given the way writers are often told to think of backstory (that it slows the novel down; or worse, stops it altogether): backstory is actually what holds the story together. It’s the spark that gives it juice. It’s what pulls you in and makes you care. It’s the layer we’re hardwired to respond to; it’s what gives meaning to everything that is happening up there on the surface.
Wait, you might be thinking. Am I hearing you correctly? Because it sure as heck sounds like you’re talking about an Info Dump. We touched on this a couple of months ago, but right now I want to shine a bright light on it. This might make you feel kind of squeamish. I mean, an “Info Dump” sounds like something you scrape off the bottom of your shoe. Definitely not like something you talk about in polite society.
Ah, but we must. Because the problem is that we’ve conflated Info Dumps with what is being “dumped.” That is: backstory. Writers are taught to shun backstory for fear it will “slow their story down” or worse, derail it entirely. And hey, since the last thing you want is to inadvertently leave “droppings” of backstory throughout your novel, why even spend much time developing it? Arrghh! That’s like putting on an ill-fitting, poorly constructed pair of pants, looking in the mirror and thinking, “Boy that looks awful, I’m NEVER wearing pants again!” It’s not pants that are the problem; it’s the way THOSE pants were made (and if you’re anything like me, spending a bit more time at the gym wouldn’t hurt either).
The point is, when it comes to Info Dumps, backstory is not the problem. It’s how the backstory is injected into the narrative that matters. When it’s unceremoniously dumped, it does stop the story cold. And yes, absolutely, no one should do that. Ever. But when backstory is artfully layered in? It’s what makes the story compelling, propelling it forward, giving it power. The takeaway on backstory is this: don’t give us backstory inartfully.
So, let’s focus on two things here:
- What constitutes large inartful pieces of backstory – aka the dreaded Info Dump.
- What the same type of information looks like when artfully woven in.
To make the point, I’m going to use excerpts from very successful novels to show the artful part, so you can see for yourself how large pieces of backstory are very often offered up in the first five pages (not to mention all the way through the story). Yes, these bestselling novels deftly employ the very thing that you’ve very likely been told to avoid like the plague – lots of backstory right out of the starting gate.
What might surprise you – as it did me when I focused on it – is that you’re always reading big chunks of backstory early on in a novel and you never even notice it. You don’t think, Hmmm, there’s a big chunk of “backstory.” Nor does it seem like an “Info Dump” or does it slow things down one iota. In fact, you don’t notice it as anything other than part of a very compelling story that has you hooked.
- So what, then, constitutes an “Info Dump”?
An Info Dump announces itself thusly: it purposefully stops the narrative cold (think one of those sports guys making that “T” thing with his hands, motioning for a time out), then the author steps in, and Tells Us Something S/he Thinks we Need To Know in Order for What’s Happening to Make Sense. And that’s on a good day. On a bad day, the writer stops the story to tell us something we might need to know later, but s/he isn’t sure so s/he might as well tell us now. Another variation of this occurs when the writer employs a character to deliver the same information — information that, almost always, all the other characters are already full well aware of, but the reader isn’t. Like: Joe hears a knock and opens the door to find his neighbor Barney standing there, who says “Hi Joe, how ya doin? I was just thinking about your ex-wife, Thea – you know, who you were married to about twenty years ago, before you and Wendy hooked up? Anyway, remember how Thea disappeared for two weeks without a trace, back when she was working for the CIA and when she finally turned up she looked so damned different? Ah well, people change, I guess. Never could figure out how she got to be a foot taller though. Well, so much for strolling down memory lane, can I borrow a cup of sugar?”
As you can imagine, such inartful giving of info – backstory or otherwise – stands out like a sore thumb. You notice it big time, and not in a good way.
A large part of the problem is that the author is giving us backstory point blank — that is, supplying us with “objective” facts, separate from the story we’re following, and it’s our job to then figure out what they mean and why they matter. Instead, backstory is subjective, it’s what your protagonist (and/or other POV characters) uses to make sense of what’s happening, and how they should handle it. Which is precisely why we, as readers, don’t tend see it as backstory — that is, the kind of story-stopping backstory we’ve been warned about. Because it doesn’t stop the story. Turns out it’s not separate from the story at all, it’s woven in as an integral part of it.
- The Secret of Backstory – Now You See It, Now You Don’t
Here’s the irony: When backstory is woven in well, you don’t notice it at all – as backstory that is. That’s why it’s easy to believe the writing world when it advises you to stay the hell away from backstory, especially in the beginning.
I don’t want you to take my word for it. Instead, let’s take a look at those four novels – all of them bestsellers. One was also a successful movie; one was written by a woman who went on to win the Pulitzer; one was a stunning debut novel; and one was dubbed one of the best books of 2014 by Library Journal. In other words, these writers are no slouches. To make the point, I’ve pulled out excerpts, all from the first few pages, so you can see with your own eyes what you often miss when you’re enthralled by a story: that what has you enthralled is backstory.
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
This New York Times bestseller begins with the lines: “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know it yet.” Lydia is the 16-year-old favored child of a family of five; “they” are her family. The opening scene plays out in the family kitchen on a weekday morning. When Lydia doesn’t come down for breakfast they realize she is nowhere to be found. They’re concerned, but not overly worried. Yet. Lydia’s two siblings and father then leave for the day and on on page 4 we get Lydia’s mother Marilyn’s train of thought as she considers her relationship with her beloved middle child:
When the children have gone, she takes a mug from the cupboard, trying to keep her hands still. Long ago, when Lydia was a baby, Marilyn had once left her in the living room, playing on a quilt, and went into the kitchen for a cup of tea. She had been only eleven months old. Marilyn took the kettle off the stove and turned to find Lydia standing in the doorway. She had startled and set her hand down on the hot burner. A red, spiral welt rose on her palm, and she touched it to her lips and looked at her daughter through watering eyes. Standing there, Lydia was strangely alert, as if she were taking in the kitchen for the first time. Marilyn didn’t think about missing those first steps, or how grown up her daughter had become. The thought that flashed through her mind wasn’t How did I miss it? but What else have you been hiding? …”
This flashback doesn’t stop here, it goes on for another half page. The point – the reason for the backstory – is reflected in the conclusion Marilyn then draws, as hinted at in the last couple of sentences above. It’s this: even when Lydia was very small, Marilyn felt that she was keeping secrets, that there were parts of her that Marilyn couldn’t see. The heart of the novel is right there in the backstory – and this novel is full of backstory — because that’s where the key to decode the present always lies. The continual layer of backstory that is intricately woven into the novel is where the answer to “What happened to Lydia, why and what does it mean to her family?” comes from. Without that while what happens would be a tragedy, it wouldn’t be involving – because it would just be a fact: Lydia died. And so? What’s the point? The point is that what gives meaning to these events isn’t simply that they happened, it’s how they affect her family, based on how each member – subjectively – interprets, experiences and deals with the tragedy. That is what readers are tracking, from the first page to the last.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
This is Pulitzer Prize winner Tartt’s bestselling debut novel. It centers on the experience of the narrator, Richard Papen, when he was nineteen, and a student at the fictional Hampden College. It chronicles a year, a murder, and the intertwined lives of Richard and five friends, all classics students, at a small elite college in Vermont (most likely a stand in for Bennington, Tartt’s alma mater). In the third paragraph on page 1, Richard says he’d never seen New England or Hampden College until he was nineteen. Mind you, the novel is about the year he spent at Hampden. And yet, beginning with the fourth paragraph of Page 1, Richard tells us . . .
I grew up in Plano. A small silicon village in the north. No sisters, no brothers. My father ran a gas station and my mother stayed home until I got older and times got tighter and she went to work, answering phones in the office of one of the big chip factories outside San Jose.
Plano. The word conjures up drive-ins, tract homes, waves of heat rising from the blacktop. My years there created for me an expendable past, disposable as a plastic cup. Which I suppose was a very great gift, in one way. On leaving home I was able to fabricate a new and far more satisfying history, full of striking, simplistic environmental influences; a colorful past, easily accessible to strangers.
The dazzle of this fictive childhood — full of swimming pools and orange groves and dissolute, charming show-biz parents — has all but eclipsed the drab original. In fact, when I think about my real childhood I am unable to recall much about it at all except a sad jumble of objects: the sneakers I wore year-round; coloring books and comics from the supermarket; little of interest, less of beauty. I was quiet, tall for my age; prone to freckles. I didn’t have many friends but whether this was due to choice or circumstance I do not know. I did well in school, it seems, but not exceptionally well; I liked to read — Tom Swift, the Tolkien books — but also watch television, which I did plenty of, lying on the carpet of our empty living room in the long dull afternoons after school.
I’ll stop there, but Tartt goes on for another five full pages of backstory before Richard returns to the present day subject at hand: His experiences at Hampden College.
As with Ng’s novel, notice how Richard draws conclusions about his time spent in Plano that play forward? For instance: it was expendable, allowing him to invent a very different history for himself.
The remaining five pages of backstory are chock full of the same — relevant, story-specific info. Every single thing Richard tells us about his past informs who he is, what he wants, how he sees the world and why he chose this college – in other words it’s story-specific, not merely a general summation of his general past. Along the way he continually draws conclusions so that we understand not just what happened to him but, far more importantly, what it taught him that will play forward throughout the story. It’s this inside intel that draws into — and illuminates — Richard’s tale.
About a Boy, by Nick Hornby
The following snippet is from Hornby’s bestselling novel, which was made into a successful movie starring Hugh Grant back in his endearingly boyish halcyon days. The novel has duel protagonists – Will, a rather immature man of 36 (type casting or what?), and the far more adult Marcus, who is twelve. In this scene – on page 3 — Marcus’s mom, Fiona, has just asked him whether it bothers him that she has boyfriends. He told her that he doesn’t mind. To which she says:
“You’ve been really good about everything. Considering you’ve had two different sorts of life.”
He understood what she meant. The first sort of life had ended four years ago when he was eight, and his mum and dad had split up; that was the normal, boring kind, with school and holidays and homework and weekend visits to grandparents. The second sort was messier, and there were more people and places in it: his mother’s boyfriends and his dad’s girlfriends; flats and houses; Cambridge and London. You wouldn’t believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended, but he wasn’t bothered. Sometimes he even thought he preferred the second sort of life to the first. More happened, and that had to be a good thing.
This is, in fact, a perfect example of how to incorporate backstory. Fiona says something to Marcus that makes him think about his past – and, having reflected on it, he then draws a conclusion that plays forward: “More happened, and that had to be a good thing.” It’s clearly something he’s not quite sure of (you can almost hear a question mark at the end). It is, in fact, something he’s going to spend the novel finding out – and that is why we, as readers, care.
The Moon Sisters by Therese Walsh
Here is an example from Writer Unboxed’s very own Co-Founder and Editor-In-Chief, Therese Walsh. This is from her second novel, which racked up starred reviews from Library Journal, Booklist and others. This scene is from the second and third pages of the book. As the novel opens, Olivia is saying goodbye to her mother, who’s working on a manuscript that she’d been writing for nearly Olivia’s entire life, but has yet to finish. Olivia, realizing her mother seems to be having a rough moment, offers to stay home with her . . .
“I’ll stay home with you today. If you’re up for it, we can dream together for a while. We haven’t done that in a long time.”
When I was younger, we called it “the dream game.” Sometimes I’d describe life through my eyes – like the way thunder filled the air with mustard-gold fog—because she enjoyed hearing about it. Sometimes we’d both poke our heads through the clouds, especially after math, when we were both worn out from too much thinking. She’d lie on the couch with her eyes locked shut, and I’d fling myself over a chair with my eyes wide open, and we’d unloose our wildest imaginings. Trees rained soft white buds the size of platters onto our shoulders and into our hair, covered us until we looked like exotic birds. We’d fly to Iceland or France or Russia or Brazil. Visit creamy blue pools and limestone cliffs and waterfalls that went on for miles.
Sometimes we’d visit the bog and see the ghost lights, which Mama said were like a vision of hope itself, and she’d have a revelation about the end of her story.
But it was all just dreaming.
That last line is the conclusion she’s drawn – it was all just dreaming, because sheesh, a lot of time has passed and her mother hasn’t yet finished her story. It’s also a premonition that sets the tone for the entire novel. Because two pages later, Olivia is going to return home to find her mother dead, the story still unfinished. She will then try to fill in the ending herself – which is what we will track.
I have a towering pile of books on my desk and I could keep going with example after example. Next would have been something from the first couple of pages of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, and after that, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Not little snippets, but paragraphs, pages, entire chapters of backstory.
The point is blindingly clear: Backstory is everywhere, in large explicit passages as we’ve seen, and implicitly in every action the protagonist takes. But the only way you can begin to incorporate backstory into your novel from the first page onward is to, um, create it first. With that in mind, I’d like to leave you with two pieces of advice:
First don’t be afraid of lacing backstory into your novel, from the first page to the last. Do it right and it’s what will pull your reader in.
Second, that means you need to know the backstory before you begin writing your novel. Because backstory is not only where the meaning of the events (not to mention the events themselves) comes from, but it is what drives your protagonist to take those actions in the first place. Because in literature as in life, our subjective past is the decoder ring we humans use to interpret the present, and to imagine the future.
After all, our past is the one thing we never do leave home without!
Lisa Cron is the author of Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers From the Very First Sentence and Story Genius: How To Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste 3 Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere). Her video tutorial, Writing Fundamentals: The Craft of Story, can be found at Lynda.com. Her TEDx talk, Wired for Story, opened Furman University’s 2014 TEDx conference, Stories: The Common Thread of Our Humanity. A frequent speaker at writers conferences, schools and universities, Lisa’s passion has always been story. She currently works as a story coach helping writers, nonprofits, educators and journalists wrangle the story they’re telling onto the page; contact her here.
A much needed lesson, Lisa. We tend to get so caught up in the “rules” of writing that we forget they come with many exceptions. I find the backstories in novels fascinating. Perhaps it is because I’ve had to develop my own characters, so it’s like peeking into another author’s brain. But mostly it’s that the backstory, like you say, is really what we’re all flipping the pages to discover. I’ve read many popular YA books (my genre) that never grabbed me. I think, maybe, if I were to go back and dig deeper, I’d find that this is why. The backstory wasn’t there. The author followed the rules too closely. Younger readers might give that a pass, but older readers, who have read and seen it all, want something deeper. We want to peek into the box of old photos on page one and be teased right through to the end, until we get to the bottom of the shoebox and find the truth.
Thanks for the post. Well done!
Thanks, Ron! It’s so true — backstory is what grabs us, because it’s what gives meaning to the moment. The thing is — it’s not just “the past” or about solving a static mystery, it’s an active layer of the present. Without it, readers are locked out instead of yanked in. Here’s to enthralling readers right out of the starting gate!
Yes! This perfectly expressed what my critique partners were just telling me the other day. I understood what they were saying . . . with this post, I understand it even better.
Thank you, wise woman!
Thanks Sarah, so glad to be of service!!
I wish I could use bigger font to say YES. To all this, brilliantly describing the difference. Info-Dump is poorly done back-story and vice versa. Simple as that. And in epic fantasy, we feel this dilemma most severely. Nowhere do readers need to know the back-story more, you can’t assume nuclear families, taxes, gravity, old age, anything in a fantasy world. And it’s urgent- the longer the author waits to alert everyone to the exceptions, the more danger the reader will default to the Alleged Real World instead. And then resent you when you try to correct them.
Fully agree, the sooner started the better. Thanks again for such a marvelous explanation.
Thanks so much, Will, and SO true! With epic fantasy, the reader can take nothing for granted (except, hopefully, human psychology/emotion). You have to invent everything, and not just the “what” of the world, but also the “why.” Can you imagine if our current world was an epic fantasy (feels like it sometimes, doesn’t it?) and a writer had to make up the “why” behind our rather, um, unsettling governmental battles at the moment? Wow. Sheesh, so much of it reads as fiction anyway — or make that, if it were fiction you wouldn’t believe it. But that’s a story for another day.
Good article! Writers do follow rules too closely. Don’t use backstories, stay away from italics, don’t use too much dialogue, you can never have enough dialogue….there are so many out there it makes my head spin.
The main problem I have with backstory is when a character is caught up in a potentially violent or extremely strange situation, usually in the novel’s opening sequence. Things get tense, ready to explode and then the reader is treated to a page and a half of backstory. That takes me completely out of the moment and the book.
Thanks, Serbella — and that is the point exactly — the goal is in finding the balance between backstory (which often is reflected in how the character is interpreting what’s happening) and the action — each spurs the other. Opening with pure action, without any context or “why” it matters to the protagonist other than a surface “why” that anyone would feel in said “dramatic” situation, is as dull as opening with a ton of objective explanation. The two key elements are: the “backstory” is there in service of what’s happening right in the moment, AND, that it’s balanced with the action. It’s like what they say about good comedy (everything, really) — timing is everything!
Thanks for this. The old taboo about writing backstory in your novel is well-explored here with common sense on how to write it in a way that is compelling and necessary for your book. I feel better, now about deciding to interweave one of my character’s backstory about her tragic childhood:
Syntalla sighed and traced a nondescript pattern with her finger on the tablecloth. “Mmm. I was just thinking. Terra would be a dream come true for me. Still, I’m a little nervous. So many unknowns, and I hear that living conditions are pretty harsh. But that’s nothing compared to the chance to be a part of this wonderful work!”
“What bacci-brain would be stupid enough to turn you down? You’re a respected biologist, with no close family ties—”
Syntalla winced.
“Is it still painful? The memory of the accident?”
“I can’t hide much from you—never could. Yes, but living at home has made it better, somehow. The therapy helped me a lot but I still have the nightmares once in a while. I never panic at sudden loud noises or the sight of fire anymore.” She sighed and picked at something on the tablecloth. “Even though I was a child when it happened, I still wonder why I was spared. How did I survive when no one else in my family did?” Her eyes welled with tears. “My mother, father, and…and little brother.”
“Oh, Synti. I’m—”
“Maybe I feel a bit guilty. I don’t know.” She swiped a tear from her cheek and looked up as the waiter brought the tall glasses of sparkling grenache.
“Anything more, sir?”
“Not yet. Thanks.”
Syntalla picked up her drink and studied the sparkling bubbles. “Oh, please, Ati. Let’s talk about happier things. Okay?”
“Of course.” He relaxed. Although he was ready to console her if needed, he was glad she wanted to put bad memories aside.
——
Without knowing the above about Syntalla, her future actions wouldn’t make much sense.
I forwarded a link to this post to everyone in my writer’s critique group and shared on LinkedIn. Writing “rules” are guidelines. Any one of them can be broken if handled right.
Thanks so much Anita! This says it all!
Thanks Lisa. I’ve been told the rule about backstory so often, and I have (fortunately) learned to lace it through the manuscript. Sometimes, in novels by well known authors, the story starts with a prologue (I know people who refuse to read them) or long passages of backstory. It never bothered me, making it hard to understand why writers should avoid it at all costs. I agree, the admonishment to avoid backstory should have the added adjective inartful.
Agreed, Stephanie! I admit one of the most surprising things I learned about the “writing world” was its take on backstory. It makes no sense whatsoever. Still kind of stuns me to hear it. My goal is to redefine how backstory is viewed, one post at a time ; -).
“Story specific” is now stuck in my head. That’s a good thing! What I’m taking away is that when our characters react to anything in their present lives, they are siphoning it through the lens of the past. The protagonist sees a man shove a woman and flashes back to her slap-happy first husband. The past effects her present. It happens organically, never out-of-the-blue. There has to be a trigger. Your post got me thinking about how one particular character’s past impact another’s present in my novel. I think a lightbulb just went on! Thank you, Lisa.
Yea, Susan!!! This is so well said!! Exactly, exactly. And it’s not just that they’re siphoning it through the lens of the past passively, but almost always in service of some hard decision they have to make (and sheesh, characters have to make hard decisions in every scene or else, why is it there, right?). Onward!
You’re right. If we look into most prize-winning fiction, what do we find? Backstory starting it off. The novels of Kate Atkinson as an example. My brain is fried right now from these wonderful examples or I could quote more.
Thanks for that. Lisa Cron.
Thanks, Lyn, and you’re so right about that — once you start looking for active backstory you see it everywhere! What I love best about it, is that it kind of shines a light on our own lives, and how we make sense of things. We don’t do it by objectively weighing the facts — we can’t. Why? Because what we use to weigh those facts is what our subjective past tells us those facts mean. Just like our protagonist!
Your post came at just the right time for me. I’m struggling with revising the first chapters of my novel and have an anecdote of backstory that to me is the key to the MC’s motivation through the whole novel. But my crit group is saying it is taking them out of the story and they are accusing me of holding on to a Darling (I have a huge cemetery of murdered darlings, so killing one is not an issue for me). I think your words will help me sort this out. Thanks!
I also have a cemetery filled with “darlings.” Sometimes I think a few in my crit group stick to the rules too much so I think long and hard before deciding to either reword, delete, or stick with what I wrote. Always, there’s an element of insecurity in deleting and a touch of guilt if I keep it. But in the end, we have to decide for ourselves if something in our writing belongs there or not.
I’m so glad, MaryZ — after all, timing is everything!
Lisa–
The key, I think, to learning from your excellent post is to examine your examples for what unites them. That would be specificity, concrete detail. Info dumps–those clots of verbiage that get hung up on the reader’s shoe–fail to accomplish their intended purpose–because they are usually made up of generalized exposition composed of abstract words: love, hate, hero, sorrow, loss, etc.
In all four of your examples, the writer is appealing to the reader to see, hear, smell events from the past that will serve to make the ongoing narrative matter, to make it have meaning instead of just information.
All writers are more or less versions of the Performing Child. They lack the courage or talent or something else to actually sing and dance, so they do it in stories. But the compensation for writers is that they get to play all the parts. But the scenes must live. They must be what Maryanne Moore said poems are: “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” (I think I have that right).
I take Moore to mean that the garden, the story or poem is a fiction, but it comes alive to the degree that the writer/poet invests her fiction with a sense of concrete, real detail. Real toads. That’s always necessary, maybe especially with backstory.
Thanks again for calling out a cliche about writing that needed correcting.
Thanks Barry, and SO well said! I particularly love this: “Info dumps–those clots of verbiage that get hung up on the reader’s shoe–fail to accomplish their intended purpose–because they are usually made up of generalized exposition composed of abstract words: love, hate, hero, sorrow, loss, etc.” Yes, yes, yes! The abstract, the conceptual, the general is the enemy of story. The story is always, always in the specific. That’s also why the concept of “theme” is SO often misleading and harms, rather than helps, writers. I say banish the “concept” of “theme” — instead of asking yourself “what’s my theme?” ask, “what’s my point?” Onward!
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I needed your words today.
My pleasure, Jackie!
Thank you for the honor of using The Moon Sisters as one of your examples, Lisa.
For my part, I cannot write a story without a fully formed backstory in place. I’ve said before that backstory is everything to my stories, and I mean it. My characters would not be compelling to *me* as a writer without their history in my head, and I can’t imagine they’d translate into well-defined people on the page for readers, either.
I’m so glad you continue to talk about backstory, Lisa, and I hope you use additional examples in your future essays. I’d love to see that Gone Girl snippet, for what it’s worth.
Thank you again.
Thank YOU, Therese, for writing the Moon Sisters in the first place ;-)!! As for Gone Girl, here’s the first snippet I would have given as an example (the book is FULL of them). This is from the second page, and it’s the dodgy husband Nick thinking about his suddenly-Amy-less house:
“I wallowed in bed, which was our New York bed in our new house, which we still called the new house, even though we’d been back here for two years. It’s a rented house along the Mississippi River, a house that screams Suburban Nouveau Riche, the kind of place I aspired to as a kid from my split-level, shag-carpet side of town. The kind of house that is immediately familiar: a generically grand, unchallenginging, new, new, new house that my wife would — and did — detest.
“Should I remove my should before I come inside?” Her first line upon arrival. It had been a compromise: Amy demanded we rent, not buy, in my little Missouri home town, in her firm hope that we wouldn’t be stuck here for long . . . ”
And it goes on. Backstory as Nick makes sense of what’s happening in the rather unexpected moment . . .
I started reading The Secret History very recently — and quickly set it aside because it began with so much backstory!
Fair enough! Giving too much backstory is a problem, no doubt about it — the goal is to find the balance. Reminds me of something my sister once said — she was assigned Revolutionary Road in a lit class (I think that’s what it was, or some other literary novel) and she threw it against the wall. It drove her crazy — she said the protagonist drove into his driveway, thinking, got out of his car, thinking, and fifteen pages later he still hadn’t gotten to his front door! I’d have thrown it against the wall sooner. Again — it’s all about balance.
Lisa,
I think you would do writers a favor if you were to pen a book dedicated to the art of backstory. It would not only free us from all the BS no-nos so many of us are taught in writing class, it would open up the door to so many possibility options with story. Please consider it.
Thanks, Bernadette — love it! And I’m very happy to say that the chapter I wrote for Writer Unboxed’s upcoming book, AUTHOR IN PROGRESS is on — yep — backstory! Plus the truth is, it’s also in large part what my next book, STORY GENIUS, is all about. Because you can’t talk about story without talking about backstory — it’s not separate from the story, it’s the most seminal layer of it. My goal is to redefine what writers think about when they think of backstory! Wish me luck ;- ).
Lisa-
May I chime in? Backstory is indeed a confusing topic. Your distinction between backstory and info dump helps clear the air, and may I add…
Backstory when it works doesn’t tell us only what happened in the past, it creates anticipation and apprehension about what has yet to happen in the future. It prepares us for…something. We sense…something…coming.
Barry caught that above when he says backstory carries “meaning instead of just information”. That meaning means most, for me, though when it creates mystery.
So perhaps this is another way to understand backstory: It works when it doesn’t answer questions but raises them; when it doesn’t explain things but causes us to worry about what we don’t yet understand and what we can’t see coming.
For me that’s what unifies your examples. Looking forward to your new book, Lisa. When is it out?
I’d add that at its best, backstory is revealed through behavior, not explanation. Lisa, you touched on this in a previous post noting that backstory creates the character’s attitude toward life, the way she appraises the world and other people, the judgments she makes, etc. The past creates the way she navigates the world.
But that’s most interesting, as Don notes, when it creates mystery or intrigue. When the character’s behavior or insights or impressions are slightly off-kilter, contradictory, or unexpected, we wonder — what happened in her life to make her think or feel or do that? We keep reading to find out.
Elizabeth George uses the term “pathological maneuvers” to describe the habits and defense mechanisms a person forms in response to previous incidents of pain, loss, helplessness, etc. And John Truby emphasizes that these defensive tactics and habits, by which the character has come to protect herself from pain at the expense of opening up to hope and promise, is the way the character is “ruining her life.” And we as readers are not just intrigued, we want to know: will she change?
Thanks so much for asking Don — my book, Story Genius, comes out in August 2016. I’m very excited about it!! I just finished teaching a beta online class of the Story Genius Writing Workshop at Author Accelerator and it was a powerful experience, unbelievably astute writers, who blew me away. I can’t wait to teach it again in May.
The thing is, so many writers get backstory wrong (and it’s not their fault), which is why I keep hammering away about it! I have a suspicion that we don’t actually agree on what backstory is and how it works — which would make for a juicy conversation some day on a panel. Maybe sometime soon? Nothing I love more than talking story! (You too, I bet ;-)
Meanwhile, I’m going to keep illustrating my point about backstory in my post next month — to show that the most compelling characters use “backstory” actively, not just in large swatches (which is what I was talking about here), but in small strategic snippets, in service of what’s happening on the page, throughout the entire story.
Until then — onward!
Exactly!
I use backstory to provoke interest, to raise questions, to make them wonder what does it mean.
When you give just a glimpse of a backstory – enough to show the character, but without any explanation – they turn the pages to see the rest of it.
A carefully woven net of questions and answers, spread all over the story, is essential to keep them riveted.
I’ll be darned.
Thanks soooo much for clarifying backstory even more. I cannot being to write a story until I have the histories of my characters and then it comes out naturally when they respond a certain way and not another … it’s due to their past. However, sometimes I forget that my readers don’t know the rest of the story … so must learn to weave those bits in better. This gives me even more confidence to begin my current story in media ras instead of adding on a front porch! Thanks Lisa.
Thank YOU Vijaya! It’s soooo easy to forget that readers don’t have the same info that the writer does — truth is, it’s just the way the brain works (read: not your fault ;-). Once YOU know something about your character, it’s so easy to assume the reader does — but even the word “assume” is misleading, because normally you don’t even think about it at all. It’s called the “Curse of Knowledge” — which basically means that once we know something, it’s nigh on impossible to imagine what it would be like not to know it. So we tacitly assume everyone else does — with ever consciously making that decision. That’s why forcing our noggin to pay attention to that fact is one of the things that sets writers apart. Onward!
Tha-a-n-h-h-h-nk you. I got in a squabble with my publisher’s editor about a long story about one of my characters. Call the long story, uhh, backstory.
He said that it stopped the narrative flow. (To quote Gomer Pyle, “Surprise, surprise, surprise.)
At first, I tried the way two adults are supposed to settle things: I yelled at him, told him he was nuts, that he clearly went to an inferior college, and that his collie was probably a lab.
I pointed out that The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo wouldn’t exist without extensive backstory. I told him that one my writer-heroes, Nelson Demille, in Up Country, had two men, former battle enemies during the Vietnam War, re-tell a battle they had participated in. The battle story surely stopped the ongoing narrative, but I loved it. And surely I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.
He said I was the one who was nuts, and that Babe Ruth DIDN’T point out the home run. THAT . . . was . . . the . . . LAST , , , straw.
So I told him–actually, my last straw–to read my novel without my character story.
He did. He wrote me back to say the novel didn’t make sense without the character story.
I replied, saying that his children probably weren’t as ugly as I’d said.
The book comes out this summer.
OMG, Jim, this is so well said — and what I love about it is that you didn’t, um, just say it, you told us a story about it. A story that’s immensely entertaining (so you got our attention) and informative (once you had our attention, your story did what stories are meant to do: give us a new insight; change us). Wow. Can’t think of a better teaser for your book, I’ll be looking for it this summer!
Lisa, Thanks for this. As I read, I kept thinking about my WIP and places to go reread to make sure my backstory is doing it’s job without calling attention to itself. I’ve had your next book on pre-order for a while now. Looking forward to it.
Thanks right back at you, Densie! Here’s to weaving in backstory so deftly that it becomes a the most gripping part of the narrative — the part that gives meaning to everything that happens up there in the plot. Onward!
Backstory is absolutely required if there is to be any depth not only to the character but to the story itself. Info dump? Well, it has to come out somehow, somewhere. I have my moments where I insert backstory in an info dump – but it has to be part of the construction of the story. In this info dump (below) I achieve a number of things important to the story: the fact that the husband withholds information from the wife, the state of society at this time (1933) and ten years ago, the status of the wife’s family and the decisiveness of the husband.
And most important: that withholding information from the wife is, in fact, the basis for the trouble in the marriage: though the husband has no clue about this…
From The Versailles Legacy p. 17
“I have a buyer,” Herr Mundt said in the hallway. “He wants to close by the fifteenth of April.”
“Can we accommodate him?”
“If we move immediately on it.”
He didn’t want to be rushed into something this critical.
They went into the gun room, a self-consciously masculine den. Books lined one wall and a giant fireplace commanded another. A dozen stuffed heads of game animals hung on a third wall among antique rifles and crossed sabres and pistols and an artistic block of tintypes in matched black frames. In one corner stood that damned headless manikin dressed for war in its blue cavalry tunic.
He hoped Britt would not come down for a while. He hadn’t yet told her that he’d put the Black Forest manor up for sale. Over three centuries in the Wittingen family, for the past decade it had stood empty. Everything inside had been sold, the windows boarded over, the doors barred and chained, and sapling firs were sprouting across the lawns. During that exponential inflation ten years ago, the local villagers had torn down the horse barns one plank at a time to feed their cooking stoves. Desperate times, desperate measures. Bare survival, still going on.
In the gun room Erich went over the figures with the lawyer once again. He couldn’t afford to pay one more year of taxes on that derelict place. “What’s the offer?”
I find that when I do isolated writing exercises, often what comes out is something that would be part of the backstory, if the passage appeared in a novel. It’s good practice for my own rule about backstory, which I sum up, “Kneaded as needed.” That is, fold or “knead” the backstory into the dough of the main narrative so that details from the past show up just when the reader “needs” them in order to make sense of the narrative’s present.
I have become so fond of the exercises and the way they sharpen my “kneading” skills that I have several collections of “starters” (or prompts) in my Etsy shop.
Trish O’Connor
Epiclesis Consulting LLC
Freelance Editing and Writer’s Resources
epiclesisconsuting.etsy.com
epiclesisconsulting.com
Oh my goodness, no shortage of shameless plugs in the comment section down here. Shameless … I shake my finger and say shame:) Unless I’m mistaken or have been away from the rules for too long: We aren’t supposed to sell services or push our work on people on WU … that’s part of its awesomeness! And doing so in the comment section of a great like Lisa C. is only crouching in her shadow. Be free. Go somewhere else.
Ok, back on topic:
So my comment is based on this part of Lisa’s post:
“The point is, when it comes to Info Dumps, backstory is not the problem. It’s how the backstory is injected into the narrative that matters. When it’s unceremoniously dumped, it does stop the story cold. And yes, absolutely, no one should do that. Ever.”
As for me, the change from taking a big dump on the page to artfully (I hope) weaving in lean, directly relevant information into story was when I realized “It’s all about the present” (I could so write a topic on this but it would count as a shameless plug and then Lisa would set my hair on fire).
In the past I was all about the set-up, that as long as I can get this info in now, it will make the next chapter or even the middle of the novel and the end so much better …. NO! Slam on the brakes! It wasn’t until I realized that EVERYTHING I am writing in this moment MUST serve this very moment… not the future and definitely not the past. When I focused my writing on making this very moment key to the story, everything changed and the info dumps disappeared. I don’t know if this helps anyone or if it will even be read, but it really helped me and so I’m sharing.