Raise a Question, Earn the Backstory
By Kathryn Craft | July 13, 2017 |
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
As avid readers, writers have an intuitive sense of when to include backstory. Their efforts, however, can come across as either boring (in the case of info dump), laughable (in the case of random irrelevance), or disruptive (in the case of backstory delivered too soon).
Clearly, these reactions are not ideal. What’s going wrong?
In each case just mentioned, the backstory inclusion is driven by the author’s goal to deliver information and not, as it should be in every scene, driven by the demands of the protagonist’s story.
The purpose of backstory is to motivate your characters for the actions they take in the current story. Unless something from the past had a powerful influence on the way the characters are acting now, you’ll be hard-pressed to defend the relevance of its inclusion. In fact, you may not have the chance to try—you may already have lost your reader.
Accept these cold, hard facts about backstory
- The reader approaches your novel with an interest in your character’s history that is idle to nil. During your opening, the reader’s primary goal is to orient to the frame of the story you want to tell, and will simply accept what you tell her on page one as being the current state of things. It is up to you to generate interest in the protagonist’s history.
- “Because I wrote it and it’s interesting” is not a standard of relevant inclusion. You might want to include your character’s entire personal history because you took the time to write it, but you were doing so to start to get a sense of your character. In your novel, that character will pop to life through only those backstory inclusions that will motivate the story you want to tell.
- Every time you switch to a backstory scene you stand the chance of jarring readers from the fictive dream, which will invite them to set down your book. It’s up to you to ease the transition.
One mad skill will address all three of these issues, and I’m shocked that more writers don’t use it.
Raise a question about backstory
You can keep readers with you by raising a question to which they would like an answer. Even if they are heavily involved in your current plot—which we hope they are—they will tolerate the departure from it to learn the answer.
Mark L. Danielewski used this technique to set up a frame story in his cult hit, House of Leaves. In other words, his entire story is backstory, and he hopes to involve us in it by raising powerful questions that will help carry us through an opening that’s a bit of a slog. This is from the fifth page of the fictional “introduction,” although it’s the first mention of the point-of-view character’s current situation:
I haven’t even washed the blood off yet. Not all of it’s mine either. Still caked around my fingers. Signs of it on my shirt. “What’s happened here?” I keep asking myself. “What have I done?” What would you have done? I went straight for the guns and I loaded them and then I tried to decide what to do with them. The obvious thing was to shoot something. After all, that’s what guns are designed to do—shoot something. But who? Or what? I didn’t have a clue. There were people and cars outside my hotel window. Midnight people I didn’t know. Midnight cars I’d never seen before. I could have shot them all.
I threw up in my closet instead.
Clearly, something deeply disturbing has happened to this character, and in order to beg our curiosity, Danielewski has resisted telling us exactly what. I read on for the answers. You can use this technique at the end of any section to generate interest in a backstory scene to come.
But you don’t need blood to do the trick. Raising a question can be as easy as adding one line of transition, such as in these three examples:
Susie dabbed the makeup onto her bruised cheek. Sam hadn’t always been this way.
Of course Janet knew all about the guns.
Preachers couldn’t be trusted. Jack had known that since he was ten years old.
This technique takes a little thought but isn’t all that hard. Yet I thumbed through some thirty novels I had on hand before coming up with Danielewski’s example. Give it a try. If your backstory teaser leads to a scene that helps the reader understand why your character is in such a tough spot, it will effectively maintain the psychological tension you’ve built and draw her in all the more.
Have you ever set a book down because you just didn’t want to navigate the clunky transition to backstory you didn’t care about? Have you used this technique in your writing, or noted great examples in published works? Share a line or two that comes right before the breakaway to backstory.
[coffee]
Kathryn Craft (she/her) is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. Her forthcoming book, Crafting Story Movement: Techniques to Engage Readers and Drive Your Novel Forward, draws from decades of experience as both a story consultant and a movement specialist/dance critic. Learn more on Kathryn’s website.
*GRUMBLE* I concede this is a great reality check. Please excuse me while I comb back over this draft to ensure I haven’t given too much away. Thanks for the sage advice.
I’m well aware of the syndrome you reference here, Avery. The 11th hour advice!
After eight years of steady work on my second novel, when I had three agents requesting the full ms, I took a Donald Maass workshop. You may know how that went.
I realized I hadn’t pushed my character all the way into her darkest moment, which was suddenly so clear. I had to take five months to pull the whole thing apart, make the change, and put it back together.
But it was much better, and earned me representation, and that novel became my debut! Which is all to say, I’ll bet your efforts make your ms a much better read. Good luck!
Past and present intertwine. It’s like arithmetic. One factor alone does not make an equation or yield a truth. Two factors interacting produce an insight, not just a sum but an answer to a question.
To your clear and simple guide, I’d add only this: not all factors are created equal. The number one is fine but doesn’t take us anywhere. Pi is powerful and complex, raising questions and mysteries of its own. It’s a number with no end.
In story terms that means that fixing toast has no worthwhile past resonance, but waking up covered in blood does. When there is mystery, we must delve. When there isn’t, don’t bother.
Wow, a mathematician turned storyteller! A multi-talent.
But I think I follow you on the mysteries of pi. And this is perfect: “When there is mystery, we must delve.” Thanks for the summary, Benjamin!
Whether the narrative POV is third person or first (not omniscient), the reader is experiencing what happens through a character’s eyes. 1. What is that character experiencing in the moment? One thing is almost certain: she isn’t experiencing backstory. Keeping this in mind, the writer focuses on creating a scene or moment that will capture the reader’s interest. If this is done well, the reader will naturally want to know what went before. 2. Aim for curiosity and forward movement, not information. Hint at backstory, don’t deliver it in a bundle. 3. Never forget that moments of dialogue–artfully done–can be great opportunities for revealing backstory. But backstory should almost never be the principal function of dialogue. Think of what in life we extrapolate from snatches of overheard conversation.
Thanks for the added tips, Barry. The use of backstory is a big, important topic and while I was trying to focus on just one mad skill today, these are all valid points!
Sorry if I missed your point, Kathryn. I really thought I was addressing it. IMO, the writer wants the reader to be the one asking the questions. As for your main example, I wouldn’t read beyond this opening paragraph. Blood on the hands, blood of more than one kind, but the narrator hasn’t a clue? Guns, vomit? I need something less obviously exploitative.
No I think you got the point, Barry, and expanded on it in helpful ways I couldn’t within reasonable blog length, lol!
I agree that Danielewski’s opening is over-the-top, but in a way I think it weeds out his ideal reader. Not usually my bag, but the guns and the midnight people raised a question in my mind, the vomit was a surprise—and I had it from my son that this was one crazy, twisted romp. That always helps, and is hard to divorce from one’s perceptions.
I also had a hard time finding examples, because I’m at my summer home without my library, and limited to what I had on Kindle—and they all just switched to backstory at the author’s will. Do you have any examples of this technique on hand?
Never ask a novelist for an example–unless you caution him not to use one from his own stuff. In my second suspense novel, Deep North, I start with words of dialogue. Since the book is classified as suspense, I can assume the reader knows that what she sees up front is not going to lead into the gentle study of a quilting group.
The housekeeper glanced in the rearview at the teenager in the back seat. “You got everything now? Pillow? CDs? You take a sweater?”
“God, for the zillionth time–”
“I’m just checkin’ like your mamma told me to.” She looked back to the road. “So you got no reason to go back in that house.”
“TanYA–”
“Yeah, you ‘TanYA all you want. Your mamma seen that “Risky Business” picture. She know what goes on when parents leave home.”
If this works for the reader, she will want to find out what’s going on, especially about where the girl’s mother has gone, and why. The reader also has the title and the cover art to work with.
Yes, thank you Barry! I use the technique all the time but it wasn’t cool to post my own examples—much better that you put yours in my comment section!
We writers are so enamored of your words, but sometimes it’s the things NOT said that raise more interest!
I have one rule: if the character has no reason to think something right now – from the last name of her interlocutor, to the color of her Kindergarten teacher’s hair, to her own sense of abandonment – it doesn’t go in.
So many things are thought of by characters for the convenience of writers.
So true, Alicia!
I’m reading A Game of Ghosts by John Connolly and the opening chapters have plenty of backstory and character history weaved in and out. And honestly I had to skim some of it because it was so dull and dense, and I wanted to get on with the story happening in the present. On page 26 he goes into a major shift into his personal life with ex-wife and daughter during a psychotherapy session for 6 pages. The shift totally pulled me out of the suspense and interest in the main story line.
I don’t bother with books that do that any more – if they start doing it early, they keep doing it. It’s that writer’s style – but not mine as a reader.
Paula this is a great example of backstory poorly used and executed, but also of a more pervasive problem: the lack of editing for bestselling authors. Once your name can sell a book, it seems editors kick you to the curb. I know it’s business, and that these authors are cranking out the books, but still. It’s a shame. This will nonetheless create a valuable lesson for us, so thanks for sharing, and I’m glad you can see why it wasn’t working.
I think this is what happens when authors become too easily published.
When you write the character first, and plot second or not at all, the backstory comes out naturally, when the character feels the need to think about it, and not otherwise. This also applies to description and any other sections of prose that might bore the reader.
I’m glad this works for you, Marc, but you may have a more intuitive feel for (or educated view of) the writing process. As a developmental editor, I know for a fact that relevant backstory doesn’t always spring forth naturally.
Many people who start novels by exploring character use dossier-type prompts and life chronologies that they try to weave in simply because they wrote them. The determination of relevance isn’t always intuitive.
In the case of historical fiction, writers will sometimes try include other things happening during the same time just because they researched them, even thought their story has not earned the inclusion.
I loved your post Kathryn, and have appreciated all of the comments. I have struggled with backstory for some time. I think my writing is about to get a whole lot better. Thank you!
I’m so happy, Tracey! I’m sure that now that you’re sensitized to this, you’ll find all sorts of good and bad examples in your reading, reinforcing your knowledge about this technique.
I’ve seen the backstory info dump disguised as a prologue which can work if it’s short, but I’ve found I’m better off writing the “prologue” then using that material throughout my story. I know the P-word is controversial, but for me, it’s a slippery slope which usually ends in thousands of words before chapter 1 even starts.
HAHA a fake prologue! Great way to ease into writing, Angela!
Oooo, Kathryn. Great article.
My wip incorporates mucho backstory and you’ve enlightened me to an excellent way to include it. And I was reading some of the comments above. I think Benjamin said something about past and present intertwining to produce insight…a product of an equation, so to speak. And also making sure it’s worth delving into the mystery of it all. I thoroughly agree. That’s pretty much how I’ve been including it already.
I’ll also look for Danielewski’s novel. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
I love stories where “what brought the character to this point” is of almost equal relevance to “what happens from here.” My debut, THE ART OF FALLING, was that way. It’s fun to sense the interrelationships adding up in your mind.
Hi, Kathryn:
Ah, the ever-present problem of backstory and its placement.
I wrote an article for Writer’s Digest about this last year. This is the intro to the article (after which I actually did give tips on where to place backstory):
“One hears a great deal in writing circles these days that backstory—whatever took place in your main characters’ lives before the story’s outset—is irrelevant, intrusive, a drag on the story’s forward momentum, even the hallmark of amateurism.
Although some of the reasons for this “backstory backlash” have merit, it’s far more often true that it’s the mishandling and misplacement of episodes from the past, not their intrinsic worth, which is to blame.
Slathering the past into the story in prolonged descriptive insertions—incommodiously referred to as “information dumps”—really can bring forward momentum to a jolting halt. But that speaks to poor technique, not narrative merit.
The central flaw in such clumsy insertions is the failure to realize that the past is embedded on Page 1 in how the character thinks and feels and appraises circumstances. It’s evident in the values she tells herself she lives by and the ones she actually observes. It’s revealed in the attitude she brings to various situations. Most important, the past has forged what she wants, why she wants it, and why she’s failed so far to get it.
It’s this more organic understanding of backstory—rooting it in the character’s emotional, moral, and psychological awareness and decision-making, i.e., her behavior—that points the way toward understanding not just how and why but where to use it.”
I love the idea of having backstory answer a question. In the article I just mentioned I suggest using it when the story has just hit a crucial reversal or revelation, and the character has to assess how he feels or thinks about what has just happened, and why it was so surprising or shocking–i.e., the past conditioned him to expect one thing, but another occurred. Why? And why did he expect that other thing, and how can he keep himself from falling into the same trap again?
Wonderful post. Thanks!
Thanks David! Always love your WD articles, and this is one of them.
Tapping backstory for an important decision is perhaps the most crucial and organic reason for inclusion. But I have seen riveting examples when it was included simply to contextualize an emotional state as a character approaches what he suspects will be a big moment, as I describe in my post about Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize winner, The Sympathizer: https://staging-writerunboxed.kinsta.cloud/2016/11/04/building-a-chapter-for-emotional-impact/.
What almost never works for me—despite the number of writers who try to get away with it—is something like, “I remember when I met Gary…” Unless you’ve raised a question about the importance of this introduction, we just don’t care, and are happy to assume that at some point, these two characters simply got to know one another.
I like your idea about earning the backstory. Yeah, it should be earned and necessary.
Thanks Tina!
Thank you, Kathryn for your insightful article. I will be putting the following words where I can see them every time I sit down to write:
‘Unless something from the past had a powerful influence on the way the characters are acting now, you’ll be hard-pressed to defend the relevance of its inclusion.’
My words will be very happy there! :)
Excellent topic and discussion.
Thank you.
Thanks Tom!
The thing that grabs me about your example is the twist at the end. From reading the passage you think the character is some hardened bad@$$, a “shoot first and ask questions later” type, but then he is throwing up in the closet.
Yes that gets me too, David!
Sometimes it’s the small tips that really help.
Thinking about how to raise a question so that I can get the reader wanting to know the answer later through backstory was that ‘aha, here’s something I can try’ for me today. Thank you!