How to Write Effective Backstory for Your Novel
Every fictional character has a history, or what we call in the book world, backstory. This storytelling element is critical to developing your character and conflict. Yet, ineffective, mistimed, or misplaced backstory can stall the plot and turn off your reader.
This article discusses tips on how and when to reveal backstory so that you don’t slow down the momentum of your plot yet still inject emotional tension as your character wrestles with tough decisions, resists change, and pursues their story goal.
Let’s hop to it!
WHAT IS BACKSTORY?
Anything that happened to the character in the past, typically before page 1 of your book. Backstory can include childhood events and experiences like dance recitals and Christmases at Grandma’s house, social dynamics at work or school, family history and traditions, losing a loved one, socioeconomic status, level of education, handwritten letters found in an attic, victories or good fortune, cultural norms and expectations, national or world events like wars, etc.
Any of those elements help shape your character(s) and set up some explanations to the kind of people they are in the main conflict of your story. For example, a character who grew up poor might have anxiety and fear around money in their adulthood. A character who was bullied in school might take self-defense classes or learn how to fight with weapons.
When readers understand “why” a character does the things they do, or behaves a certain way (especially if the actions or behaviors are troublesome), it’s easier to feel empathy toward the character. Readers are more likely to care about them and root them on to a better way of being.
HAZARDS OF BACKSTORY
By definition, “backstory” reels the story backward. Writers can use a number of techniques to reveal backstory: flashbacks, character thoughts or dialogue, and memories or reflections fleshed out through exposition.
While any of those techniques are excellent storytelling tools, they must be handled with care. Whenever you introduce a moment of backstory, you’re essentially hitting the “pause” button in the main conflict (which is the forward-moving plot).
If you’re going to pause your forward-moving story with information that happened in the past, best be sure it’s the right place and the right time for it and delivered with the most effective technique.
COMMON MISTAKES WITH BACKSTORY
The most common mistake I see in manuscripts that cross my desk is too much backstory in the opening pages.
Your number-one job as an author is to bond your reader and your main character(s). And, yes, understanding why they do something or behave a certain way is a crucial ingredient in that bond. But, readers don’t love it when the main conflict is interrupted by explanation because it interferes with that bond.
It’s fairly easy to stop the forward-moving story to interject backstory through a brief passage of exposition. However, this shifts things into “telling” mode, which tends to deflate tension and drama and takes the reader out of their fictive dream.
Writers are better off “showing” backstory through character emotions and responses to the action.
Using the bully example above, you can easily “show” your character’s fear of physical or verbal coercion through their body language, thoughts, and emotional responses. A simple inward musing such as “Oh my God, not again,” will tell the reader straight up that the character has been in a similar situation before. We don’t need more than that to hook us into the character’s present circumstances.
Will a reader have questions surrounding the character’s past experiences with bullying? Of course—but that’s what you want. Questions bound in “I want to know more” or “I wonder what happened to Dorothy to make her this frightened” are forward-driving questions. Readers will keep turning the page to discover more about your character.
What you don’t want is a reader asking a question like, “Why the heck are we abandoning the action scene to hear about Dorothy’s past?”
BACKSTORY IS SUPPOSED TO SERVE THE MAIN STORY
Backstory should never be more important or more interesting than what’s going on in the main story. Pay attention to how you feel when you’re writing backstory—if that’s the story that you enjoy the most, then you have trouble on your hands.
This isn’t to say that backstory should be dull and lifeless—that’d be a different kind of trouble.
You need to strike a balance. Backstory, when it’s called for, absolutely must shine in its own right. But it should always be set up and delivered in a way that ultimately lures your reader to the main story.
Your reader should devour the backstory only because it increases their ravenous hunger for the main story.
BACKSTORY SHOULD ENHANCE READER EXPERIENCE
Readers are somewhat of a co-creator in stories. What I mean by that is they want to fully participate in and experience the story world and anticipate various outcomes. They’ll make guesses about what a character might do next, how the setting will make a difference in the final battle, why two characters despise each other, so on and so forth.
Readers keep reading because they want to know what will happen next, but they also want to know if they guessed correctly. This is true of all genres—the author will lay a trail of breadcrumbs, and readers will pick them up one after the other, organizing them into a semblance of explanation to help them understand the character(s).
Their self-explanations may be correct or incorrect—but being right isn’t what drives a reader onward. Seeing if and how the character solves the problem is what invests a reader, but they have to care about the character in the first place.
Curiosity and wonderment are part of the invisible contract they sign when they open a book. Readers enjoy the opportunity to anticipate and predict story events, character behaviors, and consequences of actions.
If you explain everything under the sun, then you take away their curiosity and wonderment.
THE THREE C’S: CLARITY, CONNECTION, CURIOSITY
So, how do we figure out when or if backstory is appropriate to include? Consider the three C’s: Clarity, Connection, and Curiosity.
CLARITY: Your reader should always be clear on what the story is about. Any time you feel the need to introduce backstory, make sure it doesn’t muddle your reader’s understanding of your story. While it can help to explain some things about what’s going on in your main conflict, less is more. Only provide details that are pertinent to the situation at hand.
An exception to this guideline would be if you’re throwing in a red herring to mislead, surprise, or divert your reader. Even then, tread carefully here . . . you don’t want to establish a sense of distrust in your reader.
CONNECTION: If your reader doesn’t care about what happens to your characters, if you’ve failed to cement a reader-character connection, then chances are that reader won’t finish your novel. For backstory, find one flawed trait in your character which your reader can relate to. Develop this trait as part of your character’s resistance to change. When readers can see how something from the character’s past is intruding upon the character’s present, they feel connected to the character because it’s a relatable issue.
CURIOSITY: If readers aren’t curious about your characters and what will happen next, then they won’t stick around long. There is a fine line here because curiosity can easily backslide into confusion. Follow your trail of backstory breadcrumbs and make sure each subsequent crumb adds something new: meaning, emotion, question, explanation, mystery, revelation, trouble, fear, or hope. When backstory shows up as a relevant facet to your character’s current struggle, readers’ curiosity will expound and pages will turn.
TIMING & TECHNIQUE
As mentioned earlier, backstory can be delivered in several different ways. You may have a flashback in chapter fourteen that your beta readers think needs to go. It’s quite possible that the technique you chose could be the problem rather than the information itself. Or, it could be located in the wrong place.
Hashing this out will take some work. It’s of the utmost importance that you’re clear on what your story is about before you start axing anything. Flag it, yes, and do some discovery work on the side before you make major revisions.
Personally, I like to experiment with technique to see the various effects. For example, if I’m questioning whether my flashback isn’t propulsive enough, then I’ll play around with plugging that information into an exchange of dialogue or character interiority. I’ll run my ideas by my trusted writing groups and they help me decide what works best.
Some questions to consider:
TIMING: Why would it be best if the reader learns this information now? If I reveal it in a different place, how will that impact the reader’s experience?
TECHNIQUE: The benefits to delivering this backstory through [Technique A] are [list any and all benefits you can think of] because [explain why].
The disadvantages to delivering this backstory through [Technique A] are [list all disadvantages] because [explain why].
Switching [Technique A] to [Technique B] will help my story in these ways [list ‘em out] because [explain why].
The technique I’m currently using allows my reader to co-create by using her imagination, curiosity, and wonderment to fill in the blanks because [explain how and why you think this statement is true].
AUTHOR VS POV CHARACTER
Authors need to know a heckuva lotta stuff about their story worlds in order to craft believable characters with compelling problems they must solve. But readers don’t need to know everything the author knows in order to enjoy the story.
So how to tell the difference?
Get out of your author’s head and dive into your POV character’s head. What does your POV character desperately want to share with the reader? Whatever is important to your POV character needs to be on the page in some way. Anything else can be for your own use as the author.
Backstory that impassions you but doesn’t necessarily add value to the story is known as a Little Darling (although there are other names for this, too). Weed out your Little Darlings so that we hear less from you, the author, and more from your story people.
DISCOVERY TIME
Use the following prompts to help you decide whether your backstory is necessary, if its delivery is engaging, and if its placement propels the story forward:
1.| Why does the reader need to know this fact about the character? How will it deepen their understanding of the character and lure them into wanting to know more?
2.| In what ways does [specific detail] add value to the main conflict? In other words, if you were to take it out, does the reader lose a sense of clarity, connection, or curiosity? Why or why not?
3.| A great way to identify Little Darlings is to make two columns:
Column 1: Value to the Story
Column 2: No Value to the Story
Write down every single detail you know about this backstory in the appropriate column. If there are more than two details in column 2: No Value to the Story, then either ditch the backstory or revise the backstory so that it fully adds value.
4.| It’s scary to take out backstory, I get it. You’ll probably wonder if the story will fall apart if you withhold the information. It’s certainly something you need to consider. So do that.
Just as a test, take it out. (I said what I said.) Revise where necessary. Re-read (or, better, work with a writing partner so you can get objective eyes here). Questions may come up, in which case, you might think “See! I knew I needed the backstory!” But hold those horses. Before you reinsert the backstory like before, see if you can get away with a smaller passage, or if you should move the information to a different place in the book, or if you change the mode from, say, flashback to a character’s musings.
Backstory isn’t bad for your story, but ineffective backstory is. When you take the time to mold it so that it adds value and meaning to your overall story, then that information will become a seamless part of a story world that readers won’t soon forget.
DO YOU ENJOY WRITING BACKSTORY?
WHAT DO YOU FIND TO BE THE MOST DIFFICULT?
LET ME KNOW IN THE COMMENTS!
HAVE A WRITERLY DAY!