Backstory without Boredom
Author: Corbette Doyle
Original Publication Date in Love Notes: January 2002

Advice is cheap, especially for struggling novelists. Be a Point of View Purist. Minimize the use of italics. Don't include too many secondary characters. Never start more than one character's first name with the same letter. Use lots of dialogue to fill your pages with white space. Show, don't tell. Stay out of your characters' heads. And, above all else, avoid boring the reader with backstory.

Good advice, all of it, yet NYT bestsellers continually violate one or more of these rules. Used judiciously, every broken rule can add to your story. Especially backstory. Point in fact, you can't write a compelling story without creating memorable characters. If we are all, at lest partially, a product of our history, then a successful story cannot ignore the past. The key, then, is learning how to break this particular rule in a manner that makes more, rather than less, of your novel.

Common backstory methods, in order of editorial acceptability, include: weaving the backstory into the fabric of the novel, using a prologue, and using the early chapters to convey the past. Editors, agents, and books offering writing advice preach the need to open novels today at a point of change. Pages of backstory at the beginning will bore readers and kill sales. Yet Nora Roberts devotes the first 200 pages of the NYT Bestseller River's End to backstory. But, we tell ourselves, Nora can afford to break all the rules. What about the rest of us?

Romance novels frequently employ prologues, though literary experts decry their use. Rickey Mallory a.k.a. Mallory Lane, believes prologues enhance a story when used appropriately. In her New Orleans RWA seminar "The Book Starts Here," she advocated the use of prologues as long as they are compelling and tell the reader only what she needs to know. "The reader," she reminds us, "does not need to know everything you as author know." Others advise using prologues only when you need to establish a question the reader must beg to have answered, rather than as a lazy way to backfill history. Flashbacks, on the other hand, should answer a question the story has raised.

Flashbacks provide a convenient and direct tool for weaving history in along the way. Nancy Kress warns, however, in "Using Flashbacks" from the Writer's Digest Handbook of Novel Writing, that flashbacks can interrupt the story, thus disenchanting editors and readers alike. To describe how to use them effectively, she classifies backstory by length. 

1. Longest — A novel that consists almost entirely of backstory is called a "frame story" and the reader avoids confusion because only the beginning and the end deal with the present. The advantage of a frame story is that it affords two points of view in one character, i.e. the older, wiser protagonist can view the past through a different perspective.

2. Mid-length — Interrupts the main story with backstory that lasts one or two chapters. On the positive side, this approach lets you open the story in medias res and hook the reader with the proscribed dramatic point of change. You then return to the past to provide the necessary background and motivations. On the negative side, many consider mid-length backstory hackneyed and amateurish. If you decide to use this approach, tread carefully and give the reader a roadmap to transitions. Kress suggests separate chapters and obvious opening lines ("Nine years ago I had arrived in New York…").

3. Shortest — Lasting no more than a few paragraphs, these hardly interrupt the story yet can deepen characterization and clarify the specifics of a situation. While valuable, avoid overuse. Kress also suggests using a bridge to evoke memories and move between the main scene and a short flashback such as: an object (e.g. music, photos, an unusual color, a scent), a place (as in A Separate Peace or Summer of ‘42), or an incident (e.g. snatches of conversation or an employment application question asking, "the most significant thing about you…").

But how much of the past do we reveal and how do we incorporate the past without distracting or confusing the reader? Orson Scott Card, in "Creating Characters That Readers Care About" from the same Writer's Digest Handbook, echoes Mallory's warning that few things from the past are really important to the present story. He advocates revealing only enough to convey motive and character revelation and to avoid backstory until you have securely anchored the story.

Card suggests making the unveiling of the past a journey as Dickens did in Great Expectations. Dickens, he points out, used Miss Havisham's eccentricity to make her memorable for one day by opening the novel with the old woman dressed in a wedding gown. He used her cruelty to Pip, i.e. through what she taught her niece, to make her memorable throughout the novel, and he used the final revelation of her past, i.e. jilted at the alter, to make her memorable forever.

Three subtle, or indirect, methods Card outlines for revealing the past are:

1. Past as a present event — Have one character tell another a story from the past in a manner that both reveals the past and adds to the present action;

2. Implied Past: Expectation — Show what a character expects to happen currently to reveal something about that individual's past. For example, if a woman cringes at a raised hand, we assume instantly that she has been beaten in the past, and more than once; and

3. Implied Past: Networks — Reveal a character's past through the way others who know the character react to her and treat her. 

Theory yields insight but what methods do successful novelists employ? Do they use dialogue, italics, spaces for separation? Only the shortest form of flashbacks? All of the above? Recent novels by Susan Wiggs and Ginna Gray apply several of the techniques recommended in the articles by Kress and Card.

In The You I Never Knew, Wiggs uses one style for recent backstory and another for older history. In the former, she tends to insert a memory immediately following a line of current dialog — all in a single paragraph. For example, a statement by the protagonist's estranged father triggers the flashback. "‘This is one time you don't get to call the shots.' Out of the blue, a trust agreement had arrived in November…" The rest of the paragraph explains why she has come home, but not why she left. Dialog returns the reader to the current setting, i.e. "‘Michele?' Her father's voice beckoned her back to the present."

Wiggs uses the reverse, a longer, more introspective approach with dialogue in the middle, to weave in older backstory. "At the moment she couldn't do anything but think…She had been sitting on the steps of that gazebo the first time she met Sam… ‘Nice picture,' said a voice behind her." 

After half a page of remembered dialogue, Wiggs again uses introspection to transition the reader. "The sound of Sam McPhee laughing… These were the first things about him that she had loved. In the years that ensued, they were the things she remembered more vividly and more frequently than she wanted to."

Ginna Gray's approach to recent backstory in The Prodigal Daughter is similar to Wiggs'. She blends a current memory trigger and the memory itself into a single section without spaces, italics or other differentiation. "Ever since that call four days ago… ‘Maggie, you have to come home.' The words had hit her like a fist to the stomach. Remembering the shock of the moment…"

Gray uses introspection only, without dialogue, for some of the older backstory. In one critical scene, viewing her favorite garden spot triggers very old, fond memories that segue into an old (but more recent) negative memory of an incident that took place in the same spot. The remaining pages of the chapter delve into that ugly memory. The next chapter opens with the protagonist forcing herself out of memory lane. "Maggie swallowed hard, her gaze still blindly fixed on the gazebo. Even after all this time, she still remembered every detail of that awful night…"

Kudos to Wiggs and Gray. Both authors used non-controversial methods to communicate backstory without boring the reader. But atypical approaches to backstory may separate your novel from the pack. Take Madeline Hunter's By Possession. Though a relatively new author, she dares to break the mold. Rather than weaving backstory into dialog or moments of introspection, she opens every chapter, starting in Chapter 2, with two to three pages of backstory. She signals the reader carefully by italicizing the flashback, using a space for separation, and then returning the protagonist to the present with obvious integration tools such as, "She awoke from the dreamy memory…," "She emerged from her reverie…," and "She became aware…"

Anita Shreve (author of Oprah's pick The Pilot's Wife) tells her most recent novel in reverse. The Last Time We Met opens in the present with the woman's point of view. Part two, told from the man's point of view, takes place two decades earlier when both were in their twenties. Part three mixes the points of view and describes their first encounter as teen-agers. The tragedy of that meeting, though hinted at throughout the novel, is not revealed until the end.

The recent cult movie Momento deserves a prize for the most bizarre, yet intriguing, approach. The entire story is told in reverse, scene by scene, but the opening of each scene replays the last section of the prior one like a loop. Pieces of the puzzle are parceled out stingily, making the audience beg for more. Similarly, a recent Edgar Award winner opens by revealing the murderer, but the story works the reader back in time to unveil the victim.

While Hunter, Shreve and Momento all take highly unusual approaches, each adheres strictly to the opening advice: give the reader no more than they must have to follow the story — and no earlier than absolutely necessary. Play it safe with brief, well-integrated flashbacks or dare to break the rules. Just don't forget the basics of good storytelling.

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