#7. BS is for ‘Back Story’

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Sunday, June 24th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed

All your main characters have a back story that you should probably know inside out. However, your readers don’t need to be exposed to all the excruciating detail. A sure fire way to let your narrative pace slip away forever is to foist a chunky back story on them in the first chapter.

Back story, or everything of relevance that happened before the opening of the story, tends to loom large in the work of new short story writers. There are two reasons for this, both based on the fear that the reader:

1. might fail to identify with the character from the beginning.
2. won’t understand how we reached the start of the story and will lose the narrative thread.

The result is long passages of back story unloaded into the narrative of so many first chapters. We’ve all fallen foul to this in our early stories, but it wasn’t until I had started working as an editor that I discovered how prevalent and destructive the back story dump really is to new writing. In fact, it’s one of the clearest signs of someone starting out. I could give you plenty of examples from my own early attempts at fiction, but on balance I think it would be too painful for both of us.

Far from tempting the reader to identify with the characters and orientate themselves in the story from the beginning, you can end up losing opportunities to build conflict and suspense into your story as it unfolds. You can answer too many questions before the reader has time to think of them.

Let’s take a look at three typical examples of ill-conceived back story:

“Alice Goode stepped through the doorway to her childhood home and stood in the large marble-floored entrance hall. As she gazed up at the domed ceiling 20 metres above her, she felt dizzy as memories came swarming back to her… One in particular: of her mother’s body hanging from a homemade noose tied to the chandelier. She had left nothing more than a note containing the name of her husband John, Alice’s ne’er-do-well father, repeated again and again so it filled the paper from the top left corner to the bottom right. Alice had spent the last fifteen years fleeing this memory, but now she was returning home at last to claim her inheritance. She realized, as she stood there, that she would have to sell this house. She would not be strong enough to endure living with her memories.”

“David Robinson had been born thirty years earlier in a wide valley in West Yorkshire, the son of a farm labourer and his puritanical wife. At school he discovered a facility for drawing, and his art teacher helped him focus his talent. He wasn’t much of a student at Ketterby Dale High School, but his artistic achievements earned him a scholarship to York University. There he met and later married Joanne Jones, a pretty brunette reading economics from an upper middle-class home counties family. Their marriage was beset by conflicts of class, and after five turbulent years they got divorced… “

“Anna convinced herself, subconsciously, that she shared her family’s promiscuity gene that had blossomed so early and so virulently in her sister. That’s why she steered clear of attractive men. She had tricked herself into accepting that her long-term affair with George, a dull store manager, was enough to fulfill her need for love.”

On the face of it, you might not see anything wrong with the excerpts above - at least they are mercifully short. You could argue that they let the reader know what’s going on, what’s motivating the central character and driving the story.

So why all this fuss about dropping in back story at the beginning of a story? Let’s delve a bit deeper.

To begin with, the best way to curtail the momentum you are building is to dump some back story into the narrative. If you have carefully chosen the start of your story to maximize the drama, the last thing you want to do is to kill it by back-tracking to another time and another situation. You will be providing an answer to the question, “How did the protagonist end up in this situation?” before the reader has a chance to ask it.

In the Alice example above, a major revelation - that she had discovered her mother’s suicide - is just dropped into a static description of the entrance hall. Major revelations of portent and weight are nearly always set up with a bit of foreshadowing to milk them for suspense and drama. This is a literary convention, so much so that you risk leaving your readers wondering just how important the suicide is if you just toss it into the middle of a quick description. Furthermore, its effect on Alice is spelled out in undramatic terms. We’re told about her flight from the past rather than shown it.

Here’s the ’show’ version. Alice unlocks the door of her childhood home, steels herself, walks in, glances around the entrance, sees the chandelier, stops short, and then, resolutely, goes into the dining room, past the table, into the kitchen, and pulling a cell phone from her purse, calls an estate agent and says, “I want to sell a house. Immediately. I don’t care how much I get for it.” The readers will be asking, “Hang on a minute. It’s a beautiful house. It’s her childhood home. Why does she want to sell it? And why doesn’t she care about getting a good price?” On the heels of those questions will come the canny conclusion, “I bet it has something to do with that chandelier. I wonder what.”

You’ve got your readers where you want them. Once you have them speculating about the situation you’ve set up, they have to keep reading to get more clues to see if their guesses are correct.

If you tell them everything up front, you’ve blown a big opportunity to build some suspense, epitomized in this case by the question, “Why does Alice want to unload her beautiful childhood home?”

Moving on to the ‘David Robinson’ example above, the ‘capsule biography’ is a real narrative killer. Here, the action isn’t taking place anywhere. David’s whole existence is summarized in a dry and distant description. The voice isn’t even David’s. He isn’t trying to make a point or build up to anything. The capsule falls from the sky and lands in the paragraph.

How is the reader to know that this capsule contains anything essential or even related to the opening scene? It reads like a list. How are the readers expected to discriminate between the life elements that matter and the incidental detail? Is it the puritanical mother? The art teacher? Or his scholarship? The result: you are inviting your reader to skim. I’m sure they’d take you up on it. Wouldn’t you? And you’re still in chapter one. Instead, let these details emerge through the action as and when they’re needed. Readers are always up for the challenge of piecing together the puzzle of who this man is, what matters to him, and how he is going to handle the events thrown up by the story.

For example, let’s say the puritanical mother is important. Maybe David would picture, in the midst of a critical clash with his rich parents-in-law, his mother praying and trying to force him to join her until he fled the room. This makes for a more character-driven read: readers learn what is important from the characters’ thoughts and actions, rather than from an omniscient and distant author summary. They learn much more about who David is from what he remembers of his past (e.g. his mother’s prayers) and how he currently interprets it (e.g. he refuses to pray himself) than from an arbitrary list of biographical details.

Finally, dropping the back story into the beginning of the narrative doesn’t leave enough for either the characters or the readers to do. Writers set every main character a journey - the story runs from embarkation to destination. The protagonist doesn’t always get to choose the destination, especially if it involves psychological change, but the interesting part of the journey is recognizing limitations and managing to overcome them.

Your readers are invited to take part in this journey by identifying with the protagonist. This identification will be keener if you can avoid telling your readers ahead of time what the protagonist needs to overcome. Showing each dilemma as it unfolds is incredibly effective. Your readers can discover, along with the protagonist, the destination by experiencing the journey for themselves.

In the third extract, if Anna’s response to her sister’s promiscuity is still subconscious, part of her journey will be toward bringing it to the surface and dealing with it consciously. You don’t have to tell the reader what Anna doesn’t understand herself - this is a story not a psychologist’s case study - but you can show her reacting to her sister’s past. Maybe she meets an attractive man, and is thinking about deepening the acquaintance when he says casually, “You know, I went out a few times with your sister.” Anna might freeze up and immediately, without further consideration, decide to have nothing more to do with him. Maybe he will have to pursue her, even charm her against her will, force her to confront her fear that if she gives into attraction, she will be like her sister - out of control. All you are doing is dramatizing her conflict.

Ultimately, it comes back to the old adage ’show, don’t tell.’ If your story really does require back story, it should be knitted into the fabric of the story. Making an authorial comment on top of the opening scene just doesn’t work. Get the reader to do some of the work, to piece the puzzle together, to get involved. If you can create this kind of suspense, even in books that have nothing to do with mysteries, the reader will not be able to put the book down. Tell them everything too early, and they won’t be able to pick the book up again.

Sometimes it is quicker to show back story. There is, however, a rule of thmb: hold it back until the moment your reader cannot go on with out it. Even then give them the bare minimum and knit it into the scene using the thoughts, actions, memories or conversations of the characters. Let the readers take part in the ‘making of meaning’ process. You are providing them the context to provoke their questions (”What’s up with that chandelier?”) and puzzle out the answers. All good books are open to interpretation; that’s half the fun of reading.