Our Round Robin Blog Hop for March is: The Importance of your character's backstory/history and how to share this with the reader.

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Backstory is what gives both the characters and the plot depth and meaning. Without it, neither the author nor the reader really knows who the characters are or why the story is going where it’s going. We’ve all read books that seem totally shallow, mere vehicles for violence or sex or sometimes humor but without much character growth or story arc. But, thankfully, most authors do know their character’s backstory. So, then the question becomes how much should the author reveal? When? And how? We’ve all come across books with major info dumps, and that’s just as much of a story killer.

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If the author decides there is so much “important stuff” about their characters that the reader just has to know ahead of time, they often decide on a prologue. That can work both ways. Some people ignore prologues and just flip pages to chapter 1. They then miss the things that drive the character to make the decisions they make and leave the reader scratching his head wondering “why?” This habit also leaves the reader in the dark about the character’s growth, healing, or resolution of past issues that had been holding them back. But some editors and readers love prologues for all the information they can deliver. Your choice.

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Another story killing option is to save it for chapter one and just lay it all out there on the first few pages or even chapters. Unfortunately this can end with the reader putting the book aside. No action, nothing happening = no hook. Even if they keep reading and finish, when they post a review it will nearly always begin with something like – “It was a good story, but it started slow.” “Or I had a hard time getting into the story.” So, not your best option.

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So, if prologues and info dumps are both iffy choices, how does the author tell the reader the important parts of a character’s backstory, or the events leading up to and causing the inciting incident in the plot?  

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The first thing to remember is that while you know, or should know, your characters as well as you know yourself or at least your best friend, not everything you know about them needs to appear in the story. For instance, maybe your hero had his tonsils out when he was five. Traumatic for a five-year old, especially when he’s been promised all the ice cream he wants when the surgery is over and then discovers his throat hurts so much he doesn’t want any ice cream. But your hero is now 32 and he’s a soldier or a fireman, his disappointment over the ice cream issue has no bearing on the choices he makes today and this tid-bit, however amusing, isn’t important. UNLESS – another part of the five-year-old experience was terror on waking from the anesthesia and finding a bunch of masked strangers hanging over him. And now he’s been wounded either in the theater or war, or putting his life on the line to save another human from a burning building. If he was almost immediately unconscious, now he’s going to wake up from the anesthesia with absolutely no idea where he is, who these people are or what happened to him and a flash back has him panicking again. So, maybe that five-year-old experience does make a difference.

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What if your heroine’s father had been an alcoholic and now the man she has only recently met and started dating turns out to be a heavy drinker – was her father mean when he drank? Or did he just pass out in front of the TV each night? Those two different options would have an impact on decisions your heroine might make about continuing to date this guy. Maybe your protagonist had a double major in college. This could mean they are super smart, super hard working, or super determined to succeed. All three do have some input into your protagonist’s personality, drive and work ethic, but unless he’s now in a race to figure out how to stop a virulent new virus from infecting millions, his other major in biology might not be important. Certainly not important enough to discuss all the classes that were needed to follow that course of study.

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So, picking and choosing the important bits from your character’s pasts aka backstory is the first step. Now the question is – how?

Several options. Dialog. Your double-major protagonist is reading a recently published and much discussed book on Covid and other variant viruses and another character shows up and says, “Good grief, Matt! I thought you swore you were never going to read another science book in your life.” And Matt’s response can tell the reader a bit depending on the reasons for reading it. If he is working on a task force to find out where another new virus came from, then he might say something along the lines of, “Yeah, I did say that, but those books were all about human bugs we had already conquered. And when I joined the FBI I had no plans to ever think about medicine again.” So, now you’ve told the reader he studied this in college, never planned a career in the field, as well as the career he did choose if the reader doesn’t already know that. But perhaps he’s FBI, but on a task force that has nothing to do with biology or the story. His reply might be something like, “I know, but Linda gave me this book and told me I just had to read it. So, I’m reading it.” The topic moves on, the reader knows he studied biology but it’s not critical now.

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A similar way to inform the reader of the same information might be inside your character’s head. He’s digging frantically through this book, hoping to find a clue he never got from all the hundreds of books he had to read to pass his double major. Or, he’s listlessly turning pages hoping to find just enough fun facts to share with Linda so she doesn’t get pissed with him for not reading the book. This would also work with your firefighter who is slowly coming to and realizing something bad has happened. Memories of being so small he only took up half the gurney and being totally scared by all the strangers surrounding him. Only this time those strangers are anxiously working on him, monitors are beeping, everyone is intent on serious tasks, but the panic is the same.

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And then there’s action. Your character is involved with an activity they’ve done so many times they could do it in their sleep would give your reader a hint to your character’s back story, and this can segue into his conscious thoughts about what he’s doing, why he’s doing it and where he learned how. What if your heroine is a nurse who has been doing rounds in a nursing home. When she comes to the old man’s bed he tries to reach out to her but his hand falls back to the sheet and his eyes seem to plead with her to understand he needs her. She’d seen that look before. When her grandfather had been failing but insisted on living out his days in his own home. Their family couldn’t afford round the clock nursing so they’d taken turns being with him. And it had been her turn the night he’d passed from this life to the next. He’d reached out to her just like that but his failing strength had caused him to miss the connection. She’d been younger then. She’d tried to guess what he needed. You need a drink. Her grandfather had shaken his head, a weak almost not there movement. She’d tried a bunch of other things. But every option she’d given him had been a similar no. So, she’d clutched at the weak, wrinkled hand, folding it into both her own with no idea what to do next. And her grandfather had sighed, his fingers trembling in hers and his mouth turned up in a small smile as he closed his eyes and his breathing faded away. All he’d needed was touch. The touch of another person in those last moments of life. So, now Jean reaches behind her and pulls a chair up to sink into as she lifts the man’s hand into her own and cradles it with warmth and caring. Now the reader knows important bits of her history as well as a lot about the kind of person she is.

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There are other ways to introduce back story that are great but be careful not to overdo them. Unless you’re writing a memoir, you wouldn’t include pages from a diary or letters from the past more than a couple times in a book of fiction, but they can be a great way to tell an important story from the past that motivates the character now.

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A character’s reaction to something. Like seeing blue lights flashing behind him on the road. The average driver just pulls over and waits for the police car to pass. But what if your guy breaks out into a sweat. The last time he saw lights like that, it hadn’t ended well. Okay, here’ a bit of the character’s history that might need telling. Maybe in a flashback?

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Dreams are another option for revealing backstory in the course of your novel. Or your heroine is having coffee with her friend and decides it’s time to tell the friend why she’d dropped out of high school before graduating. Getting pregnant had been a bombshell. Her religious belief precluded abortion. Her boyfriend turned his back on her. Her parents kicked her out of the house. So, she’d gone to live with an aunt in another state until her baby was born and put up for adoption. In the telling of this story, she can reveal not only to her friend, but to the reader, a huge chunk of her backstory that impacts the decisions she makes today.

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There are lots of ways to introduce backstory without dumping it all on the reader at the start of the story. It just takes a little patience to decide where and when. And never let it slow the current pacing of the story. One way to know if you’ve included all the important things or dumped too much after you’ve finished your first draft is to find a beta reader or three to just read. Not to critique the work, but just read and come back with comments, gut reactions, or questions. If you’re beta reader comes back with a question like, “I loved your hero Mikey, but why on earth did he turn down that job offer?” Then you know there was backstory you were totally familiar with but failed to share in some way with the reader that was important to this decision. Another time the beta reader might suggest that the story is really confusing, or is so slow at the start that they wouldn’t have read it except they promised you they would. Now you have a hint in the first instance that there is some bit of history that needed telling that would have explained the confusing part and in the second instance, that you’ve dumped so much info at once that you dragged the action to a halt. Not every suggestion a beta reader offers needs to be incorporated but listen with an open mind. Sometimes we’ve been so close to the story as it unfolds we miss things someone with fresh eyes sees right off. While most authors are also readers, you are writing for readers so never discount what an ordinary reader might have to offer. They know what they like and enjoy and what turns them off.

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Thanks for taking the time to read my blog, and for a few other perspectives, visit my fellow Round Robin Blog Hoppers to see what they have to say about backstory.

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Connie Vines 

A.J. Maguire 

Dr. Bob Rich 

Our Round Robin Blog Hop this month asks the question:  How can contemporary Fiction keep up with our swiftly changing world, politically, socially or technically? Or how do you keep your stories located in time?

 

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Sometimes, we are advised to keep our writing free of things that “date” it, and yet, this isn’t always either possible or desired. Unless you plan to never refer to any specific piece of popular music, a current TV show or movie, politician, movie star or sports hero, then you pretty much date your story with this information. Other things that can date a story that are easily overlooked are things like the mention of organic anything in the kitchen, security lines at the airport, reusable grocery bags and so much more.

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Technology poses an even bigger challenge because it changes even more often than car models and fashion trends, so what is common today is gone tomorrow. I wrote a story set in 1972, not really that far in the past and yet when I depicted a harried father of an injured child asking my heroine to watch his other two kids because he was unable to reach his wife, my first beta reader asked why he didn’t just call her on her cell. I reminded my reader that cell phones did not exist in 1972. Yet, they have become so common, even for fairly young children, that not being able to reach someone is pretty much a thing of the past and even my savvy beta reader didn’t think about that. In my novel, it didn’t date the story so much as confuse the reader, but things like TVs with rabbit ears, VCRs and Game Boys do rather fix the time frame of the book.

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There are also the common reference points we have in our cultural memory. Suppose I mention that a town is like Mayberry, I’m betting there is a whole generation of young adult readers who have no idea where Mayberry is or what the reference suggests. God knows, even R2D2 or Rocky could be lost references. Says something about the permanence of Shakespeare that people still quote him. Watch an old movie or re-runs of old TV shows and note how many people smoke cigarettes. Old TV sitcoms always depicted married couples sleeping in twin beds. Not that many actually did use twin beds, but showing them sleeping together on TV was taboo. Future generations watching shows from as short a time as two years ago will wonder why there was no outward sign of the gay and lesbian lifestyle, or so few main characters of color that has suddenly appeared in just about every TV series’ casts today.

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Bottom line for me is that there is no way to avoid any hint of a general time frame in our writing. Unless you are writing Sci-fi or historical, there has to be a backdrop that makes the characters and story come alive and to avoid any specifics is to leave the page and the characters colorless. Sometimes you can re-write a scene to avoid a problem. In my example above, I removed the distraught father’s comment about not knowing where his wife was and replaced it with she was out running errands and “Taking this gang to the ER with me would be a nightmare.” So I avoided the confusing reference. There are a number of ways to avoid a time tagging reference. For instance, instead of having your character watch Gunsmoke or CSI, you could simply say they fixed a bowl of popcorn and plopped into their recliner to watch their favorite TV series.

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But there will be times you can’t avoid or work around these issues. My advice is just write the best story ever and it won’t matter that it’s dated. Depending on the story, you might want to find a way to tell the reader where they are and when. Easily done with a date line at the beginning of the book, or each chapter if the story moves from one time period to another. Or set the scene in the first few pages of the book with easily identifiable references. Examples might be: ‘It had only been a few years since 9/11 and people hadn’t begun to whine about long lines at the airport, yet.’  or  ‘Tom Brady had finally retired, for good, and now NFL fans would have to find someone else to adore or hate.’  Even kids born since 9/11 know what that ominous number means. Not everyone is a football fan but pretty much everyone’s heard of Tom Brady and his climb to fame as the GOAT. 

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So, that’s my take on dating your stories. The era is part of the story, adds color and explanation to the actions of the characters and maybe we shouldn’t work so hard to avoid it. But why not hop on over and see how these other authors view the question.

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Victoria Chatham 

Connie Vines

Dr. Bob Rich  

Anne Stenhouse 

Helena Fairfax