Michelle Barker and David Brown Backstory: Handle With Care

Backstory can be an effective tool for developing character and adding tension, but it often gets mishandled. In simplest terms, backstory becomes a problem when there’s too much of it, and when it comes too soon.

Backstory can include information about a character’s personal history and interpersonal conflicts, or it might have to do with establishing a broader historical context: this includes world-building or explanations about the setting, real or fictional world history, and tidbits from the author’s research.

Why is it a problem? Here’s a simple guideline to consider: if readers don’t care about what a character is DOING, they aren’t likely to care about who they are, why they are, or where they are. As such, readers should want to know more about a character’s backstory before the backstory appears on the page.

This relates to the writer’s maxim: show, don’t tell. Backstory is a form of telling, which reduces a reader’s participation in the narrative. By explaining backstory rather than hinting at it, readers lose the opportunity to play the detective: observing, noticing, and coming to their own conclusions. Similarly, by frontloading your manuscript with backstory, you are stalling the story and cutting your readers out of the process of discovery.

RUE: Resist the Urge to Explain. This is particularly important at the beginning of your novel. Let readers connect directly with the protagonist in dynamic scenes where the characters are taking action and making decisions. This is the strongest storytelling mode for creating plot momentum AND conveying character. Let the story come first. Backstory, world-building, and research work best when they serve the story, and not the other way around. Use backstory effectively. There will be times when you’ll need to use backstory in fiction, so here are some strategies for slipping it in unobtrusively: Proceed on a need-toknow basis.

Ask yourself: what does the reader need to know right now? If they don’t need to know it, leave it out. Integrate it into a scene—sneak some telling into your showing. Sprinkle information around. Don’t put it all in one place. Keep it brief.

Try something drastic. Literary agent Donald Maass suggests combing the first fifty pages of your novel for any sections of backstory, cutting them, and pasting them into Chapter Fifteen.

Those sections might not actually belong in Chapter Fifteen, but you may find one of two things: You don’t need them at all, or they might be better placed somewhere after the midpoint of your novel.

In this way, you can use backstory to deepen an existing problem or answer a long-standing question—illuminating a character rather than just using backstory as set-up.

As a fiction writer, you have one job: to tell a story. You are not writing an essay, a history book, or a biography. Anything you choose to include must serve the story. If it doesn’t, then it belongs on the cutting-room floor.

If you use only a minimum of backstory or none at all, you will create a gap between what’s happening in the story and why it’s happening. This gap serves to heighten tension.

Readers don’t need all the answers at the beginning of a novel. They like to put things together based on the clues you give them. Reading then becomes a process of discovery that includes the reader; the anticipation of finding things out slowly is part of that process.

Michelle Barker is the author of The House of One Thousand Eyes, which was named a Kirkus Best Book of 2018 and has won numerous awards, including the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award. Her newest novel, My Long List of Impossible Things, was released by Annick Press in the spring of 2020. Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and works as a senior editor at the Darling Axe (www.darlingaxe.com). She is represented by Westwood Creative Artists and lives in Vancouver.

David Brown founded the Darling Axe in 2018 after working as a freelance editor for more than fifteen years. He is an award-winning short fiction writer, and his debut novel is represented by the Donaghy Literary Group. He has published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in magazines and literary journals, and he has an MFA in creative writing from UBC. David lives in Victoria, Canada, in the traditional territory of the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations.