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Give backstory the proper
respect, and it will help readers
bond with your characters.
Poor backstory. It gets no respect these days.
I was in a crowded elevator at a writers’ conference
after teaching a class on great opening chapters (wherein
I had been cheeky enough to use one of my own as an
example). A bespectacled fellow complimented me, then
added, “I did notice, though, that in the opening chapter
of your novel, you had backstory. The rule is no backstory.”
Almost everyone in the elevator nodded in silent
agreement.
I’m always fascinated how “viral rules” get propagat-
ed among the writing masses. It’s like the super fl u in The
Stand. Maybe it starts in a critique group, gets put up on
a blog, and, pretty soon, it becomes accepted wisdom.
Not always for the best.
In fact, backstory has an important part to play in
the opening of your novel. But it must be properly un-
derstood what that role is.
First, a defi nition. Backstory is what has happened be-
fore the present story begins, usually related to the Lead
character’s history. And there’s the potential problem.
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We want a story to begin now, in the present, with a dis-
turbance. With trouble.
A disturbance connected to the character. That’s the key
to the proper use of backstory. It should not be used to help
set up the story. Many new writers think the reader needs
a bunch of backstory to understand who the character is
and why she is in this opening scene. They don’t. Readers
will happily wait a long time for the background if you
have a character dealing with a disturbance.
But using backstory judiciously is important because
it helps bond the reader with the character. Backstory deepens
that bond via emotion and sympathy.
When we know something of the character’s life, how
she got into this opening situation, and why the distur-
bance matters so much, we get invested in her.
And that’s when your opening really starts to cook.
The main mistake new writers make is what I call
backdumping, the piling up of backstory early on, even on
the fi rst page, deadening the effect of forward motion.
Back when people had actual attention spans—the gold-
en era of actual attention spans being 1774 to 1879—a
novelist could take a long time up front laying out the
history of a character.
Those days are over. You must begin with a character
and drop in backstory in little bits as the need arises.
Some types of fiction can be a little more liberal
with backstory. An epic, for example. Historical, science-
fi ction, and generational epics can start with more his-
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tory because the readers expect it. The sheer size of the
book signals that it’s coming.
You want that kind of backstory? Read James Mi-
chener’s Hawaii, which begins “Millions upon millions
of years ago …” Or Alaska, which begins “About a billion
years ago …”
Now that’s when backstory had hair on its chest.
But unless you are writing such a book, use the ac-
tive drop for relevant backstory in your opening chapters.
That’s the subject of the next section.
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