Chapter 22

Layering in Backstory

“The first draft of my second novel, Common Murder, began with five beautifully crafted chapters of backstory for my protagonist, Lindsay Gordon. When I sent it off to my agent, she said, ‘Lose the first five chapters. They’re lovely, but they don’t tell the story. Everything you’ve told us here can be fed in as and when we need to know it.’”

—Val McDermid

Suppose you’re writing a novel that starts with a brutal rape and murder. In the opening scene, medical examiner Renata Ruiz examines the body. The reader doesn’t know that Renata grew up poor on a farm in central California, put herself through college, modeled for Playboy magazine in college to make ends meet, and, most important, was the victim of a brutal rapist who also raped and murdered her best friend. You want to convey all these aspects of this backstory because, by the end of the novel, you want Renata to triumph on two levels—first, by putting this sexual pervert in jail, and second, by coming to terms with her own survivor’s guilt.

Question: When do you reveal Renata’s backstory?

Answer: A little at a time.

Too much backstory in the beginning can bog down your novel before you get it off the ground. Initially, your reader may need to know only that Renata is an experienced medical examiner with special expertise in sex crimes and that she doesn’t tolerate anyone kidding around when the corpse of a woman victim is on the autopsy table. Once your story is airborne, slip in more details of Renata’s past at opportune moments.

The really dramatic information that resonates with this investigation—that Renata was herself a rape victim and that her best friend was murdered by the rapist—is best revealed in layers as part of the unfolding drama. You might slip in, early on, that Renata was a crime victim. Later, you might reveal that she was raped, and, later still, that her best friend was raped and also murdered. At a major turning point in the novel, perhaps when Renata is about to confront the villain, you might write a vivid flashback that dramatizes the rape or her dead friend’s funeral.

The stronger and more compelling your front story, the more backstory it can hold. Here are three rules of thumb to keep in mind:

1. Hold the backstory until your novel is launched.
2. Gradually layer in backstory wherever it resonates with your main story, letting the past drama reinforce the present drama.
3. Tell the backstory in a variety of ways.

There are a number of different strategies for telling that backstory.

BACKSTORY STRATEGY: NARRATOR TELLS ALL

The narrator can simply tell the reader about a character’s past. In this example from Denise Mina’s Field of Blood, narrator Paddy Meehan has just walked into the Press Bar. She’s the only woman in a sea of men.

Voilà. Here’s a snapshot of who she is and who she aspires to be. We’re already privy to her insecurities and biases. Talking directly to the reader like this is an efficient, economical way to convey a character’s background. In small doses, it’s highly effective.

BACKSTORY STRATEGY: SLIPPING IT INTO DIALOGUE

An equally simple but somewhat more artful way of layering in backstory involves dialogue. In this example from Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, author Susan Elia MacNeal has Maggie Hope deliver a monologue explaining why she’s annoyed at being turned down for a job and why apologies don’t cut it:

This edgy diatribe packs a punch—it delivers information about Maggie’s backstory as well as attitude.

But be careful. Dialogue freighted with information can sound stagy and artificial, as in this excerpt I made up to demonstrate the point:

Yes, we get tons of backstory, in all its glory, wedged into wooden dialogue. Never force words into characters’ mouths like this. Use dialogue to convey backstory only when it feels natural and works dramatically.

Now You Try: Put Backstory into Narration or Dialogue (Worksheet 22.1)

Download a printable version of this worksheet at www.writersdigest.com/writing-and-selling-your-mystery-novel-revised.

BACKSTORY STRATEGY: FICTIONAL DOCUMENTS

Another way to deliver backstory is through fictional documents—wills, newspaper articles, photographs, letters, school yearbooks, and so on. You can reproduce the document or have one of the characters summarize what’s in it.

For example, your main character might receive a letter from an old friend, reminiscing about when they were in school together, asking after the main character’s family, and reminding the character that the friend once saved his life. Now the friend is calling in his chits and asking for a favor. The letter effectively moves the story along while delivering information about the main character’s past.

It’s a commonly held belief that readers skip over the fictional documents in mystery novels to get to whatever is happening in the scene. I have no idea if this is true, but I’ve heard it often enough that I offer these words of caution: Keep those fictional documents short, and don’t put anything the reader really needs to know in a fictional document and nowhere else.

BACKSTORY STRATEGY: MEMORIES

Use a memory to tell backstory in a dramatic way. In this an example from Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza’s A Window in Copacabana, Inspector Espinosa remembers his grandmother.

The act of examining a book that belonged to his grandmother triggers the memory. This memory is not essential to the plot but gives the reader insight into Espinosa’s character, revealing a contemplative, literate side to this tough police inspector. The “orderly stacks” suggest an orderly mind, and a “disdain for shelving” suggests a man who lives alone and feels no need to conform to conventions.

Here are some examples of memory triggers:

• What a character says: He sounded just like Red, my mentor at the police academy who …
• How a character looks: She had that same look on her face as my first wife right before she slapped me with divorce papers.
• A dream: I dreamed I was back in elementary school, fourth grade, Mrs. Joffey standing there, glaring at me bug-eyed, like I had the IQ of a frog.
• An object: Whenever I saw that photograph, I thought of Joe and the day we …
• A song: That was our song. I remember the first time …

Memories conveyed in a sentence to a few paragraphs, strategically sprinkled throughout your novel, enable you to reveal layer after layer of your characters’ backstories.

BACKSTORY STRATEGY: EXTENDED FLASHBACK

You can also insert an extended flashback—a scene within a scene—to deliver backstory. An extended flashback can show how a character’s past experience compels him to behave the way he does in the present. Or it can build understanding of how a situation got to be the way it is now.

Here’s how William G. Tapply starts a four-page flashback in the second chapter of Bitch Creek:

A tricky part of writing a flashback is handling the time-and-space shift. Notice how Tapply does it simply:

• The time shift: almost exactly five years earlier
• The space shift: along the muddy bank of a little tidal creek

A second tricky part is handling verb tense. If the main part of your novel is written in the present tense (he pulls the trigger…), the solution is simple: Write a flashback in the past tense (he once killed a man …). But what if the main story is written in the past tense? Logic dictates that the flashback would be written in the past perfect (he once had killed a man …). Notice that the flashback in the example from Bitch Creek begins in the past-perfect tense: Calhoun had been creeping …; A blush of pink had begun to bleed …

Had, had, had … Past perfect quickly gets cumbersome, but the good news is that once you’ve launched your flashback and oriented the reader by using past perfect a few times, you can revert to past tense, as Tapply does in the excerpt: “The tide was about halfway out …”

At the end of a flashback, you once again need to cue the reader that you are returning to the present events of the main story. To show the transition, insert the past perfect a time or two at the end of the flashback; when you’re out of the flashback and back in the main story, revert to past tense.

Here’s an example of a sentence that signals this transition:

Keep in mind that an extended flashback interrupts the narrative flow of your main story. Delivered at the wrong time—in the middle of a chase, for instance—a flashback can derail the current action and waste any momentum you’ve gathered. Delivered at the right dramatic moment, a flashback enhances and deepens your story. Experiment, moving around flashbacks in your novel, to see where they work best.

Now You Try: Layer Backstory into a Memory or Flashback (Worksheet 22.2)

Download a printable version of this worksheet at www.writersdigest.com/writing-and-selling-your-mystery-novel-revised.