Backstory
without Boredom
By Corbette
Doyle
Advice is cheap,
especially for struggling novelists. Be a Point of View
Purist. Minimize the use of italics. Don't include too
many secondary characters. Never start more than one character's
first name with the same letter. Use lots of dialogue
to fill your pages with white space. Show, don't tell.
Stay out of your characters' heads. And, above all else,
avoid boring the reader with backstory. Good advice, all
of it, yet NYT bestsellers continually violate one or
more of these rules. Used judiciously, every broken rule
can add to your story. Especially backstory.
Point in fact,
you can't write a compelling story without creating memorable
characters. If we are all, at least partially, a product
of our history, then a successful story cannot ignore
the past. The key, then, is learning how to break this
particular rule in a manner that makes more, rather than
less, of your novel.
Common backstory
methods, in order of editorial acceptability, include:
weaving the backstory into the fabric of the novel, using
a prologue, and using the early chapters to convey the
past.
Editors, agents,
and books offering writing advice preach the need to open
novels today at a point of change. Pages of backstory
at the beginning will bore readers and kill sales. Yet
Nora Roberts devotes the first 200 pages of the NYT Bestseller
River's End to backstory. But, we tell ourselves, Nora
can afford to break all the rules. What about the rest
of us?
Romance novels
frequently employ prologues, though literary experts decry
their use. Rickey Mallory a.k.a. Mallory Lane believes
prologues enhance a story when used appropriately. In
her New Orleans RWA seminar, "The Book Starts Here," she
advocated the use of prologues as long as they are compelling
and tell the reader only what she needs to know. "The
reader," she reminds us, "does not need to know everything
you as the author know."
Others advise
using prologues only when you need to establish a question
the reader must beg to have answered, rather than as a
lazy way to backfill history.
Flashbacks,
on the other hand, should answer a question the story
has raised. Flashbacks provide a convenient and direct
tool for weaving history in along the way. Nancy Kress
warns, however, in "Using Flashbacks" from The Writer's
Digest Handbook of Novel Writing, that flashbacks can
interrupt the story, thus disenchanting editors and readers
alike. To describe how to use them effectively, she classifies
backstory by length.
1. Longest:
A novel that consists almost entirely of backstory is
called a "frame story" and the reader avoids confusion
because only the beginning and the end deal with the present.
The advantage of a frame story is that it affords two
points of view in one character, i.e the older, wiser
protagonist can view the past through a different perspective.
2. Mid-length:
Interrupts the main story with backstory that lasts one
or two chapters. On the positive side, this approach lets
you open the story in midair and hook the reader with
the proscribed dramatic point of change. You then return
to the past to provide the necessary background and motivations.
On the negative
side, many consider mid-length backstory hackneyed and
amateurish. If you decide to use this approach, tread
carefully and give the reader a roadmap to transitions.
Kress suggests separate chapters and obvious opening lines
("Nine years ago I had arrived in New York").
3. Shortest:
Lasting no more than a few paragraphs, these hardly interrupt
the story yet can deepen characterization and clarify
the specifics of a situation. While valuable, avoid overuse.
Kress also
suggests using a bridge to evoke memories and move between
the main scene and a short flashback such as: an object
(e.g. music, photos, an unusual color, a scent), a place
(as in A Separate Peace or Summer of 42), or an incident
(e.g. snatches of conversation or an employment application
question asking, "the most significant thing about you").
But how much
of the past do we reveal and how do we incorporate the
past without distracting or confusing the reader? Orson
Scott Card, in Creating Characters That Readers Care About
from the same Writer's Digest Handbook, echoes Mallory's
warning that few things from the past are really important
to the present story. He advocates revealing only enough
to convey motive and character revelation and to avoid
backstory until you have securely anchored the story.
Card suggests
making the unveiling of the past a journey as Dickens
did in Great Expectations. Dickens, he points out, used
Miss Havisham's eccentricity to make her memorable for
one day by opening the novel with the old woman dressed
in a wedding gown. He used her cruelty to Pip, i.e. through
what she taught her niece, to make her memorable throughout
the novel, and he used the final revelation of her past,
i.e. jilted at the alter, to make her memorable forever.
Card outlines three subtle, or indirect, methods for revealing
the past:
1. Past as
a Present Event: Have one character tell another a story
from the past in a manner that both reveals the past and
adds to the present action;
2. Implied
Past Expectation: Show what a character expects to happen
currently to reveal something about that individual's
past. For example, if a woman cringes at a raised hand,
we assume instantly that she has been beaten in the past,
and more than once.
3. Implied
Past Network: Reveal a character's past through the way
others who know the character react to her and treat her.
Theory yields
insight but what methods do successful novelists employ?
Do they use dialogue, italics, spaces for separation?
Only the shortest form of flashbacks? All of the above?
Recent novels by Susan Wiggs and Ginna Gray apply several
of the techniques recommended in the articles by Kress
and Card. In The You I Never Knew, Wiggs uses one style
for recent backstory and another for older history. In
the former, she tends to insert a memory immediately following
a line of current dialog all in a single paragraph. For
example, a statement by the protagonist's estranged father
triggers the flashback. "'This is one time you don't get
to call the shots.' Out of the blue, a trust agreement
had arrived in November." The rest of the paragraph explains
why she has come home, but not why she left. Dialog returns
the reader to the current setting, i.e. 'Michele?' Her
father's voice beckoned her back to the present."
Wiggs uses
the reverse, a longer, more introspective approach with
dialogue in the middle, to weave in older backstory. "At
the moment she couldn't do anything but think. She had
been sitting on the steps of that gazebo the first time
she met Sam. 'Nice picture,' said a voice behind her."
After half
a page of remembered dialogue, Wiggs again uses introspection
to transition the reader. "The sound of Sam McPhee laughing.
These were the first things about him that she had loved.
In the years that ensued, they were the things she remembered
more vividly and more frequently than she wanted to."
Ginna Gray's
approach to recent backstory in The Prodigal Daughter
is similar to Wiggs'. She blends a current memory trigger
and the memory itself into a single section without spaces,
italics or other differentiation. "Ever since that call
four days ago 'Maggie, you have to come home.' The words
had hit her like a fist to the stomach. Remembering the
shock of the moment."
Gray uses introspection
only, without dialogue, for some of the older backstory.
In one critical scene, viewing her favorite garden spot
triggers very old, fond memories that segue into an old
(but more recent) negative memory of an incident that
took place in the same spot. The remaining pages of the
chapter delve into that ugly memory. The next chapter
opens with the protagonist forcing herself out of memory
lane. "Maggie swallowed hard, her gaze still blindly fixed
on the gazebo. Even after all this time, she still remembered
every detail of that awful night."
Kudos to Wiggs
and Gray. Both authors used non-controversial methods
to communicate backstory without boring the reader. But
atypical approaches to backstory may separate your novel
from the pack. Take Madeline Hunter's By Possession. Though
a relatively new author, she dares to break the mold.
Rather than weaving backstory into dialog or moments of
introspection, she opens every chapter, starting in Chapter
2, with two to three pages of backstory. She signals the
reader carefully by italicizing the flashback, using a
space for separation, and then returning the protagonist
to the present with obvious integration tools such as,
"She awoke from the dreamy memory," "She emerged from
her reverie," and "She became aware."
Anita Shreve
(author of Oprah's pick The Pilot's Wife) tells her most
recent novel in reverse. The Last Time We Met opens in
the present with the woman's point of view. Part two,
told from the man's point of view, takes place two decades
earlier when both were in their twenties. Part three mixes
the points of view and describes their first encounter
as teen-agers. The tragedy of that meeting, though hinted
at throughout the novel, is not revealed until the end.
The recent
cult movie Momento deserves a prize for the most bizarre,
yet intriguing, approach. The entire story is told in
reverse, scene by scene, but the opening of each scene
replays the last section of the prior one like a loop.
Pieces of the puzzle are parceled out stingily, making
the audience beg for more. Similarly, a recent Edgar Award
winner opens by revealing the murderer, but the story
works the reader back in time to unveil the victim.
While Hunter,
Shreve and Momento all take highly unusual approaches,
each adheres strictly to the opening advice: give the
reader no more than they must have to follow the story,
and no earlier than absolutely necessary. Play it safe
with brief, well-integrated flashbacks or dare to break
the rules. Just don't forget the basics of good storytelling.
Corbette Doyle is a member of MCRW. She squeezes in the
study of the art of writing amidst a drastic rewrite of
her work in progress, Guilty Pleasure. This article originally
ran in the January 2002 issue of Love Notes, the newsletter
of Music City Romance Writers.
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