Right now, I’m dragging myself through a book. It’s supposed to be really good, but personally, I despise the main characters. They’re too perfect. Their lives aren’t perfect, but the bad stuff that’s happened to them is presented in a way that makes them victims instead of strugglers with strength.

Ugh. Just thinking about it gets me all het up again. Let me just give you a bulleted list as to why this wrong, immoral and bad.

• All this bad stuff happened to them years ago, but their struggles . . . well, in hindsight, maybe they weren’t so bad. Now life is practically perfect in every way. (You want to hear about those characters now, don’t you?)
• There’s nothing going on in the present as we spend pages twelve through sixteen recounting the last ten years of the characters’ lives (characters we met on page eleven).
• Five pages of telling. In the first 20 pages.
• It’s backstory where we need to get some story.
• The antagonists’ storyline is more interesting. I want to read more about them. Something is happening over there other than people sitting and thinking about their lives. The so-called heroes? Not so much.

In a romance, we don’t have to hear about every person the main characters have ever dated, and every bad date they’ve ever been on. In a mystery, we don’t have to have the hero’s case-solving track record presented in full color. In any genre, we don’t need a character’s life story the first time we meet them (this drives me nuts!). We just need to know what’s pertinent to the story. There is a better way to deliver backstory!

In fact, Livia Blackburne did an in-depth analysis of some comparable titles to her work to see how they handle backstory in the first chapters. Surprisingly, both Graceling and The Hunger Games deliver big chunks of backstory that early in the novel.

However, I think the key is how they do it, and what they choose to include. Livia catalogues each line of backstory from those chapters, including flashbacks. The backstory:

• Informs character relationships. Often just a line or paragraph about how they met or a nickname, but these seem to highlight their power dynamic now. (Katniss & Gayle, Katniss & Peeta.)
• Builds the world—focusing on conflict. (Katniss learns to hold her tongue about the government.)
• Shows history that relates to this moment in the story—especially as it helps us understand the conflict. (Livia notes that there was one section of backstory which she found less than compelling, which dealt with the history of the civilization.)

Agent Rachelle Gardner has a great post about choosing and using backstory:

When you’re bringing your reader into the world of your novel, you’re trying to engage their senses and their emotions right away to get them involved in the story. You need to make an emotional connection with the reader as quickly as possible. The way to do that is in the here and now, the action and dialogue taking place in the present time. It’s highly unlikely you’ll make an emotional connection through backstory. . . .

There are ways to bring the backstory into the book, and the key is to do it slowly. Think about giving just enough information to illuminate one tiny aspect of your character at a time. Place your characters in situations, let them react, and let your reader wonder how they got there and why they reacted that way. You want to be strategic, almost cunning, in the way that you let little bits of information from the past appear on the page. Use those pieces of backstory to slowly and carefully flesh out that character, never giving away too much, always leaving the reader guessing a little.

I worry that in the past I’ve come down too hard on backstory. It’s useful—really!—but in many cases it’s more useful to writers than to readers. You know that lady that corners you and makes you look at photos of all seventeen grandchildren? Don’t be that lady when it comes to backstory!

What do you think? How have you seen backstory done well?

Image credits: history—Kristian Bjornard, applause—Jonathan McPherskesen

Once again, we’re at the “end” of the series on backstory. In this first iteration of the series, we focused on the standard uses of backstory (character motivation and trying to make characters look sympathetic) and the standard delivery of backstory (“shards” designed to clarify the story).

This “201″ take focused more on the special category of stories where the present story is all about discovering “truth” through discovering the past story. This backstory is more than just information that makes a scene make sense; it changes the entire way the character views the world (maybe we could say that it makes their whole world make more sense).

The example I keep using is in The Secret Life of Bees, where Lily is trying to find out the truth about her mother’s death (and her life). It’s been a while since I read it, but if I remember correctly, there are very few instances where backstory’s sole purpose is to justify a character’s action in the present. The backstory revelations aren’t incidental to the scene and the characters; when they come, they’re the purpose of the scene and have a big impact on the character and her journey.

It’s a special use of backstory, definitely, and not the “usual” use. But no matter how we use backstory, it can enrich our characters and our story—as long as it’s not like this:

What do you think? Have you ever seen this use of backstory (the good example or the bad one)? What all would you say is “bad” about the cartoon example?

So we’ve talked about the methods of conveying backstory—but we also need to hit on the purposes of backstory. Generally, I see two main uses for backstory: to explain why the character is the way he is (characterization) and does the things he does (motivation). Personally, I think using backstory for characterization is the weaker of the two reasons—but both come with caveats.

It seems like backstory in characterization is usually used to try to make us feel sympathy with the character. The errors can run either way. In “Sympathy without Saintliness,” editor and author Alicia Rasley lists several common faults in trying to create character sympathy—and backstory is two of them:

4) Giving the protagonist a lot of heroic backstory. Yeah, he was a big hero in the war. Yeah, she saved a lot of lives during that epidemic. But that was then. This is now. Backstory is just background– the character exists right now, and what he/she does now is what’s important. It might work if now he/she is burned out by all the heroics, self-doubting, feeling like an impostor… oops. Now we’re getting into the fun stuff…. hang on to that thought.

5) Giving the protagonist miserable backstory. This is often done in order to excuse some unsympathetic behavior or attitude [and is also a common technique to try to make villains sympathetic]. Yeah, he hates women, but it’s because his mother abandoned him! And his foster mother beat him! And his aunt framed him for murder! And his first girlfriend trapped him into marriage by getting pregnant! And…

Gag me.

Maybe we’re just hitting a nerve here with me, but frankly, I’m so tired of seeing that in fiction that instead of feeling that desired tug at the heart strings, I roll my eyes when I read about how he’s too short and her mother never, ever loved her. I know a lot of people who’ve been through bad times: abuse, living on the street, loss, grief. None of them automatically became fractured protagonists or villains. Geez, if these characters are going to act a certain way, let them take responsibility! Don’t just blame everyone else—that character made a choice somewhere along the way that made them into this person. (Possible exception: the character’s journey is about learning to take responsibility for his/her choices and actions.)

Alicia puts it better than I can: “While we want to sympathize with the characters, we don’t want them to be victims so battered by past events that they don’t actually live in the present. There’s also that ‘authenticity’ problem. If we lose the sense that this is a whole person, if we think the author just layered all these past traumas on, we won’t believe in the protagonist.”

We don’t want our stories or our characters to be trapped in the past. We need to remember to focus on the story. As Mystery Man on Film said:

What happens in the past, off screen, good or bad, does not affect sympathy. It’s what we see the character do in the present that determines how much we will or will not care about that character.

Backstory can definitely influence how our characters are and act—they had to come from somewhere!

But that’s not the only problem with backstory and characterization. If we use backstory as the primary way to build character sympathy, we’ll probably have to stop the present story to wedge in a long story about our character’s terrible childhood. We run the risk of boring our readers right out of caring about our characters. We need to focus on the scene—and story—at hand to find a way to get our readers caring.

What do you think? What’s the right way to use backstory for characterization?

Photo by Margarit Ralev

We’ve already covered the two most common ways to convey backstory—narration and dialogue—but this is perhaps the most interesting way to share backstory: through the setting (and props within it). While narration and dialogue can definitely set up the conflict that backstory enhances (or creates), using a concrete setting or prop to do the same thing can ground your characters—and vividly symbolize their conflict.

As editor Theresa Stevens puts it (emphasis mine):

Even though backstory relates past events, it sets the stage for current events. Let’s face it — if it didn’t set that stage, there would be no reason to include it. So perhaps Mark’s purple bathroom becomes important when Grace, his interior decorator, is banned from repainting it. The purple bathroom is symbolic of Mark’s inner landscape, and that’s perfectly fine. In fact, this is how we like it to work: the character’s inner state is made manifest in his outer world.

So think about how your character’s backstory becomes tangible in the physical story world. And then think about how those tangible details can be used as props while the characters are working out their conflicts. This will effectively tie the past to the present in a meaningful way. But one coat of lilac paint is all you need. No need to analyze every bristle on the paintbrush. Present your backstory and return to the present as quickly as possible. You want to sacrifice as little momentum as possible.

Note that this example exemplifies (uh, duh) a great way to do this—it only lets us see that something is up with the purple paint. We don’t stop the story—and interrupt the conflict between Mark and Grace—to spend a paragraph in a flashback explaining Mark’s neurosis. As we read from Chris Roerden last week, “You don’t want to satisfy reader curiosity—you want to increase it” (Don’t Murder Your Mystery, 53).

Editor and author Alicia Rasley (who now writes the blog edittorrent with Theresa, the editor quoted above) says something similar in her article “Backstory Problems“:

Consider how much more dramatic this opening scene might be if Emily unlocks the door of her elegant childhood home, steels herself, walks in, glances around the foyer, sees the chandelier, stops short, and then, resolutely, goes into the dining room, past the table, into the kitchen, and pulling a cell phone from her purse, calls a realtor and says, “I want to sell a house. Immediately. I don’t care how much I get for it.” The readers will be asking, “Wait a minute! It’s a beautiful house! It’s her childhood home! Why does she want to sell it? And if she sells it, why doesn’t she try to get a good price?” On the heels of those questions will come the canny conclusion, “It must have something to do with that chandelier. I wonder what.”

Once you have the readers speculating about the situation you’ve set up, you’ve hooked them. They have to keep reading to get more clues to see if their suppositions are correct.

But if you tell them everything upfront, you might lose the narrative drive that comes from posing the story question, in this case, “Why does Emily want to unload her beautiful childhood home?”

(If the suspense for these two examples is just killing you, check out their full articles for the reasons behind the paint and the chandelier.)

What do you think? How else can the setting and/or props tie in to backstory?

Photo by Alyssa Hill

Dialogue can be one of the most effective ways to slip backstory into your work—but as always, there are some major, common pitfalls to avoid in conveying backstory information in dialogue. For example, as you know, gentle reader, we want to avoid “As you know, Bob” dialogue. If both the characters already know something, why would they inform one another of those facts?

Inserting a character who doesn’t already know the situation can work—but it can also backfire if it’s obvious that character is there mainly as a plot device so the author can info dump. It also leads into what may be the biggest problem with using dialogue to convey backstory—it’s still boring. Even if it’s a secret baby or rich uncle or life as a courtesan, sometimes it’s just not interesting.

Why is it boring? There’s no conflict. Sometimes it’s easy to find the conflict: the heroine calls the hero by her abusive ex’s name in the middle of an argument; if the hero finds out about his brother’s secret baby, he’ll flip, etc. But it’s not always that easy.

In Don’t Murder Your Mystery, author Chris Roerden offers a bunch of techniques for binging out, adding or just simulating conflict in dialogue, including bypass dialogue, borrowed conflict, simulated disagreement and flat-out editing (179-184). (I posted about these techniques during the tension & suspense series, too.)

Of course, the answer may also be simpler: if there’s no conflict to this backstory here, is this the right place to put it? Are these the right characters to be discussing it? If you change/add/subtract characters, does it change the dynamic?

And, as always, good dialogue technique is important. One character delivering a monologue about his or her life history isn’t any different than a regular info dump in narration. Interruptions, reticence and context (and subtext!) can add to not only the conflict, but the meaning of the words your characters are saying—and may require less jabbering to for the same impact.

What do you think? How do you reveal backstory through dialogue?

Photo by Beppie