Lesson 3: Backstory

Lesson 3 – Backstory

Ah, Backstory. This one should be easier.*

When writing a story, unless you're being weird unique and only plan to sell the work as a piece of Literary Fiction, you have a basic scheme of time: past, present, and future. There are many ways of blending these things—say the hero is recounting his rise to greatness, in which we are grounded in the future, but the story is in the present (so to speak). Examples: Gladiator, the anime Baccano (as far as I can tell—it was kind of confusing), and a number of novels written in First Person. Most of the time you'll find works where the present is the focus, but where the past was massively important. Take the novel The Hunger Games for example. The rise of the totalitarian government is important, as well as all of Katniss's life experiences that prepare her to compete in the sadistic ritual of the games. The story is brilliant, and I have little to say about the concept that cannot be described as "gushing" about it. I loved the story. I did not love how the writer chose to bring that story out on the page. Suzanne Collins, just like Stephenie Meyer, has made more money than I have, so as always don't take anything I'm about to say as bashing. I just need examples for the things that I teach, and the very popular YA novel The Hunger Games gives me a lot of freedom to speak.

I'm in a family of writers. In one project my mother was working on—a police procedural where a pedophile is murdered by one of his victims (well, maybe writing that theme is a family trait…)—she started off with this info dump about the deep, deep meaning of the character's name, and his life experiences, and the hardships that had prevented him and the love of his life from being together, and all his motivation for being a police officer, and blah, and blah, and blah. I love my mother. That is the very reason why I gave her Rule One.

Rule One: No info dumps.

It read like Literary Fiction, where instead of focusing on things like plot development and action, the writer focuses on making the very best sentences they can. They put all their craft to work in making a beautiful tapestry of words.

Excuse me, but if this is a police procedural, I want a corpse within the first ten pages or I'll just go spend my money on crappy CSI DVDs (well, no, I personally won't—there's too many flaws with the show, but they at least keep the body count quota up). Mom has since learned that, and the story has changed, along with the craft that she uses to tell it.

The thing about info dumps is this: No one wants to read them. Really. The story might be amazingly interesting, but it's almost like the reading homework from history class: I will drag my eyeballs over the page until I can go back to something interesting and worthwhile.

Now, this doesn't mean don't write info dumps! This is a very helpful tool in first writing a character. For me this is a vital part in recording the premise of a potential novel. I write down everything that comes to me, and that's no lie (perhaps an exaggeration, but not a lie). But like any other good plot element, it is best trickled in. If I whack you in the head with THE BRICK OF CONFLICT on the first page, pulling out all the stops—I mean, violence, perversion, angst, financial troubles, crapsack world, all love is unrequited, everyone has wounds and we're squirting lemon juice indiscriminately—you will put the book down because it's Just Too Much. Same goes for Backstory. I've put books down before because the first chapter was apparently nothing but backstory—and this was a mystery novel. There was a dead guy in the first ten pages, because that death and subsequent inheritance was the premise for the main character even being in the setting of the story, and I was on a several hours long road trip. I liked the character, I think—it was kind of hard to get to know the character when I was stuck in the character's past for pages and pages on end. But however cool the story was, it seemed like the writer was reluctant to tell me the story—they wanted to tell me this other story from the character's past, first. But I want the story I picked up the book for, not the other story! I wanna! And I wanna now! (I'm exaggerating here, but you have to make these assumptions. In your writing you have a cruelly small window of opportunity to get your reader, and if you waste that time on backstory, you miss out on your reader.)

The Hunger Games only barely manages to claw its way out of Backstory Hell Purgatory by merit of good conflict; that book is freaking full of flashbacks that keep the reader on a kind of merry-go-round of "Sad Remembrance" and "My, Grandma, What A Large Body Count You Have." This novel is an example of where things could be done better. (Not that I expect Suzanne Collins to change a single thing with the writing style that made her famous and, I assume, wealthy.) There's Mood Whiplash, Setting Whiplash—I was constantly being drawn out of the story by being drawn into the backstory, which were really two separate stories.

That's something you need to keep in mind: Your Backstory Is Not Your Story. Unless you're simultaneously writing the story and the prequel, which is not advisable. You're backstory is a time before, or during, the trials which give your Gritty Detective his wounds from the past that make him the cynic he is today. Your backstory is the time when everything was butterflies and ponies for the little princess before she had to learn what the word "regicide" meant.

So. Know your two stories—Backstory and Present-Story—and know that they are two separate things. Like two great tastes that taste great together, these can be mixed very well. There is an anime which I have glanced at but not watched called Gankutsuou which is the anime translation of The Count of Monte Cristo. I freaking loved The Count of Monte Cristo. One of the main elements of the story line of the anime is that they take the whole story of the Count's revenge from the point of view of another character. Maybe that doesn't seem worthy of italics to you, but the story of Edmond Dantés revenge is a very personal one, and to take that and translate it through the view of his semi-protégé/whatever else Albert de Morcerf, it's a big deal. But because Albert only knew the Edmond Dantés after his self-reinvention into the revenge-obsessed Count, the backstory must be trickled in a bit at a time. Since I haven't seen the show all the way through, I can't outright say "They did it well, without any info dumps," but this is a case where an info dump could both meet suspension of disbelief and be interesting.

Yep, I've already broken Rule One. Let's move right along to: Rule Two.

Rule Two: Info dumps are acceptable if you retain tension.

Think about a Big Reveal. Think about the twist ending of a tense short story. Think about the villain explaining how he got to where he is today, and what he's going to do now that he's here. This is usually a big, long speech—and we're waiting with bated breath to see how it's going to turn out. With the anime of The Count of Monte Cristo, I'm sure they at least once had a place where there's an epic long speech about why the Count is screwing with people's lives, and I'm sure they pull it off well. Have you read "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe? That story, in a way, is nothing but an info-dump, but also the antithesis of an info-dump. It's all the primary character telling the story of how he came here today—where "here" is, or where the character was before the events in the story is left out (Poe loved the fact that a short story leaves the reader with more questions than answers). It's all the story of how this heinous act was committed, and it's tense from beginning to end (I highly recommend that if you read it, read it out loud).  At the end of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians, rereleased as And Then There Were None, the epilogue is nothing but an info dump explaining just freaking how those fantastic murders were accomplished. It gave us resolution, stoking the tense factor all the time!

An example of an epilogue info-dump that stole tension would be the infamous Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows epilogue.** It outlined who married whom, made sure that we know about all the happy endings and normality that everyone achieved after all their incredible adventures at Hogwarts. Yippee. It suffered from fan backlash because people still wanted to imagine things, like who ended up with whom, and what other wacky adventures they might have. Nope! Word of God*~ says no, thank you! Rowling stole that tension away from us—as, admittedly, was her right/privilege—and we didn't like it!

So, if there's anything to take away from this lesson, I'll summarize it below, possibly making the entire body of work above this line essentially useless:

1. Don't start off your work with a huge info-dump about your character's past.
2. Don't interrupt your story with a huge info-dump about your character's past.
3. You can have an info-dump about your character's past if you are:

  -Not interrupting the story
  -If you keep the tension up while you're giving the info-dump
  -If the info-dump gives some needful or interesting information

4. If you can break the rules and still make a lot of money, go for the money. (It's just easier to make money if you abide by the rules first, and then break them.)

Every character is the sum of his past experiences and his own personality. Backstory can be a vital part of any character—just try not to give us a Stimulus Bill's worth of information about that backstory all at once, okay?



* I should note that the other day I had a simply wonderful lesson by Mark Mynheir, and a lot of this essay is going to derive from that (everywhere you see terms like "trickling backstory in" is from him). He also had the disclaimer "I don't have an original bone in my body, and everything in this lesson that's not specifically from my books came from somewhere else." That said, I try to give credit where it's due, but please take what I'm about to say as general knowledge or lightly researched information, not original thoughts of my own.

** J. K. Rowling has made more money than I have, so do not mistake what I'm saying for bashing—I'm just recording the overall reaction.

*~ When the creator of a series comes out with an official statement about the work, and some detail is made canon.