On Writing: How to handle backstory?

Backstory is anything in the characters' past that happened before the beginning of the book. Locally speaking, some people put in unnecessary backstory, some people leave out necessary backstory. What is the most effective means of using backstory to further the story?

As always, you do not have to answer these questions, they're just to help get the juices flowing.

How can you tell if something is backstory or not?
How can you tell if the backstory is necessary?
What do you think of flashbacks as a device for explaining things?
What different kinds of ways can you think of to present backstory?

Re: Discussion: How to handle backstory?

KillerMuffin said:

How can you tell if something is backstory or not?
How can you tell if the backstory is necessary?
What do you think of flashbacks as a device for explaining things?
What different kinds of ways can you think of to present backstory?

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Interesting questions. I tend to use lots of backstory, since character and background development is important to me, as a reader and a writer.

How can you tell if it's backstory? Simple. Past tense is used. Now, more complex, edgy, "artsy" stories may keep you guessing as to whether something is happening or has happened. Those can be fun, too, as I like a mystery. It just irritates many people, however, so this type of jumping back and forth should be used in moderation. I'm thinking of Sandra Cisneros' "House on Mango St", which is a (non-erotic, for the most part) collection of vignettes about growing up in Chicago.

That is bewildering to many people. In reality, though, people do slide back and forth in their minds from past to present to future. There is a legitimate basis for use of this technique in storytelling, particularly memoir.

2nd question:

How can you tell if it's necessary to the story?

If you can't understand the present, without understanding the past, i.e. how the character got to the point of being completely naked in the middle of the department store, then the backstory is necessary.

3rd ? Flashbacks are fine, as long as you don't have to broadcast it: OMIGAWD I'm having a flashback!

4th ? I think I've answered the 4th question already. Use of past tense, or non-use of past tense, but the character is younger or more innocent, obviously.

Yayess.

IMHO Backstory is only necessary when itis useful to the story. If the backstory is useful for character development or for later plot, then it is necessary. Backstory for its own sake is superfluous.

I say this, but Shogun by James Clavell involves tons of unecessary backstory and I never get bored of that book. I guess there are exceptions to every rule.

I try and keep backstory to a minimum in my Lit stories, simply because 90% of Lit readers wouldn't read them otherwise and I'm not confident in my ability to write interesting backstory. Practice makes perfect I guess.

The Earl

That's a funny thing, ya know

An editor for literotica told me the backstory part of Lady Bashirah was annoying. The storiesonline editor who looked at it said the backstory was necessary and enjoyable.

I am prepping the storiesonline version separate from the lit version because the likes of one readership is contradictory to the likes of the other.

I prefer less backstory than more. I think behavior and language can go a long way toward explaining motivation and leaving some part of the reason for behavior to the reader's imagination seems to respect the reader just a bit more. For me less is always more. I think that is why I am so fond of Hemingway.

Mentally running over a few stories...

I've done one or two prologues, which I would define for my purposes as a short section at the beginning which takes place at a different time from the main part of the story. It doesn't have to take place in a time *previous* to the main story. I've seen a fair number of prologues that took place *after* the action, making the main story a flashback, technically speaking.

The particular case I'm thinking of involves a character who at the time of the main action has been divorced for years. The prologue covered what took place on one of her first dates with her ex-husband, and was meant to show the tone of their relationship and how her character had changed since she was a teenager. On the first pass, I wrote all that information into (ugh) expository dialog taking place in the present. I tossed that scene out on its boring little butt and cannibalized it for an entirely new one.

I've seen some great, corny old movies that incorporated flashbacks. With all the cliches--screen goes wavery, eyes go dreamy, and we're reminiscing. ;-) That works for noir, but not very well for me.

I can't recall ever using a full-scale flashback in a story. They are so well ridiculed by now and so typed as confusing that perhaps I automatically shy away from them. I run into them a lot in bad fan fiction--they take careful thought and planning, IMO. I've seen them well used by more skilled authors, but they strike me in general as old-fashioned and artificial. How often does someone think through an old experience in such detail that it seems to happen again at full length before his eyes? (That's different from something like post-traumatic stress, which does flash you back with awful realism. I would treat that as something else entirely.)

My preference is to try to structure the backstory in a natural way. I like to keep things firmly in one forward-moving timeline as much as possible. IMO, it gives unity and realism to the story. Most of the time I let backstory slip in by dribs and drabs and try hard not to overdo it. I mention something in passing, I use an object as a concrete bit of the past, I let the character tell someone else about something that happened. Usually I cut out a lot of it in second draft.

Yes, letting the reader guess about motivations can accomplish much more than handing them everything on a platter. I may know a lot about the character's past that never makes it to the page, and that's the way it should be. No one reveals herself completely to anyone--don't force your characters into gutting themselves for the reader's benefit.

MM

TheEarl said:

IMHO Backstory is only necessary when itis useful to the story. If the backstory is useful for character development or for later plot, then it is necessary. Backstory for its own sake is superfluous.

The Earl

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I agree, but you can slip a little bit of superfluous backstory in provided it is short and doesn't put you off your stroke, so to speak. A little backstory is sometimes needed to make things believable, even when it's not needed to understand the action. You get far more turned on if you think the events are real. 'He fucked her because he was horny' may be true, but it doesn't help you get turned on about it.

Backstory for me is fine provided it is well written, short, and doesn't start delving into the years he spent working on farms squeezing pig's blackheads with a tea-strainer.

I would say that any backstory that makes things more believeable would be under 'necessary for character development.' I love the analogy though. Pigs blackheads with a tea strainer. You'll fit in well here.

The Earl

Nice discussion.

Practically speaking, my personal slant leans to having just enough backstory. I suppose it's a carryover from how we, as writers, train (or practice) to say just enough, to be efficient and miserly in our selection and use of words, to avoid wearing down our reader's eyes and brains from reading "too" much. With that said, I've also been delighted by some truly terrific stories with more than enough background that were so well-written I couldn't take a break from reading even to take a piss.

So in that instance when there is "too" much backstory to support the weight of character development, but on whole the story remain an enjoyable read (you become immersed in the hedonistic excess of words, like a sensual massage or a warm bath), is it fair to say that such an imbalance is a bad thing?

Sometimes, it can be pleasant not to be too practical.

What different kinds of ways can you think of to present backstory?

What different kinds of ways can you think of to present backstory?

Upon careful consideration I tend not to use back story, and to the best of my knowledge have never used a flash back exactly

However, sometimes I will have a character compare something now to something then. For example I wrote a story invovleing a brand new professor and she had to dash to a car in the rain, but she compared it to being nothing vcompared to the hike she often made in the rain back when she was a student, not really necessary and it was like a 1 or 2 liner, just a glimpse of her past.

If I actually have to work in past events, I discovered (seriously didn't realize I was doing this until today) but I discovered I had been using pictures. Like a picture on a wall or desk of someone or something. For example, widowed character picks up picture of her dead husband and remebers something that the picture triggered. Or a character sees a picture of another character and someone he doens't know, but figures out from the picture who that person is, like a wedding picture, you can be pretty sure the man next to the bride in the tex is the groom.

In my fan fic I'm writing I used that to sum up the relationship between two characters, with him looking at the various pictures on her desk quickly and noting he was in most of them along with her husband and whoever his girlfriend of the moment was.

So basically not a everything goes wavy flahsback, but more of a remebering thing. Appoligies for writing something this late local time, but I wanted to respond to this iwith what I've done before I forgot. Not sure how well it works, but I haven't had complaints yet about screwing up the story flow.

~alex756~
http://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=177120

Backstory advice

I'm toying with a story I'm writing -- it would be my first for this site. It's a BDSM story with an incest sub theme. A husband disciplines his wife and his stepdaughter. At the time of the story the relationship is five years old. He began to punish and play with stepdaughter after he married mom. Today, when the story opens, mom is 38, daughter 23. I'm planning on having a brief prologue and then cutting to the chase. Since of the story will rely on past knowledge I thought this would be enriching rather than cumbersome. It's hard to comment on unfinisdhed work but any advice would be helpful.

I tend to use a fair amount of back story (for fair amount read 'lots') and I use it to either foretaste or contrast the later happenings or to include a sex-scene that wouldn't occur with the protagonists available.

Writing in first person (which I do most) enables back-story fairly easily eg; "I remember when..." or "That came about because..."

There are quite a few stories which are whole remeniscences and although technically backstory, "When I was 18" etc. don't lead onto any present except "...and we live as man and wife to this very day."

Can't see any point to that at all. Why not just set it then and finish with "... and we will live as man and wife from now on."?

Gauche

It's a big subject with no pat answers.

One thing I'll say is that I think it's a sign of good craftmanship if you can work in your backstory without the reader being aware of it. Flashbacks always seem very amateurish to me, as does anything that stops the flow of the story. Stopping the story to explain what had happened in the past can be done, and done gracefully, but it's not that easy.

Backstory is the one place too where you should tell rather than show, unless you're dealing in flashback. This is especially hazardous in third person stories, where too much detail makes the flashback vie with the main action. In first person you can always have your narrator drift off into reverie. for the sake of backstory. Hokey, but it works.

I think my ideal is to eliminate as much backstory as possible. I would like all the relevent action to take place between the beginning and end of the narrative and not have to hang histories here and there to have the story make sense. Sometimes histories are necessary though, and there's no way around it.

A question related to backstory is deciding just where and when in a sequence of events you begin the narrative. I've seen a lot of stories here that start way before the actual dramtic events that make up the narrative, and it makes things very confusing. We don;t need to know about Chad's freshman year at College if thge story doesn't really start till his senior year, and yet dsome people insisit on telling us that.


---dr.M.

The Bovery Factor

Flaubert would agree. Although I'm glad I asked.

deep and wide

I have used backstory in several stories. It is always, as another poster mentioned, regarding established relationships. My two "best" stories have a good bit of back story. I think it gives depth to the characters and plot.

I have used several methods: quick snippets from the narrator, flashbacks and reminiscing. I have reserved the flashbacks for scenes including sex. It rewards the readers for reading them.
It also allows me to put more sex in the stories.

I do try to keep snippets and reminiscing tight.

b

One turn-off for me is a long opening palaver about where the narrator grew up, how they dated a few times in college, moved to another city out east, started a construction company, built it up, got married, got divorced: all for nothing more than an explanation of why they're gagging for it and driving an expensive car.

One weakness is in thinking that events have to be described in the order they happen; another is in thinking that the only way out of that is to go into explicit flashbacks. In reality, a person's past is part of their present. 'I'm gagging for it now, because I haven't had any since my wife ran off with the gym instructor.'

One of my stories turns on events in the past. It opens:
Marly. It was at a party that my parents and I went to that I met her for the second time. ... I went because I knew some of their children would be there, now themselves settled with children, and the word was it might be a larger than usual reunion of what once had been my “crowd”: university days were long behind but there were a few people I would find pleasure in meeting again.

And that's it, that's all the set-up there is. Later after he's met Marly, conversation turns to how they'd met once before.

Another has an actor discussing her role and comparing to previous roles and interactions with the same director.

Several others have nothing noticeably past in them.

But I think it's an error to suggest the past isn't part of the story, as if it can only be a live-action film or a play observing the Unities. Narratives move through time; they can move backwards as well as forwards. It isn't a stepping out from a 'true' narrative perspective to an indirect or reflected one.

I believe in back story, because I believe in characters who came from somewhere and are going somewhere. Most of the time I end up just dropping small dollops of back story as needed--like if a situation comes up where the reader needs to realize that Jones was castrated when he was thirteen, I'll break the narrative and explain it. It's distracting, but it adds a bit of punch in that the reader is presented with a situation and then is informed why it's relevant to the character's life. The other alternative, as I see it, is to have like a prologue or something: "Once upon a time, Jones was born. Thirteen years later, he was ritually castrated by his mother, who used a spoon to sacrifice his testicles to Schravschplott, the God of Spitting." This is boring, and you run the risk of having the reader forget by the time the knowledge becomes important. So basically, my rule is "Don't tell them anything until they need or want to know it."

CWatson said:

So basically, my rule is "Don't tell them anything until they need or want to know it."

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Sounds like Agatha Christie's Method of Mystery.
Never introduce the murderer until very near the end.

Gauche