So you’ve got a GREAT Storyworld for your novel and you can’t wait to tell your reader all about it. How and when do you do that for maximum effect?
Dre posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:
I have a problem transferring vast amounts of information to my reader in an interesting manner, like the history and the natural laws of a Storyworld.
-Footnotes seem a cheap way to do this.
-I’ve considered excerpts from made-up chronicles or study books, but typical for such texts is that they’re not compelling.
-Simply interrupting the narratives with informative lectures gets disturbing and is a violation against the MRUs.
-And weaving the information through a dialog doesn’t always make sense.
So I’m lost. How do other writers cope with this?
Randy sez: Writers always believe that the reader is dying to know the entire life history of every character and the full history of the Storyworld and exactly how the Storyworld works in all its infinite complexity.
The reader is and she isn’t. Let’s take those in reverse order.
When you pick up a book, you’re looking for a story. Something happening here and now. Characters doing things that matter right now. If you don’t get that right away, you’re going to put the book down. You just will. And your reader is just like you.
As you get into the story, you begin to realize that these characters weren’t born yesterday and the Storyworld in which they live has a long history. Some things in the story just don’t make sense unless you have some context–some backstory or some description of the present world.
So when do you put in that context and how much do you put in?
The answer is simple: Just when you need it and no earlier. Just as much as you need to make sense of the action and no more.
You have many tools to do this:
- Exposition or Narrative summary. A block of it to fill in the past.
- Dialogue. One character explaining the past to another.
- Interior monologue. One character thinking about the past.
- Flashbacks. A scene set in the past, connected to the present.
- Diaries, chronicles, or other written texts found by a character.
- The Pensieve. Works if your name is J.K. Rowling. Works very well. Essentially a flashback.
- Description. Works best if it’s filtered through the senses of the viewpoint character.
Those are your tools. You can even use footnotes, as Stieg Larsson did in his Millennium Trilogy, although this is pretty rare for a novel.
The important thing is to not give backstory or description to your reader until she’s begging for it. She’ll be begging for it when the main story gets confusing and can be easily clarified by a few snippets of backstory or description. Give it to her then. Just enough to answer the questions, and NO MORE.
You may believe that you are the amazing exception to this rule, and that your readers will find you uniquely gifted at telling backstory or description and therefore you can heap it on and let the pace of your story go to zero.
No you can’t. No more than your brother-in-law the tax accountant is amazingly gifted at explaining arcane 19th century tax laws to his enthralled friends. He isn’t. You aren’t. Don’t do it.
Tell your story. Save the backstory until it’s screaming to be told. J.K. Rowling held off on giving her readers the full backstory of Severus Snape for thousands of pages — until that information was desperately needed late in Book 7 in order to advance the plot. Take a lesson from the master. Tell no backstory before its time. Less is more.
If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.
Thanks for the post Randy!
I’ve been wanting to ask this very same question for a long time. I always feel like it’s really obvious when I try to put backstory into dialogue. I guess I just have to get used to it.
Lately I’ve been trying to avoid doing any backstory at all because I find that no matter how I do it it comes across as interrupting the story too much.
It’s nice to know that holding off on the backstory is not only ok, but often the better way to go.
Seth, if you don’t mind me replying to your point there, I think it probably feels obvious to you because one of the characters involved in the dialogue has no reason to discuss/know what you’re saying, and you can feel that (even if subconsciously).
One use of backstory I’ve found is to “show” a passage of time. If a character is on a journey, for example, some backstory in between a period of a few story days will help the reader “feel” a passage of time (since it slows down the narrative). Frankly I only ever put in backstory if I need to slow things down a bit, like after a lot of dialogue (or in between) or action. Assuming of course, we need to know the stuff in the first place!
Pardon for that, it’s just nice to be able to share some stuff I’ve learned the hard way.
Great advice that is the most difficult for new novel writers to comprehend. I know, I’m a novel newbie. Thanks for the tips Randy.
Literary agent Donald Maass said, “The number one mistake I see in manuscript submissions is a failure to put the main conflict in place quickly enough. In fact, it is the primary reason I reject over 90 percent of the material I receive.” A chief culprit: backstory. Too much backstory too early is a manuscript prospect-killer. Nothing contained later in a manuscript can overcome backstory delivered too early because agents and editors won’t read beyond the backstory. This is such a difficult notion for many writers. They want to set up everything with lots of explanations of what has happened before putting the story in motion. If our novel begins on August 1, save everything that happened before August 1 for well into the story, and then make it brief. In my editing and teaching, this is one of the most important lessons for writers.
Randy adds a comment: Good point, James. I agree with Donald on this one. This is the biggest problem I see when I read manuscripts at conferences. It’s the biggest problem in my critique group (you know who you are, critique buddies!). It’s the biggest problem every agent and editor sees. A lot of professional writers have a rule that they won’t put in any backstory in the first fifty pages. But they almost always violate the rule because they think that a little backstory won’t hurt. Then they give their work to their critique buddies and get their butts kicked. Yes, this happens to me. It happens to everybody.
Thanks Randy&Jules, for this simple but unobvious advice. It’ll definitely help.
Fantastic advice Randy and posters! I am definitely guilty of dumping backstory on the front end. My challenge is to find the balance that works within specific scenes. Thanks!
Oh, my! I did my first published book with a lot of backstory! In fact, I began with backstory! A lot! Little wonder, I suffered so many rejections before I quickly decided to self-publish it. What shall I do, Randy? Call it up for some kind of post-production modifications/corrections?
Backstory is like the bread in a sandwich — it’s best if the slices I use are fresh, made of natural grains, and just thick enough to hold the main ingredients together. Thanks for the reminder Randy.
My favorite metaphor about backstory is that it’s like eating an elephant – you can’t just dump it on someone and expect them to eat it all up; it must be served one bite at a time. 🙂 Nobody cares about the mindblowingly original and complex storyworld you’ve created until they care about the characters in the story, so give your readers some action and introduce the characters first, then sprinkle the storyworld information throughout in small bites.