You’ve spent hours. You’ve been slaving away. You’ve taken seventeen different personality tests, generated a full horoscope analysis that was so long it took ten minutes to download, and filled out every character sheet Pinterest has to offer. You can recite every detail about your character’s life, from their first word to their last. And it’s all important. All of it. You are absolutely convinced of this, and nothing will shake you from this belief. Somehow, some way, it all has to find its way into the book, because there is simply no way your readers will understand the tragic complexity of your hero without knowing what he got his aunt for her birthday last year and how traumatized he was by the death of his childhood pet hamster. It’s important, okay?!
Look, I get it – we’ve all felt this way at one time or another. However stupid and insignificant they may sound to other people, these details are often important for us as writers to understand. When you know how much depth there is to a character going on behind the scenes, it leaks through in your writing, whether you directly add these details or not. But sometimes, you really do have to include some of it… and it’s really, really, hard. You want to just say it, but you can’t, because your English teacher yelled at you so much about “show, don’t tell” that you’re practically as traumatized as your hamster-mourning protagonist. So you try putting it in a flashback, but then you read something online about how cliché that is, and how nobody likes flashbacks. This isn’t true, but you believe it anyway and delete the whole thing in disgrace. Maybe I can just leave it out, you think to yourself. Maybe it’s not that important – maybe I can just wait to explain it until later, or let it out slowly, in small chunks. But then another 250 words go by and you realize none of this chapter makes sense unless you explain it – all of it, right now.
It’s quite a pickle, isn’t it? I’ve never met a single writer who hasn’t struggled with this at some point, and I absolutely include myself in that. I don’t claim to have all the answers to this one, but I can tell you a few things I’ve learned about what works and what definitely doesn’t.
Do: use a reactive scene
If you’ve read my previous post on plot structure, you may recall our old friends, active and reactive scenes. Stories, as we know, rise and fall in tension, action, and emotion. During the rising/active story beats, we are hiking up a mountain, gaining ground and burning adrenaline as the plot moves forward and the stakes and tension rise. We are actively working toward something, and working against conflicts – solving, or sometimes creating, problems. But from time to time, the trail levels off – maybe even goes downhill for a while. During these falling, or reactive story beats, we (and the characters) get a moment to catch our breath, process what just happened, and decide how we feel about it and perhaps even where we’re going next.
Now, this is not a hard and fast rule by any means, but I have noticed that explanations of backstory tend to make a lot more sense in these falling/reactive moments than they do in moments of high or rising tension. This isn’t to say that you can’t include little scraps of detail here and there in an active scene. But they’ll usually be just that: little scraps. If you really want to tell the whole story of how Little Jimmy’s hamster died of consumption and the funeral would have been so beautiful if Cousin Gertrude hadn’t interrupted it with a tearful rant about her husband’s affair, you’re probably not going to want to do that in the middle of, say, a fight scene. That’s a lot of information you’ve got to not only express, but contextualize. You also have to give your readers and your characters time to process, understand, and internalize the information you just gave them, which is likely to be emotionally weighty and may even change the course of the story once it gets out.
If this is sounding like a reactive scene to you, good – because it is one, ready-made with little to no assembly required. But… where to put it?
Don’t: spill the beans right away
Don’t put your backstory explanation at the beginning of the book, please. I’m sorry, but I do not care about the dead hamster and scorned cousin of a character I just met. I don’t care how excited you are about it – hold it in until you’ve given me a reason to care.
And I know what you’re thinking: But Colleen, this IS the reason you should care! No. Sorry. Not good enough. Let me prove it to you.
Say a new neighbor knocks on your door and tearfully explains that when they were eight, their hamster died and it was the worst day of their life because the funeral was ruined by their Cousin Gertrude ranting about her cheating husband. After ten minutes of this, they finally explain that their new hamster is missing. You’d probably be 1) a little irritated that it took them this long to get to the point, if only for the lost hamster’s sake, 2) fairly creeped out that this person just came up to you and told you their whole life’s story out of the blue, and 3) disinclined to help them since you now have good evidence that they might be certifiably nuts.
Now imagine it happened the other way around. You get a knock on your door from your new neighbor, who explains that their hamster is missing and begs you for your help. You, of course, hurry out to help them, and during the search, they confess that they’re extra upset because as a child, their pet hamster died, and blah blah blah.
So, which version of your new neighbor do you like more?
I rest my case.
Do: focus on what matters
Context really is your best friend for communicating backstory. Think about it: we don’t generally spill our guts without a reason, and when we do, the parts of our guts that we choose to spill will inevitably end up being highly context-dependent. That hamster story, for example, is unlikely to come up when Person A is trying to comfort Person B over a bad breakup – but the part about Gertrude and her cheating husband might. Figure out what the relevant details are, and put your characters in a situation that will naturally draw out those details and those details only.
Like, in the examples in the last section, do we really need the detail about how Cousin Gertrude interrupted the funeral with her rant about her cheating husband? Not really, because it’s not relevant to the current situation: your neighbor has asked you for help looking for their missing hamster. It’s connected, sure, but isn’t everything, to some extent? And unless your characters already have a bond that might lead them to divulge that extra piece of information, you might be better off saving that tidbit for a different scene later down the road. Remember, just because you’re doing a lot of this all at once doesn’t mean you have to do it all.
Don’t: be afraid of exposition
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, people get spooked by exposition because of all that “show, don’t tell” propaganda we were fed in high school. And I’m not saying that’s bad advice, but it’s not complete advice. It’s a maxim that leads too many people to believe that exposition is something you should never, ever do, which isn’t true at all. Exposition is a critical component of storytelling – just a difficult one to master. People screw it up, sure, but it exists for a reason. And hey, people screw up lots of things in writing! That’s no reason you shouldn’t try it.
This terror around using exposition leads a lot of writers to fall back on contrived methods of conveying information like vague dialogue, out-of-place flashbacks, or other ill-fitting narrative devices that read as odd and sometimes even forced. Sometimes these methods will work, but the fact is that sometimes, like I said earlier, exposition really is the right tool for the job. It’s like using a pocket knife when you should be using a band saw: the poor result you get doesn’t mean the knife is no good, and yes, the band saw is big and scary and you have to know how to operate it properly or you’ll chop your hand off, but do you really want to build this whole house without power tools?
Bottom line: if you really feel like the only way to get this information to the reader is to just say it, don’t over-complicate things. Just say it.
Do: let other characters talk
Backstory is frequently revealed during conversations between characters, especially when it’s a side character’s backstory rather than the POV character. If you’re going this route, remember that you’re dealing with a conversation, not a speech (unless, in fact, it is a speech). Think about the last time you told a friend about something that happened to you, say, as a child. It probably wasn’t 300 words of you monologuing while they sit there in dead silence, possibly with their hand raised to ask when they can take a bathroom break. There was probably some back and forth there: questions and answers, tangents, off-hand observations and connections. Adding in these little remarks from the other character(s) in the scene makes the dialogue feel more natural and less exposition-y. It’s the spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down, if you will. It tricks the reader into thinking they’re not reading a big giant explanation – just a normal conversation between two characters.
As a matter of fact, this advice also holds if you’re doing the POV character’s backstory. In that case, breaking up the internal narrative with interaction with other characters can be a good way to make the scene feel more dynamic and keep the momentum up a little (because it will naturally tend to ebb a little bit without this). These interludes can be in the form of remembered dialogue that forms part of the memory, or it can be a real-world interruption – perhaps one that reminds the POV character of something else, leading them into another memory. Both of these options will improve the flow of the scene and keep what might be a very long explanation from feeling monotonous.
Don’t: let anyone tell you you’re doing this wrong
The world is full of rigid, one-size-fits-all advice on many writing topics, but none more so than this one. The internet is chock full of people who are happy to go on rants about how using flashbacks is always a bad idea, or how exposition is always heavy-handed, or how you’re just including too much detail in the first place and should just leave it out altogether.
These people have not read your story. They don’t know anything about it – your characters, your plot, your writing style, what you’re trying to say – none of it. But there’s no one right or wrong way to do this, and there are no universal rules for what needs to go in a book. If there were, every book would be exactly the same, and we’d all be reading a lot less.
Put aside the doubt about what you’re doing, and just focus on doing whatever it is well. It’s your book – don’t let someone else tell you what goes in it.
Happy writing!