Craft: Backstory and Front-Story
by Randy Ingermanson
Advanced Fiction Writing
Every character in your novel has a past, a present, and a future.
The future is fuzzy and out of focus, but your characters think they know what they want their future to be.
The future that your protagonist wants is called the “story goal” for your novel, and it drives your story forward.
Your front-story is whatever is happening right now as your protagonist tries desperately to reach his or her story goal.
The front-story is the reason your reader reads. Without a front-story, your novel is dead in the swamp. As much as possible, you need to always keep your front-story on center stage in your novel.
But your character has a past also—all the things that happened in their life that made them the person they are today. That past is called “backstory.”
Backstory Matters
Backstory matters a lot. Nobody just walks onto the stage of your story without a past. Everybody carries baggage. The older you get, the more baggage you carry, unless you learn to let go. And nobody ever lets go of it all.
But backstory can be a story-killer. Reading a novel that begins with a huge lump of backstory is like going out on a first date and spending the whole time hearing about the other person’s miserable, horrible, no-good, very bad childhood.
There’s a place for backstory. That place is not at the beginning of the story. At the beginning of the story, you want to be focusing on the front-story. The stuff that’s happening right now.
In Star Wars, we spend quite a lot of time getting to know Darth Vader before we ever learn that he’s Luke’s daddy. If we found that out in the first ten minutes, we wouldn’t care. Because we wouldn’t know Vader and we wouldn’t know Luke enough to care yet. But at the right place in the story, that little bit of backstory carries the force of a proton torpedo.
The Cardinal Rules of Backstory
So how do you know when to bring in backstory?
Here’s are two simple rules I use that guide me well most of the time:
- Bring in the backstory at exactly the point when the reader must know it in order to make sense of the scene I’m writing right now.
- Tell only as much backstory as the reader needs to understand just this one scene.
These are not iron-clad rules. They’re useful rules of thumb. Use them when they improve your story. Ignore them when they don’t.
The TV series Lost used backstory heavily. Lost had a very large cast of characters, and it took many episodes to get to know them all.
Typically, each episode highlighted just a few characters, and one or two of those would have a flashback that showed off some essential piece of backstory in their lives.
When I say “some essential piece of backstory,” I mean that piece is essential to understand the episode in which it appears.
Over the course of six seasons, we saw more and more backstory about each character, and understood them better and better.
If you liked Lost, I suspect that part of the reason you liked it was that the backstory was strong. The backstory served the front-story.
Developing Your Backstory
There are two basic ways that novelists use to create their backstory:
- Figure it out before you need it
- Make it up as you need it
People who like to plan their novel before writing it (such as outliners or Snowflakers) usually figure out most of their backstory before they write their novel. Of course, during the process of writing the story, they’ll think up new bits of backstory and add that to whatever they started with.
People who like to write their novel without preplanning it (such as seat-of-the-pantsers and edit-as-you-go writers) usually make up backstory as they’re writing scenes. Then when the story is finished, they may need to do some work to make it all consistent and fill in any gaps.
It really doesn’t matter which way you do things. Your brain is wired to favor one method over another, and I don’t recommend fighting the wiring in your brain. Work with your brain, not against it.
But however you prefer to work, I strongly recommend that you spend some time making sure your backstory is strong. It should be a reasonable explanation of how your character came to be the person they are. It should increase the conflict your character feels during the front-story.
Editing for Backstory
I also strongly recommend that when you edit the second draft of your novel, you should fire-test each chunk of backstory as it comes up in the story. Could you delay telling this bit of backstory until later in the story? Would that improve things? If the backstory is essential right now, could you tell less of it? Would that improve things?
The goal here is not “to get rid of all the backstory.” That would be like cutting off your nose to improve your smile.
The goal here is “to use the backstory to make the front-story as good as possible.”
About The Author
Randy Ingermanson is a theoretical physicist and the award-winning author of six novels. He has taught at numerous writing conferences over the years and publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.
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