Unlocking Depth in Fiction: A Fresh Take on the Snowflake Method

 

Unlocking Depth in Fiction: A Fresh Take on the Snowflake Method

By Olivia Salter

The Snowflake Method, developed by Randy Ingermanson, is a popular approach to planning fiction. Its step-by-step expansion, beginning with a simple idea and layering complexity, mirrors how a snowflake forms—starting as a speck and growing into an intricate, unique structure. While the traditional method focuses on expanding plot and character, this article explores how the Snowflake Method can be creatively adapted to deepen theme, setting, and emotional resonance in fiction.

Step 1: The Core Crystal – Defining the Emotional Truth

While the Snowflake Method traditionally starts with a one-sentence summary of the story, this adaptation begins with the emotional truth you want to convey. Ask yourself:

• What core emotion or truth do you want your readers to feel or understand?
• How does this truth connect to universal experiences?

For example, instead of starting with “A woman must escape a haunted house,” your emotional core could be: The paralyzing fear of being trapped in a life you didn’t choose. This foundation ensures every layer of the story builds toward an emotionally resonant payoff.

Step 2: Expanding the Theme – Creating Snowflake Arms

Expand your emotional truth into key thematic questions. These “arms” become guiding principles for your narrative arcs and character decisions.
For instance:

• How does fear limit personal freedom?
• What happens when we confront the unknown within ourselves?
• Can someone truly escape their past?

Each arm not only ties back to the core but provides a framework for scenes, subplots, and character development.

Step 3: Sculpting the Environment – The Snowflake’s Setting

Settings are often underutilized in the Snowflake Method. However, think of the setting as the snowflake’s intricate lattice. Let your world not just reflect the plot but echo the emotional truth and themes.

• If your story is about suffocation, create claustrophobic settings: narrow corridors, foggy landscapes, or stifling urban spaces.
• If your story centers on liberation, contrast confined spaces with vast, open environments to visually underscore the character’s journey.

Each location should feel like it contributes to the narrative’s emotional impact.

Step 4: Multi-Layered Characters – Adding Depth to Snowflake Branches

Instead of merely expanding a character’s backstory or goals, explore their emotional landscapes. Start with their surface fears and motivations, then expand into layers of subconscious desires, contradictions, and symbolic roles within the theme.
For example:

• Surface: A woman fears being alone.
• Subconscious: She equates solitude with failure, rooted in childhood neglect.
• Symbolic: She embodies the universal fear of insignificance.

By layering your characters this way, they serve not only the plot but also the thematic and emotional depth of the story.

Step 5: Emotional Beats – The Snowflake’s Symmetry

The Snowflake Method emphasizes structure, but emotional beats often go unexamined. As you outline scenes, identify moments where the emotional truth is challenged, reinforced, or reframed.
For each major event, ask:

• What is the character feeling, and how does it evolve their arc?
• How can I subvert expectations to heighten the emotional impact?

For instance, instead of a dramatic confrontation resolving tension, let it deepen the protagonist’s internal conflict, forcing growth in unexpected ways.

Step 6: Weaving Subplots – Strengthening the Snowflake

Subplots in this adaptation are more than distractions; they are additional snowflake arms that reinforce the emotional truth. Each subplot should mirror or contrast the central theme. For example:

• In a story about freedom, a subplot could explore another character who finds freedom through sacrifice, providing a counterpoint to the protagonist’s journey.

Step 7: Refining the Flakes – Balancing Complexity and Elegance

The Snowflake Method’s iterative expansion can lead to unwieldy drafts. Periodically step back and assess:

• Does each layer of complexity enhance the story’s emotional and thematic resonance?
• Are any elements redundant or distracting from the core truth?

Refining the snowflake is about finding elegance in simplicity while preserving depth.

Final Thoughts: The Blizzard Effect

When applied thoughtfully, this enhanced Snowflake Method allows writers to create stories that are not only structurally sound but also rich in emotion, theme, and atmosphere. By starting with emotional truth and building outward, your story becomes more than a narrative—it becomes a transformative experience for the reader.

Embrace the snowflake not just as a plotting tool, but as a way to shape stories that linger in the heart like winter’s quiet beauty.

Taking the Snowflake to New Heights: Advanced Applications

Once you’ve mastered the basics of this emotionally-focused Snowflake Method, consider these advanced techniques to elevate your fiction even further. These refinements emphasize integration, experimentation, and adaptability to ensure your story resonates deeply with readers.

1. Integrating Symbolism at Every Layer

Incorporate symbolism into each stage of the snowflake’s expansion. Themes, settings, and character arcs can gain new depth through recurring symbols that evolve alongside the story.
For example:

• A broken mirror could symbolize fractured identities in the protagonist’s journey.
• Changing weather might reflect internal transformation, starting with relentless storms and ending in clear skies.

Make these symbols subtle but impactful, weaving them into descriptions, dialogue, and plot points for maximum resonance.

2. Dynamic Snowflakes – Allowing for Nonlinear Growth

While the Snowflake Method traditionally grows in a linear, outward fashion, real creativity thrives in fluidity. Let each layer inform and reshape others as new ideas emerge.

• Reverse Layering: Sometimes, a powerful scene or piece of dialogue will arise spontaneously. Work backward to align it with the emotional truth and thematic structure.
• Thematic Cross-Pollination: Allow elements from one arm of the snowflake (e.g., setting) to inspire new dimensions in another (e.g., character arcs). A foreboding forest might influence a subplot about the protagonist’s fear of the unknown.

By embracing nonlinear development, your snowflake evolves organically while maintaining cohesion.

3. The Fragmented Snowflake – Embracing Chaos

Not all stories require perfect symmetry. Some narratives thrive on a sense of disarray, particularly those exploring fragmented identities or chaotic worlds.

• Purposeful Gaps: Leave certain parts of your snowflake underdeveloped to mimic themes of mystery or incompletion.
• Uneven Layers: Focus deeply on some arms (e.g., characters) while leaving others (e.g., setting) minimalistic, creating a deliberate imbalance that mirrors the protagonist’s experience.

This approach works particularly well for psychological horror, surrealism, or experimental fiction.

4. The Emotional Echo – Layering Impact Across Scenes

Emotional echoes occur when moments in a story subtly reflect or call back to earlier scenes, creating a sense of narrative cohesion and emotional depth. In the Snowflake Method, build these echoes into the planning process.

• A seemingly mundane object or interaction in Act I could resurface with heightened emotional weight in Act III.
• Revisit locations, but transform them to show the protagonist’s growth or regression.

These echoes create a satisfying, layered experience for readers, rewarding close attention and deepening engagement.

5. The Shifting Snowflake – Writing for Dual Perspectives

If your story features dual protagonists or contrasting viewpoints, create interwoven snowflakes for each. Start with individual emotional truths and themes, then find intersections where their arcs collide, complement, or conflict.
For instance:

• Protagonist A’s emotional truth might be about learning to trust.
• Protagonist B’s emotional truth could focus on breaking free from trust that binds.
  By planning their snowflakes in tandem, you create a story rich with tension, synergy, and complexity.

6. Emotional Pacing – Balancing Calm and Storm

A well-crafted snowflake is not just intricate; it’s dynamic. Emotional pacing ensures the story has a natural rhythm, blending moments of intensity with quieter scenes for reflection.

• Highlight Peaks and Valleys: Identify moments of high emotion (conflict, revelation, loss) and balance them with moments of respite (contemplation, bonding, small victories).
• Build Emotional Arcs in Subplots: Each subplot should have its own emotional rise and fall, contributing to the overall pacing.

Plan emotional beats as carefully as plot points to ensure readers remain engaged without feeling overwhelmed.

Why This Method Works

This adapted Snowflake Method doesn’t just build a plot—it crafts an experience. By centering emotional truth, weaving themes into every layer, and embracing both structure and spontaneity, you create stories that are deeply personal yet universally relatable. The snowflake becomes more than a tool; it becomes a metaphor for your story’s growth—intricate, unique, and unforgettable.

Final Exercise: Crafting Your Snowflake’s Emotional Blueprint

To apply this approach, start with a blank page and follow these prompts:

1. Write a one-sentence summary of your story’s emotional truth.
2. Expand this into 3-5 thematic questions.
3. Sketch a symbolic setting that echoes this truth.
4. List 3 key emotional beats your protagonist will experience.
5. Identify one recurring symbol or motif.

From this blueprint, begin crafting your snowflake, letting it evolve organically. By the time you finish, you’ll have a story that’s structurally sound, emotionally resonant, and rich with meaning—a true masterpiece, as unique as a snowflake itself.

Also see:

• The Snowflake Method For Designing A Novel by Randy Ingermanson

Writing Craft: When You Can’t Finish Your Story by Randy Ingermanson | Advanced Fiction Writing

When You Can’t Finish Your Story

by Randy Ingermanson

Advanced Fiction Writing

When you can’t seem to finish the first draft of your story, that’s a sign something’s wrong. You could try to power through to the end, but if you try that repeatedly and you still can’t finish, then the story is probably broken.

In that case, you have two choices:

• Throw it away and start over.
• Fix it.

Usually, fixing a story is a lot more economical than throwing it away. If the story can’t be fixed, then yes, go ahead and throw it away. But most stories can be fixed. It’s a matter of asking the right questions. Below are a few that may be useful.

Did the Story Have a Plan?

Many writers don’t plan before they start writing. They just write without a plan, and a story emerges.

That’s the theory, anyway, and it very often works beautifully. But in practice, sometimes a coherent story doesn’t emerge. It happens.

When it happens, when you can’t make a story emerge, it may be time to take drastic action. You may need to make a plan, based on the story you have so far. One way to do this is to use the Flowsnake Method that I talked about in the April issue of this e-zine. The Flowsnake Method essentially works my Snowflake Method backward, starting from the story and ending up with a one-sentence summary. And a plan for the story.

Depending on how complicated your story is, using the Flowsnake Method will take you anywhere from a few hours to a couple of weeks. That’s a big time investment, but if you’re stuck, it’s a price you might be willing to pay to get unstuck.

Did the Story Follow the Plan?

You may have started with a plan, but that’s no guarantee of success.

I’m pretty sure no author ever made a plan for a story and followed it exactly. I never have, and I don’t expect I ever will.

Things change as you write the story. Some characters walk on the stage and say things you weren’t expecting. Others just don’t play as big a role as you had expected. Sometimes, small story strands turn into major plot threads. Or the story veers in a direction you couldn’t have foreseen.

Your story evolves. That’s not bad, that’s good. Usually, that evolution takes you to a better place than the story you had planned, and all is well.

But sometimes your story evolves in a way that paints you into a corner. When you’re painted in a corner, you can either walk over wet paint or break a wall. Either way, you need to change from evolution to revolution.

What that means is you need to replan your story. That shouldn’t be hard. You planned the story once, so you ought to be able to plan it again.

But before you make the new plan, write down what’s wrong with the actual story you wrote. And keep that in front of you when you write up the new plan.

Was the Original Plan Bad?

Sometimes, you wrote something pretty close to what you originally planned, but it turned out to be a bad plan.

That can be hard to swallow. You like to think you’re a good writer. It’s tough to admit you made a bad plan. But if the story isn’t working, it’s better to own up to your mistake than to stick to a plan that was bad.

Read the plan again, looking for fundamental errors:

• Can you summarize your storyline in one sentence?
• How does your protagonist change in the story?
• What is the theme of the story?
• Are the storyline and the character arc and the theme in sync with each other?

If you look long enough, you should be able to spot the cracks in your original plan that prevented you from writing the story you wanted.

The hard part is to make a new plan. You may need to break large parts of the story. You might need to throw away some scenes. Or some characters. Or rethink who those characters are.

Do what you need to do to make a plan that actually works. Then get back in gear and follow the new plan.

It’s helpful to remember that writing isn’t some mindless paint-by-numbers thing.

Writing is Hard

If writing was easy, everyone would write a bestseller, and nobody would earn any money, because there would be too many great stories available to buy and not enough buyers to buy them all.

So be glad writing is hard. But that means you’ll often get stuck. Everyone gets stuck. When you’re stuck, you don’t want to hear that writing is hard and everyone gets stuck, but it’s what you need to hear. Because the first step on the road to getting unstuck is to recognize that you’re stuck.

Homework:

• Is your current story stuck in the first draft?
• Did it have a plan to begin with?
• If it had a plan, did you drift so far away from it that you need a new plan?
• If you followed the plan, was it a bad plan to begin with?

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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.

 

 Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

More Advanced Fiction Writing

Writing Craft: Backstory and Front-Story by Randy Ingermanson | Advanced Fiction Writing

 

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 you

r 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.

 

 Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

More Advanced Fiction Writing

Creating: A Failure To Communicate | Advanced Fiction Writing

Creating: A Failure To Communicate

by Randy Ingermanson

Advanced Fiction Writing

There's a famous line in the movie COOL HAND LUKE:

"What we've got here is failure to communicate." The line comes twice, once said seriously by the evil prison warden and once said mockingly by the title character, Luke.

Failures to communicate are pretty common in real life, and in many cases, they're caused by different personality types. In last month's column, I talked about the Myers-Briggs scheme of classifying personalities into 16 different types.

This month, I'll look at a somewhat simpler scheme developed by D. Glenn Foster, who started his career as a polygraph examiner. What Foster discovered was that his own observations of his subjects told him a lot more about their guilt or innocence than his lie-detector machines could.

Foster's original idea was that there is no one best way to interrogate somebody. Methods that work on one personality type won't work on another. So if you want to get a confession, your first task is to "read" your prisoner's personality type. Then you use the appropriate methods to get your confession. Of course, if the prisoner isn't actually guilty, you'll discover that soon enough.

Eventually, Foster became an "interview consultant" who taught methods of interrogation to law enforcement agencies to help them get confessions from prisoners. I recently read his book, "HOW CAN I GET THROUGH TO YOU?" -- coauthored with Mary Marshall -- on the subject of interpersonal communication.

You might think that Foster's methods are only useful to novelists writing police procedural mysteries. Nope. An interrogation is only one of many ways that people communicate -- or fail to. The book by Foster and Marshall is actually aimed at anyone having communication failures. Whether you're not communicating with a friend or a family member, a co-worker or a Congress-critter, this book shows you how to read people and analyze what's gumming up the communication lines.

Foster categorizes people into four basic types:

• Feeler
• Driver
• Analyzer
• Elitist

Let's look at each of these in turn:

• A FEELER likes to get along with people. Feelers put other people's feelings first. A Feeler wants to get along with you and will try to accommodate you, if possible. Feelers are people persons. If you run a business, you want your receptionist and your PR director to be Feelers.
• A DRIVER likes to get things done. Drivers don't much worry about hurting somebody else's feelings, so long as they hit their task objectives. A Driver likes to argue and doesn't get a bit offended if you argue back. In fact, a Driver likes that and respects you if you push back. If you run a business, you want the sales-droids who make cold calls to be Drivers, because they don't take no for an answer.
• An ANALYZER likes to figure things out. Analyzers don't have any need to "share their feelings" with others. They'd much rather share their thoughts. Analyzers don't mind a spirited discussion, so long as it's about ideas and doesn't get personal. Analyzers dislike "ad hominem" arguments and will walk away when the heat turns on. If you run a business, you want your business strategist and your engineers to be Analyzers.
• An ELITIST is a one-of-a-kind person. The Elitist marches to his own drummer. There's a bit of the Feeler, the Driver, and the Analyzer in the Elitist. The Elitist rarely gets close to anyone, because there just isn't anybody like him. If you run a business and you need a visionary who thinks differently, then an Elitist might be what you need.

When two people are talking, they tend to treat the other person the way they expect to be treated. This works fine, if they're both the same personality type, because they have a common idea of how to communicate.

A Feeler talking with a Feeler will get along fine, because they both want the other person to feel good about the exchange. Each will bend over backwards to accommodate the other. No hard words and at the end, everybody's happy.

A Driver talking with a Driver will also do great. They'll likely get into a spirited argument, each giving no quarter, hacking away at each other until one of them wins or they reach a happy stalement. Plenty of hard words, but no hard feelings, because shouting is just part of the game, and at the end of the game, everybody knows who won.

An Analyzer talking with an Analyzer will have a terrific time. They'll get into a deep discussion about ideas. It may or not be an argument, but even if there's a strong difference of opinion, each will take care to attack the other's ideas, not his person. No hard words, no hard feelings, and at the end, one or both of them may have changed his mind, but both will feel like they learned something.

An Elitist talking with an Elitist rarely happens, because there just aren't that many Elitists. Each will recognize that the other is someone special and rare, because all Elitists are special and rare, but always in different ways. Elitists most likely won't share their feelings, not even with another Elitist. If necessary, they may argue like a Driver or reason like an Analyzer, but at the end of the game, they're really above all that.

When members of two different groups talk, it's a different story. Each will treat the other the way they want to be treated. But neither will be treated the way they want. Let's look at what can go wrong. We'll be brief here, because we have six different kinds of pairs:

When a Feeler talks with a Driver, she may very well be irritated by the Driver's "pushiness." Feelers see Drivers as being "control freaks" who want to "run over everyone else." The Driver will be annoyed by the Feeler's wimpiness. Drivers expect push-back, and when a Feeler just gives in, where's the fun in that? Drivers see Feelers as being "spineless" slugs who "beat around the bush" and "won't stand up for themselves."

When a Feeler talks with an Analyzer, she'll be annoyed by the Analyzer's "coldness." Feelers see Analyzers as being "too much in their heads" and as eggheads who "don't care about other people's feelings." The Analyzer will be irritated by the Feeler's "mushy-headed" approach to life. Analyzers see Feelers as "uninterested in ideas" and "losing their heads in a crisis."

When a Driver talks with an Analyzer, he may be annoyed by the Analyzer's cautious "look before you leap" foot-dragging. A Driver wants to forge ahead, because "he who hesitates is lost." The Analyzer will be especially infuriated when a Driver makes a "personal attack" in an argument. The Analyzer is sensitive to personal criticism and wants to "focus on ideas, not personalities."

When a Feeler, Driver, or Analyzer talks with an Elitist, they'll be put off by the Elitist's "arrogant and condescending" attitude. Since Elitists generally dress with excellent style, Feelers, Drivers, and Analyzers may criticise the Elitist for being "aristocratic." Elitists have elements of the Feeler, the Driver, and the Analyzer, so they have all sorts of ways to cross communications. The Elitist may see the Feeler as "weak" or "spineless"; may see the Driver as "pushy" and "overbearing"; may see the Analyzer as "cold" or "smart, but lacking vision."

There's a lot more to be said on Feelers, Drivers, Analyzers, and Elitists. I highly recommend the book "HOW CAN I GET THROUGH TO YOU?" by D. Glenn Foster and Mary Marshall for vastly more information on how these personality types work. Their interest is in helping people understand their own type and the types of others, so they can learn to get along.

Our interest, as novelists, is in learning how to understand our characters so we can pick a fight. Fiction is about characters in conflict. The more you know about what causes conflict, the more realistic your fiction will be.

I thank my friend, Mark Mynheir, a working cop and novelist, for alerting me to the Foster Method.

This article is reprinted by permission of the author.

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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.

 

 Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

More Advanced Fiction Writing

Writing Craft: Backstory and Front-Story | Advanced Fiction Writing

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.”

This article is reprinted by permission of the author.

---

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.

 

 Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

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Writing Craft: The Five Tools for Showing

The Five Tools for Showing

 

By Randy Ingermanson 

 

Your job as a novelist is very simple: to create a movie inside your reader’s head.

Not a picture. Not a sound bite. Not a word salad.

A movie. Inside your reader’s head.

Do that, and you win.

When editors tell you to “show, don’t tell,” what they really mean is to create that movie in your reader’s head.

You have five tools for showing that movie. That’s all. Just five. Master those five tools, and you’re far along the road to novelist nirvana. Here they are:

• Action
• Dialogue
• Interior Monologue
• Interior Emotion
• Sensory Description

Action

Action is a person or an animal or a robot or an angel or any other sentient being doing something. Some examples:

• Hermione jumped on her broomstick and raced after Malfoy.
• Michael Corleone pointed his gun at the head of the police captain and squeezed the trigger.
• C3PO pressed its fingers into the wall socket, tripping the circuit breaker and plunging the room into darkness.

Dialogue

Dialogue is a person or an animal or a robot or an angel or any other sentient being saying something. Some examples:

• “You are the last man I could ever be prevailed upon to marry,” said Elizabeth Bennet.
• “Hasta la vista, baby,” said the Terminator.
• “These are not the droids you’re looking for,” said Obi-wan Kenobi.

Interior Monologue

Interior monologue is a person or an animal or a robot or an angel or any other sentient being thinking something. Some examples:

• I’ve got to catch that bottle of nitro before it hits the floor.
• Bad news. He loves me and he loves me not.
• It’s not enough to win this fight just for today. I need to win the fight for all time.

Interior Emotion

Interior emotion is a person or an animal or a robot or an angel or any other sentient being feeling emotion.

This is more complicated than the other tools, so we need to clarify a few points before giving an example. You don’t need to name the emotion. If you name the emotion, you aren’t showing it, you’re telling it. If you want to show the emotion, you show the character’s physiological response to the emotion, and the reader figures out the emotion and may well feel it right along with the characters.

Note that physiological responses are ambiguous. They are usually not enough to pin down the exact emotion. The reader also needs context. But once you’ve given them the right context, showing them the character’s physiological response will make them feel the emotion.

I’ll give just one example. You can easily imagine different contexts in which this physiological response might signal anger, fear, horror, or possibly other emotions:

• Luke’s face burned, but the inside of his stomach was icy cold.

Sensory Description

Sensory description is showing the environment in a way that appeals to the senses. Some examples:

• The dorm room smelled of peanut butter and dirty socks.
• Neon lights flashed red and blue and green.
• Thunder smashed outside the house. Rain pounded on the roof.

Mix and Match

You have five tools for showing your reader your story. You can mix and match them any way you like. Any paragraph you write can use any combination of these five tools. That gives you endless variety for showing your story.

There are other tools for telling your story—narrative summary and exposition are the most common. You may be asking if it’s okay to use these tools.

Of course it is! These can be powerful tools, used in the right way, at the right time in your story. It’s not possible to spend 100% of your story showing, with no telling at all. Telling gets your reader quickly and efficiently through the boring parts of the story. Showing takes your reader slowly and immersively through the exciting parts of the story.

As a novelist, you get to decide what percentage of your story to show and what percentage to tell. A modern high-octane thriller might spend 98% of the story in showing and only 2% in telling. A slower-paced, more reflective novel might spend only 60% showing and 40% telling.

Just don’t fool yourself. If you intended to show your reader mostly movie, but you wound up breaking into the movie in every paragraph to tell your reader interesting footnotes, then you didn’t do what you intended. You should at least know you’re doing that.

Homework

Look at the most recent scene you wrote for your novel. Highlight every word in the scene that is not action, dialogue, interior monologue, interior emotion, or sensory description. The parts that are not highlighted are the movie you’re creating in your reader’s head. The parts that are highlighted are the interruptions to the movie. Are you surprised how many interruptions you’ve got in your movie? Or is the proportion about right?

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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.

 

 Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon