An Alphabet of Better Writing # B

B is for Back Story...

In many ways beginnings are easy: you think of a dramatic moment in your story and jump in (even though it can take you a little while to find your narrative feet).  The tricky part is managing your back story. This is the information your reader will need about what has happened to your characters before the current action starts.  The back story is your intimate knowledge of their lives.  It is important that you, as the author, know a good deal about your hero, heroine and their confederates, because you will need all this information to bring them to life.  However, this is not the same thing as telling your reader everything about them. You need to know about their early childhood traumas in order to show how it affects their adult behaviour, but you don't always need to spell out everything, otherwise you will end up with a curriculum vitae rather than a novel.

The principle for handling the back story is similar to the principle for handling how you drip feed information in general.  Too much is definitely not a good thing.  It is crucially important for the writer to get the reader to work with them in imagining the story - this is very much a joint venture. To achieve this, you need to give them enough facts to stimulate their curiosity, so that they start adding two and two together, then suddenly they're off and away, making four, or five, or Heavens to Betsy, even six.

As a rule of thumb, I try to find out as much about my characters as I would want to know about a friend.  I'm inquisitive about their families, where they were brought up, how educated  they are, what they enjoy , what they fear, any gossip, etc etc. This is all useful to me because it informs how I write about them.  I guess I only tell the reader about a quarter of what I know.

Collating this information is one thing, distributing it is another.  Try not to dump it in a great indigestible heap at the beginning of your story.  Work out the minimum that your reader requires in order to get started and then try sprinkling the rest judiciously as the narrative moves along.  Try an aside here, a recollection there, but avoid big clunky flashbacks because they're just that: clunky.