The Trouble with Backstory

Inevitably, I get stuck whenever I start a new book trying to talk myself into a prologue. Why? I want to give you the character’s backstory. How did they get where they are? And inevitably, I end up trashing the prologue in favor of slipping small snippets of information throughout the story.

Info Dumping
It’s easy to want to introduce your characters right away, to tell everything you’ve learned about them, from how they grew up to who their best friend is to what made them the way they are. But readers these days do not want you to dump all that information in the first chapter. In fact, they don’t want you to dump that information at all. They prefer to be spoon fed little bites at a time. Nothing glazes over the eyes faster than wasting precious words that don’t move the story forward.

But wait? Isn’t backstory important? Absolutely! But filtered in. It’s seasoning, and you know what happens when the cook adds too much salt to the stew.

Backstory Serves a Purpose
As an author, sometimes it’s good to get that prologue written—and then moved to a different file. It helps me, as the author, get to know my character and ground myself in what makes them tick. I understand why my character acts the way she does because she has shared her life history with me. Conversely, the reader is more interested in the action, and less in the history. Save the history lesson for when it makes the most impact.

Example: “She hadn’t been through this part of Ohio since she was a kid.” END OF BACKSTORY. This gives the reader enough information to know the character has been to Ohio. But it might come into play later in the story, so the reader will tuck that tidbit of information away, so that when you go back to that and say something about Ohio, the reader can then feel smart when they connect the dots. “Oh yeah, she was there when she was a kid.” And that return to Ohio should be something that moves the story forward, and the character’s previous experience, something that colors her view.

In the prologue version of this information, I might start writing, “She grew up in Ohio,” and go on to detail the whole experience which left a mark on her. It’s good for me to know as the author, but the reader doesn’t necessarily care about her past until it makes a difference to her story TODAY, the “why is she acting that way?” response to an everyday occurrence.

Backstory is important. Everything we do impacts how we respond to different stimuli and different situations. A good story starts with the stimuli and the potentially over-the-top response. Or the conditioned response. This raises questions to the reader about why the character acts the way they do, and then a dribble of information helps them to understand until, over the course of the story, the character is able to overcome whatever makes them respond differently. To grow beyond their own backstory.