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That’s So Yesterday:
The Perils of Backstory
by James Thayer
The literary agent Donald Maass says, “The number one mistake I see
in manuscript submissions is a failure to put the main conflict in
place quickly enough. In fact, it is the primary reason I reject
over 90 percent of the material I receive.”
A chief culprit: backstory. Too much backstory too early is a
manuscript prospect-killer. Nothing contained later in a manuscript
can overcome backstory delivered too early because agents and
editors won’t read beyond the backstory.
What is backstory? If the first page of a novel begins on August 1,
anything that happened before August 1 is backstory. How the hero
got into chapter 1’s terrible fix, the villain’s early evil
scheming, the next door neighbor’s childhood bullying, Meghan
breaking his heart when he was eighteen, his weapons training at
Quantico, even July 31’s weather: all of this is backstory.
A successful story is like a clock. It moves forward. Albert
Zuckerman says, “The one aspect
of a blockbuster novel’s structure that usually keeps the reader
turning the pages more than any other is pace—storytelling that
moves relentlessly forward, constantly repositioning the characters
and posing ever new dramatic question in the reader’s mind.”
Readers expect movement toward resolution of the conflict. They
want the new, not the old. They want to know what will happen, not
what has happened. Over-the-shoulder backward glances stop the
novel’s momentum.
Here is an outline of the first scene of a novel, done the wrong
way. After a promising beginning, backstory jerks the forward
momentum to a halt.
Chapter 1 outline:
A. Allison opened the closet door, and found a rifle inside. She
had never seen the weapon before.
1. She had driven her daughter Amanda to school that morning early
for Amanda’s choir practice.
2.
Allison’s husband Eric was a hunter,
mostly deer. He had grown up in Michigan, and spent most every
weekend in the woods with his father.
3.
She and Eric had met in junior high
school, and neither of them remembered a time when they didn’t know
each other.
4.
Eric was an orthodontist. He had
graduated from the Michigan State, and went to the University of
Michigan School of Dentistry for both his DDS and his MS.
5.
Their daughter Amanda was their
first-born. Amanda was going to have a sister in seven months.
Allison’s tummy had begun to show.
B. A creaking sound came from the kitchen door. Someone was coming
into the house. She called, “Eric?” No answer.
Here is that same story, done the right way:
Chapter 1 outline:
A. Allison opened the closet door, and found a rifle inside. She
had never seen the weapon before.
B. A creaking sound came from the kitchen door. Someone was coming
into the house. She called, “Eric?” No answer.
But what about all the stuff about her daughter and meeting Eric in
junior high school and deer hunting? Whether this information is
important for understanding the story isn’t the point. The point is
that in this outline, the information about the past—the
backstory—is given way too early. The promising story—a woman hears
a creepy sound downstairs—has stopped cold. So has the agent and
publisher’s interest.
The urge to deposit backstory far too early in a novel is strong.
One of the reasons is that as we have
plotted and researched our story, we have thought and thought about
our characters and their histories, spinning out their backgrounds,
which is a lot of fun. Immense satisfaction can be derived
from creating a compelling, sympathetic, fascinating character. “I
have tried every device I know to breathe life into my character,
for there is little in fiction more rewarding than to see real
people interact on a page,” says James Michener.
So as we’ve put together our story, we’ve
come up with lots of explanations for why our characters behave as
they will in the story, explanations from childhood, from early
romances, from mentors, from odd experiences, from lots of things.
What could be more rewarding than inventing a background, which
probably includes all those great things we wished had happened to
us but never did, and some things we are intensely grateful never
happened to us.
And then, after all the work and creativity we put into this
history—after our act of profound creation; a fictional character in
all her manifestations—the truth is sometimes hard to accept, but it
is a truth nonetheless: readers are not much interested. Backstory
is almost always more interesting to the writer than to the reader.
The reason: readers want to move forward with the story. Anything
that happens now—in front of the reader in real time as she reads—is
intrinsically more interesting than things that happened before the
story’s “now.”
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Illustration by Jennifer
Paros - Copyright 2010
This is such an important concept—early backstory is a
prospect-killer for a manuscript—that another example might be
useful. Here, at the beginning of the novel, two fellows are
hanging on the side of a cliff, and things have nicely started to go
wrong (nicely for the reader, not for the climbers). Notice when
the backstory starts:
1
“Did you jam the bolt anchor in?” Burkhart called. “I’m
slipping.” He gripped the granite ledge—not more than two inches
wide—his fingers sinking into the moss.
Thirty feet above him, Monroe yelled, “The anchor is
slipping out. Don’t move. I’m pulling out the hammer.”
Burkhart looked up the granite face at his partner.
“I’ve taken the weight off the line, but I can’t hold on here much
longer.”
One of Burkhart’s hands
was white with chalk. A belaying glove was on the other hand.
Sweat seeped down his forehead. Spring-loaded cams, nuts, and
quickdraws hung from his harness. Monroe’s foot loosened granite
pebbles that peppered Burkhart’s helmet.
Burkhart was tight against
the cliff face, the toes of his rubberized climbing shoes jammed
into crevices. The boulder-strewn valley floor was three hundred
feet below them, straight down.
He yelled, “Hurry, Ron.
My fingers are giving out.”
This was Dan Burkhart’s
third climb of this precipice, but the first time he had attempted
the Devil’s Tail route, a class 5 ascent. Burkhart had begun rock
climbing when he was fourteen years old on a wager from his father.
Burkhart had been begging his family for a dog, and his dad had told
him that if Dan could climb Mount Baldy at Lehi State Park, and
reach the top, the family would get a dog. Burkhart spent a month
learning climbing techniques, and by the time he had conquered Mount
Baldy, he had forgotten about a dog. When he graduated from high
school, he had already climbed the Fire and Ice Face on the
Chieftain in British Columbia and the Skyway Route on Mount
Constance in Washington State.
After college he had
joined the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, and had served
as an instructor in the division’s climbing school. Although the
division was headquartered at Fort Drum, New York, the climbing
school was at Breckinridge, Colorado. Burkhart rose from second
lieutenant to captain, and was the deputy director of the school
when his father passed away, and Burkhart left the Army to try to
keep his father’s business—Burkhart Beer Distributing—together.
The reader is following the life-or-death struggle of two people on
the side of the mountain—hundreds of feet up a granite cliff, their
fingers giving out and their bolt slipping out of the crevice—and
suddenly we are reading about the family beer distributorship. This
is an exaggeration to make a point, but it isn’t much of an
exaggeration. For new writers, the urge to talk about how Burkhart
got into rock climbing—and to let the reader know right away—can be
intensely strong.
Most novels need some backstory. A bit of the characters’
backgrounds and several events leading up to the story—things that
occurred before August 1—are probably needed to make the story clear
and complete. How can a writer successfully include these necessary
explanations?
First, irrespective of how important the backstory is to the novel,
do not use the backstory in the first pages of the novel. Maybe not
in the first thirty pages of the novel. The reader can wait. If
the writer starts her backstory on page three, she has determined
how far an agent or publisher will read: page three. Back-story not
only halts the story, it halts the agent’s interest. Early
backstory is a singular hallmark of amateurism.
Second, make the backstory short. Far less is probably needed than
it seemed when we were inventing the plot and creating the
characters. Eliminate those things that aren’t essential to
understanding the story. We love that our heroine Annette’s mother
graduated from Stanford. Let’s keep it to ourselves.
Third, dialogue between our characters is perhaps the most
interesting way to deliver backstory:
“Don’t let Travis do the
same thing to you that Ben did,” Courtney said.
“I have no idea what you
mean.” Katie Jo looked away, hoping Courtney hadn’t seen the rush
of color to her face.
“He ditched you three days
before your wedding, and it almost destroyed you and your mother,”
Courtney said. “This Travis is the same type of guy.”
Sure, it’s backstory, but at least we can see the characters
building their relationship as the backstory is delivered.
So: that information about the beer distributorship? Leave it out
or save it for later and make it short. Wait. A beer
distributorship? Leave it out.
More
Author Articles...
James
Thayer’s thirteenth novel,
The Boxer and the Poet; Something of a
Romance,
was published by Black Lyon Publishing in March 2008. He teaches
novel writing at the University of Washington Extension School, and
he
runs a freelance editing
service (www.thayerediting.com
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