The Myth of Backstory

(Sorry about the lag in posts... Blogger hates me!)

On the Drunk Writer Talk blog they have been discussing backstory in fiction. Backstory is when the writer drops in information about a character's past, by whatever method - dialogue, introspection, flashback, or just straight narrative.

Beginning writers are told that backstory is evil, it is bad, under no circumstances must you write it. Jennifer Crusie says:

Keep it in the now, or I am gone. Any time the writer stops to tell me things about the character or the past or anything else that isn’t actually the story at hand, I am going to stop reading. Period.

And as I did with prologues, I have to disagree. I see two phenomena happening:

1) Writers told by anyone in authority in the publishing business not to write backstory for their characters;

2) Readers complaining about books that they have forgotten ten minutes after they put them down. Readers complaining that they would like to see something with some meat, some substance. Readers complaining that the fluff getting published these days means that there is nothing to read.

I believe the two are related.

I work with a woman who is... well, difficult to get along with. Rigid, negative, quick to criticize. Drives people nuts. The other day I learned that she has been caring for her mother, who has Alzheimer's, for the last seven years. What would you be like if that were you? Now we no longer have a caricature, we have a person. Someone real. All it takes is one sentence of backstory.

Georgette Heyer's books are crammed with backstory. Dang, she just stops the narrative dead and writes two paragraphs about where that character has been. And romance writers today are still talking about those books and what genius they are. The edition of These Old Shades I just read had a worshipful intro from Stephanie Laurens. Okay, I read one Stephanie Laurens book (something about a man named Devil Cynster and a woman named Honoria) and she won't be winning any Pulitzer Prize. Still, she's a big selling author. I don't remember if Devil Cynster had any backstory, but I'll bet he did.

Everyone does it; you can't get away from it. People don't merely exist in the here and now; the here and now is really boring if the reader hasn't been given the right information.

Let me modify the message. It isn't that you must eliminate backstory. It's that you must master it.

There is good backstory, and there is bad backstory. Read the masters; find out which is which. And write good backstory.

The readers are waiting.