Not sure if your backstory is working? Let’s fix that.
What to keep, what to cut, and why.
As an author, you are the reader’s guide through your story. It’s your job to make sure they don’t get lost in a forest of details and recollections from your character’s past. Let’s talk about how to do backstory well.
When should I include backstory?
One way to use backstory is to contrast or to parallel a feeling or action in the current timeline to strengthen your character arc.
For example, if “story-you” (the character of yourself in your memoir) is making an “irrational” choice, a scene from your past can reinforce to the reader what drove you to that decision.
Let’s say story-you is considering bailing on an interview for your dream job. It may not be clear to your reader why story-you would pass up this opportunity. You can show the reader why you don’t trust yourself to perform under pressure by including a scene of you freezing onstage in your middle school band performance.
By weaving in these pieces of backstory, you’re illustrating to the reader how you’re either overcoming a belief or experience from your past or how your past is still impacting you.
You can also use backstory to reveal a character’s personality or a relationship dynamic. If we see how your mom dropped her career ambitions to raise a family, we’ll better understand the character if her resentment bubbles up in the current timeline of the memoir.
Without that backstory, readers may not understand why your normally supportive mother isn’t happy for you when you land the dream job. When you bring in your mom’s backstory, we get a more complex and empathetic view of her character.
Too much backstory, not enough front story
Oftentimes I see writers starting to too early in their story; they're writing a lot of background information or relating a lot of the character's past. Ultimately, you want to start your story at the moment right before everything changes; before that inciting incident that is going to kick everything into gear.
Ask yourself “Why am I starting the story here?” If you don't have a good answer, that’s a sign that you may be doing just a little bit too much scene setting and backstory before you get to the actual action of your plot. If the actions that the main character is taking are not directly leading to them trying to achieve their story goal, there's probably a disconnect there.
If your character is doing plotty things because it seems fun or exciting to write, you probably need to go back and look at your theme and the deeper why of your story. Do these scenes help the reader understand the central conflict that the character is facing? If the answer is “no” or “I don’t know,” don’t worry. The good news is that you don’t have to scrap everything and start over; this is something that can be solved in revision.
A note about world-building
Backstory isn’t always character-specific. Sometimes, we need backstory to explain the conditions of the world your character lives in. I won’t go too much into this here, but you can read more about it in my post on the top three world-building pitfalls.
Tl;dr: you want to give readers just enough backstory and just when they need it, usually a little bit before that information will come into play. Like in TJ Klune’s In the Lives of Puppets, Klune mentions the “Old Ones” on the page before they show up so we know what they are when they arrive. Resist the urge to info-dump!
But really, don’t worry too much about it until later drafts
Whether we're mining our own lives to write a memoir or inventing a world when we're writing fiction, we often front load much of the backstory because we’re just telling ourselves the story in the early drafts.
In revision, you can figure out what backstory can be cut, what can be moved later, what can be told in more of a mini flashback or a small reference, and what needs to be told in a full scene. It will likely take time and multiple rounds of edits to find the right cadence of moving between backstory and front story to convey important ideas.
Even for experienced writers, this is something that gets refined all the way up until the final drafts. As you bring revised drafts to your critique partners and beta readers, listen for the comment “I don’t understand why your character did [insert thing].” That’s a clue to you that you need to refine your backstory.