 Drama: December 11, 2019 Issue [#9902] |
This week: Dealing with the Backstory Issues Edited by: Joy  
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“The most important things to remember about backstory are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn't very interesting. Stick to the parts that are, and don't get carried away with the rest. Life stories are best received in bars, and only then an hour or so before closing time, and if you are buying.”
Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Treat backstory like a pungent spice. I say this to encourage you to picture a jalapeno pepper that can set your mouth on fire, every time you even think about adding backstory into your book.
What you need is subtlety.”
Sandy Vaile
“Every character has a back story. It’s what makes them fully formed and believable. But resist the urge to describe your character’s past with a data dump of everything they ever experienced since birth. The best way to reveal a character’s back story is through the character’s actions/dialogue on the page.”
Karen Sandler
“In the writers mind, even a backstory has a backstory.”
Terry a O'Neal
Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. This issue is about offering the backstory in a way that it turns out to be helpful to the core story.
Thank you for reading our newsletters and for supplying the editors with feedback and encouragement.
Please, note that there are no rules in writing, but there are methods that work for most of us most of the time.
The ideas and suggestions in my articles and editorials have to do with those methods. You are always free to find your own way and alter the methods to your liking.
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
First, I need to come clean with you. I hate designing and writing backstories, but they are as important as any medical procedure or the dentist’s chair. Without them, your fiction will lose its oomph.
The first thing to keep in mind is that a character’s backstory is not their history. Yes, it might have something to do with what happened in their past, but your story works better if its backstory rises from the character’s goal. What does the character want the most? What has triggered this need or wish in him? The answer to the second question here should be the roadmap to the backstory.
This is because your readers are interested in the present story unless a certain character has something to do with the action at hand. In other words, a character’s relevance to the story has to be proportional to his backstory. For that reason, the readers will want to know a lot more about a character who is the protagonist in the story.
In some instances, it might work to mine a character’s real-life history to find their motive for the present story, but this succeeds mostly if you are writing a story on a historical person or you are planning a historical fiction. In that case, searching the real-life history might be contained in the pre-planning stage, and not inside the actual story.
Suppose you did come up with a killer backstory and you can’t help but feel eager and excited to share it with your readers. I’d say just calm down. A backstory is best served piecemeal and in such a way that the reader feels he has discovered it all on his own, rather than being spoon-fed.
Although I believe there should be no strict rules in fiction, dumping the backstory info right in the beginning, sometimes as a prologue or in the first chapter in big chunks, might turn the readers off. But then, how do you present the backstory to the readers so they can grasp the story’s meaning more easily?
Here are a few ways of inserting the backstory into your fiction:
 A narrator in the story tells it. That narrator can be one of the characters or if a story within a story, he or she might be a character in the framing story. It is always a better idea to let one of the characters to take on the readers than the author putting himself into the story.
The backstory is told through dialogue and actions among characters. This is my favorite way, but it might not always work, especially if the other story characters may not know anything about the backstory in question, but they can at least wonder, can’t they! Their wondering may also make the readers wonder, so this is a ploy that may be easily used.
Something in the environment may bring on the memories of the main character or the others, such as an object in a childhood home or a place the character had visited once. Still, try not to dump these facts all at once, either. They are more valuable when mixed with the current events of the story.
Another way could be the presentation of fictional documents, such as a letter received from a friend or foe, re-discovered wills, newspaper pieces, photos, yearbooks, etc. Still, it is a good idea to keep these short and just present the gist of them.
Flashbacks are all right, but try to keep them down to a paragraph or two, so they don’t interfere with the flow.
There are, however, long-winded flashbacks in literature. Although used by the famous authors of the days-gone-by, long-drawn-out flashbacks, which spread over tedious expository paragraphs and pages, wear out today’s readers who tend to skip those long sections, thus missing on the gist of the story. Also, when long sections of backstory are told within the story’s present scene, handling the tense changes can become a chore, even if this succeeds to show how the past makes the character behave in the present. So, if you use this method, be very careful with your tenses.
In short, the questions we must ask ourselves when compelled to offer a backstory are: Is this necessary at all? Can the story stand on its own without it? If it doesn’t, how can I put it inside the text without hurting the story’s flow?
This means, the discerning mind of the writer that sticks to the intention of the story rather than filling pages has to be the best bet in coming up with and presenting a backstory that the readers will enjoy.
Have a great Holiday Season!
Until next time! 
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"When you see a sixty-five year old man climbing a tree to rescue a kitten, his dhoti snagging on twigs, his hair sopping with wet leaves, you've seen everything.
When that man happens to be Mr. Kamlakar Pahalvaan, you know you've seen it, but you simply can't believe your own eyes. Especially when, safe on the ground, he cuddles the kitten, croons to it and asks Dhondya to fetch a saucer of warm, diluted milk to feed it."
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The jet fighter pilot strolled out to his sleek, lethal looking plane. With a big grin, he clambered aboard. He lowered the canopy and put on his helmet, adjusting the mic and making sure it was on snug. He buckled his harness.
“Testing, one, two, three, and four…” he said into the mic.
“Loud and clear sir,” crackled over his helmet receiver.
The thing is, Ilya Yven is tired.
He lets the hair-thin, faultlessly sharp blade of his knife skate across the foolish informant's neck, and takes no pleasure in the burst of warm, hot blood that arcs into the air and lessens in strength with each spurt.
He's jealous of the guy, really. What he wouldn't give for a sleep so deep. He's tried, of course, in many creative ways over many, many long years. Nothing has stuck. Not even the time he paid that guy to dismember him.
Berta switched between the long and short beam lights, but it made no difference. Big blotches of snow, heavy with water, almost turning into ice smudges of white blanketed the view ahead. All she could see was a wall of wavering black, grey, and white—a dancing noise of out-of-sync TV screen—and a few metres of wet grey asphalt with a vague line in the middle, disappearing under the front of her car.
Joel let out a muffled cough, and Berta forgot she was holding the wheel. In the mirror, she saw how the tip of his little nose lifted, nostrils expanded, lips got pressed together and then formed a tube and expelled a portion of air that circulated through his lungs.
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"Same to you," Hannah said and unlocked her mailbox. A key on a square cardboard tag dangled from her fingers.
Roxanne waltzed into second period geometry class, and Christopher's heart sang a silent song of yearning.
He snatched up his textbook and hid his flaming face in marching triangles and parading parallelograms. The delicate scent of lilac wafted across him as she flounced to her seat and beamed at her friend, Lydia. He scowled in annoyance as Lydia's mouse-like form obscured his view of the lovely Roxanne, and he squirmed in his seat, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of her cat-like beauty. Her eyes glanced his way, and his heart quickened.
He scrunched down and ran his fingers through his frizzy, blond hair. God, she's looking at me. I bet she thinks I look like Krusty the Klown. Trent Paulson shouldered his way through the students...
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This Issue's Tip: Try not to open a story with a backstory. If need be, check Charles Dickens' David Copperfield which opens with expository backstory; yet, the author avoids that boring information-dumping.
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Feedback for "Writing for Teens"
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Lilli 🧿 ☕ 
Great NL! Interesting topic and it reminded me of a movie I watched this week called "Before I Fall". I almost gave up on the film and shut it off because it was about teens. However, I stuck with it and glad I did. It was about something that's been on my mind lately.
Thanks for the input, Lilli. I didn't see that movie, but teen stories can be just as exciting because they deal with the most excitable time of our lives. See, I still remember.  
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