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    • CommentAuthorDarkRaven
    • CommentTimeDec 31st 2009
     
    You have this amazing story planned out. Possibly the most amazing story ever told. The problem is that your reader will not understand the plot unless he understands the backstory.

    Now this is where the problem arises. We may be tempted to write the back story straight out or maybe have a character explain it. That however, leads us to thread dangerously close to infodumping.

    So how do you do this? Got any ideas?
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      CommentAuthorNorthmark
    • CommentTimeDec 31st 2009
     

    Ugh, I really need help with this. My characters always have backstory to them that affects how they act, but I just know that readers will think “well why is he doing ___” or “why is she so ___” without knowing the backstory.

    As a reader I’m sick of infodump and the almost as bad inferences to it. Example of that would be a young soldier asking an officer, “Why do you care about your unit so much?” and the officer replying either “You don’t want to know,” or “I didn’t care this much before, and suffered the consequences of it,”. Maybe it’s a personal complaint but I’m tired of characters just alluding to some tragedy to explain everything.

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      CommentAuthorJabrosky
    • CommentTimeDec 31st 2009
     

    All I can suggest is maybe scatter allusions to the characters’ backstories throughout the whole story instead of just clumping it all together in a couple of paragraphs.

    • CommentAuthorSlyShy
    • CommentTimeDec 31st 2009
     

    Read up.

    One thing that is difficult is coming to terms with this fact: The reader will never have as complete of an understanding of your work as you do. But that’s okay.

    Also, understanding is a bit overrated. You are probably familiar with the idea of in medias res, yeah? Well, starting a story without the back story is just like starting in the middle of things. The back story can be gradually built up as the story progresses. A lot of books work on this principle.

    A writing teacher of mine also had this gem to offer. “In your first draft, about the first half of your writing is simply clearing your throat before the action begins.”

  1.  

    I’ll have to remember that because one of my “biggest” writing projects was made up of nothing.

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      CommentAuthorKyllorac
    • CommentTimeJan 1st 2010
     

    Well, first things first, you have to figure out how much backstory the audience absolutely needs to know to appreciate the rest of the story. Working from there, figure out which aspects of the backstory were most prominent — these are likely the aspects that are either common knowledge and/or frequently discussed by the characters that participated. These aspects don’t have to be crucially significant to the backstory; just memorable. People constantly allude to past occurrences in their conversations, and the stupider or more outrageous an event, the more likely it will be remembered and discussed and even used against the people involved.

    For example, we have a character who is a complete and utter jerk who constantly has his nose in other people’s business. For some story-important reason, we need to know why he’s a jerk. One way of revealing some of the reasons why is to have a scene where he is hovering over a group of people that want him to go away. The easiest way to get rid of someone is to humiliate them, right? And so you could write a scene with dialogue like so:

    “So, how’s the wife?”

    “Shut up.”

    “Oh, look. He’s all hot and flustered.”

    “Bet he doesn’t get like that around his wife.”

    “Can you blame him? She barely qualifies as a woman. Now his first wife…”

    “Now she was a woman.

    “Shame she ran off.”

    “And with half the family jewels, too.”

    Using dialogue and other character interactions is a great way to give the reader information because, when done well, it’s almost completely unnoticeable. You just have to be careful that the conversations are in-character for the characters involved and that there’s a clear reason for them to be discussing such and such in the first place.

    Another way of revealing tidbits of backstory is to have the character in question think on it. They needn’t dwell on it, but a casual thought here and there scattered where appropriate works wonders for filling in the readers on the details of a past situation and the character’s feelings on it.

    Also, remember that, as the author, you have the power to create/modify characters/situations so that the backstory is revealed naturally and in a non-infodumpy way. If the backstory is related to the history of the world, you could have a minor history teacher character disseminate this backstory; just keep in mind that, if the history is common knowledge to the characters and/or they are of the impatient personality type, the other characters needn’t appreciate the infodump themselves. For example:

    “In the beginning, there was Nothing. And from this Nothing aro—”

    “Arose Something, which in turn gave rise to all the gods and goddesses, yadda yadda yadda. Get to the point please.”

    “Bob!”

    “What? It’s common knowledge!”

    “Then would it interest you to learn that there’s a different version of the story, one which I was about to tell you before you rudely interrupted?”

    “Then why didn’t you just say so? Ow!”

    “Don’t mind him. Please, continue.”

    “As I was saying: In the beginning—”

    “You already said that.”

    “Are you going to let me finish this story or not?”

    And there are even more ways to subtly incorporate backstory, such as dropping details into the narrative casually; these ones I’ve mentioned are just the ones I use most often since I focus on characters more than other elements in my writing.

    I hope this was helpful.

  2.  

    I’d warn against using backstory dialogue as the tendency is to basically just break up your infodump and put quotes around it. Not that it isn’t a good method, but it is kinda overused by “2nd stage writers” who know that infodump= bad, so they just break up tons and tons of information and stick it in a conversation. looks at self
    My suggestion: look over the reams and reams of backstory you should have. Then see what bare minimum you can stick into your first chapter. Bleed it out using these methods.

    It’s a three pronged attack of paring down what we need to know, using methods such as dialogue, and spreading it throughout your story, giving us just enough info we need to follow what is going on.
    /obvious

  3.  

    As long as you give your reader enough solid footing at the beginning to make some sense of cohesion, you don’t really need to give them everything all at once. Appropriately paced reveals fuel a sense of discovery, and it makes it easier to lead the reader’s focus through whatever the correct processing order is instead of lobbing the entire picture at them and assuming they’ll find their way through it.

    I can’t really imagine a story that requires full backstory disclosure in order to work actually exists, though.

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      CommentAuthorRed Sky
    • CommentTimeJan 2nd 2010
     

    I agree with sansafro187 here. If, at the beginning, they can understand the events themselves, not necessarily the reasons behind them, they will accept what the author tells them provided it does not contradict with anything else in the story. The reader will accept being given backstory bit by bit throughout the story.

    I would recommend people here to read A Clockwork Orange if they haven’t already. The author writes it in first person from the viewpoint of Alex, a teenager who speaks in the lingo of his time and offers no translations into standard English. But despite that, after a few chapters you’ll just naturally be able to pick up what a devotchka or vetch is, or what qualifies as horrowshow. The “backstory” is this case is all intertwined with the book.

    • CommentAuthorRocky
    • CommentTimeJan 2nd 2010
     
    I like developing a backstory and skirting around it, being vague about the details and history. The only time the details surface is when it's relevant to the situation/conflict at hand, and even then, it only comes out if the character in question decides to divulge information.