Exercise Caution When Writing Backstory
Veeeery tricky
Writing backstories in fiction is precarious. You can easily ruin everything if you’re not careful.
While people have mixed feeling about the use of flashback, at least it’s narrative rather than expository, so it remains immersive and vivid. Expository backstory can be extremely dull on the page unless it’s explained by a creative, quirky narrator. Make sure you earn the right to tell it to us by making us pant for that knowledge because of your suspenseful mystery arising from the action. And some aspiring writers misunderstand flashback’s role in the structure of the story altogether.
Backstory has no role in the plot itself
When my writing students outline their first short stories, sometimes the backstory is included as if it’s one of the Plot Points or can carry the entire Middle Act. Backstory, especially expository, doesn’t play a role in the plot of a short story. It can be gracefully interspersed into the narrative in between the Points (like Inciting Incident, First Plot Point, Midpoint, Crisis and Climax.) But those core elements can’t be replaced by backstory.
For example, one student outlined a story which began with an introduction of the protagonist sitting reminiscing at home, and then the rest of the tale…
