FEATURE
From the Reading Chair: The backstory balancing act In a taster of her workshop at Byron Writers Festival this year, local editor Laurel Cohn discusses the importance of getting character backstory right, whether you are writing fiction or non-fiction.
Have you ever been stuck at an event with a stranger who wants to tell you, unprompted, all about themselves? Even if that person looked interesting from afar, they can quickly become boring. Too much backstory! The same is true with characters on the page. Readers don’t need to be regaled with great slabs of personal history about characters in order to care about them, or in order to understand what’s happening. And it’s not just characters, but also settings, both physical and social; while a sense of place is needed so that your characters aren’t interacting in a vacuum, particularly in speculative fiction genres where world-building is key, there is a point where too much information is distracting.
The need to know In an attempt to set up the story, in time and place as well as character and key event, often a writer will get bogged down in the backstory, particularly in the opening chapters. And let me be specific – particularly in chapter two after a dramatic event in chapter one. It’s almost as if the writer is saying to the reader, ‘I’ve started with something to grab your attention, but hang on a minute, let me pause to fill you in.’ I understand why writers do this. It is vital they are intimately familiar with the history of their characters and sometimes also of the locations where the action takes place. The
14 | WINTER 2021 northerly
writer needs to know this backstory in order to create compelling and believable characters with plausible motivations, as well as three-dimensional settings. However, the reader doesn’t need to know that level of detail to follow the story, to care about the characters, or to be curious about what happens next. On the flip side, sometimes writers don’t put in enough backstory, leaving the reader unclear about characters’ motivations, their frame of mind in different scenarios and the contexts that shape their decision-making. This can impede a reader’s ability to engage with the characters, as actions, demeanour and thoughts aren’t tied to a delineated sense of a whole character. It can be hard to empathise with or care about a character you only meet on the surface. It’s a balancing act – you need a certain amount of backstory for a reader to engage and identify with characters and places, but need to steer clear of what are called ‘info dumps’, chunks of information that slow the pace or stall the narrative. Whether you are writing fiction or narrative non-fiction such as memoir, you need to be able to distinguish between the information the reader must know in order to follow your story thread at that moment, and all those other fascinating things that you, the writer, know about the characters and places, that can be omitted.
