Exponential Backstory - where do you stop?

You know more about it than I do. You can always gut it in rewrite. I take notes about back story and then never introduce it. Write more. Nothing wrong with that.

When does it stop serving the story?

My policy is always to write it down, but not use it unless it moves the story. In this way, I end up with an 80k word book and a 50k word "notes" file. It's all good and it helps me figure out who the characters are.

You can easily find successful authors who generate tons of this stuff, and authors who do none at all. You can also find people who write it all down so they can keep it all straight, and people who do it almost all mentally.

I think the more complicated your work, the more useful this is. J.K. Rowling did a lot of this kind of thing, but she had to think about what a minor character in book one would be doing in book seven, hence having all those details was useful later.

Whether or not it should actually go into the book is another question, and not a simple one. If the publisher tells you to add 5000 words, maybe you need more detail about the motivations of the secondary characters. Or maybe people will be confused by a certain character's actions, and you need to add it. Or maybe the whole thing is unnecessary and should be cut. But if you don't actually have the material, how can you make these decisions?

So I wouldn't worry too much about it. If you set yourself a goal of X pages a day of actual usable material, and you can meet that goal, and you have some extra time, then I wouldn't worry too much about spending extra time on it.

Oh, I'm not throwing away one of these back stories. It'll be somewhere later. Character is complex and back story is brutal.

NeuroFizz said:

When does it stop serving the story?

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Exactly!

I can't think of that many books that have multiple, true protagonists. The only stuff that's coming to mind right now is George R. R. Martin's series. Most books focus on one or two protagonists, and so anything that is not directly relevant to their story/stories is probably going to feel extraneous to the reader.

It's fun to come up with backstories in your head, though, isn't it? It does help me understand my characters better.

Backstories could be very interesting by themselves. But yeah, does it serve the plot, the characters or the theme? Is it stopping the flow of the story? Do the readers really need to know?

Also, if you find your backstories more interesting than your main story, then you may want to reexamine everything. Are you telling the right story?

Redzilla said:

My policy is always to write it down, but not use it unless it moves the story. In this way, I end up with an 80k word book and a 50k word "notes" file. It's all good and it helps me figure out who the characters are.

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That's what I do. That way you get it all down and you can just pick out whatever it is that you want to use.

Nitpick. Thread is titled "Exponential Backstory - where do you stop?"

Exponential:



Perhaps you mean expositional?

I dunno, sometimes it seems exponential. I wrote a roughly 1000-word short story for a SYW challenge that covered some backstory and it's now 17 pages and growing. I think it might turn into a novella. And then there's the daily growth in my setting bible...

But you're probably right that it's supposed to be expositional. (It just feels like it's exponential.)

I thought he meant exponential--if you write a page for Bill, then you introduce Sue and Shelly, then you write a page for Sue, which introduces Tom and Mike, and the page for Shelly introduces Alice and Bob--exponential.

I bung it all in on the first draft and edit out what I don't need later. Lucky for me my first drafts these days are tighter than my 'finals' (*coughyeahrightcough*) from years ago.

Aha, you do mean exponential My bad!