Is it ok if my main character only comes in later in my story?

IMO ( which is worth the paper it's printed on lol) you should change it.

You don't need ten chapters of backstory before you get to your story. You need to start your story where it starts.

Backstory is tricky - especially in fantasy - but what happened to his parents and grandparents should be woven into the story itself, as and when the reader needs to know it. You'd be surprised how little they actually need.

Start with your main character, just about the point his life goes down the pan. If, say, what happened to his mum becomes relevant to the situation he's in now, then pop it in, showing it as to how it affects the current situation. Maybe your character thinks 'Oh crap, this is just how it happened to Mum' lol, or a brief line or two of narrative from his perspective - The assassin that had killed his mother was obviously hell-bent on carrying on with his mission to eradicate the bloodline - whatever.

Less is more

Oh, and BTW:

Welcome!

Pop down to the science fiction and fantasy genre forum. We don't bite. Much.

Lol - it's tricky yes. Very tricky.

Might I suggest taking a look at a couple of books in a similar vein to yours and seeing how they handled backstory?

Thing is if it's a mystery to your POV character...why not make it a mystery to the reader too, and they can find out together? Pop in little clues along the way. If it's all laid out up front, it takes away some of the enjoyment of finding this kind of stuff out.

PS: What viewpoint are you writing from? If it's third limited, the reader only knows what the character knows anyway. If it's omni, that's different, but you could use this to ramp up a bit of tension later if you don't reveal it all straight away.

Writer1020, I think starting that way is a mistake. You want to jump in with your story unfolding, not with what's already transpired, even if it's important.

You can work all of that in as backstory. Maybe your main character has to explain it to somebody, or has nightmares incorporating it, or finds he has an enemy--or an unexpected ally--because of it. Or maybe it explains his behavior or a skill, to himself or to others.

Read a good fantasy and see how other authors do it. There are some excellent examples, and I'm not even a fantasy reader, much.

Maryn, pleased to meet you

Every character has parents and grandparents. Every character is a product of his/her past -- and so are the parents and grandparents, and their grandparents. Where do you stop going back?

It's important for you to know all about the character's past, but that knowledge needs to be put to work showing who the character is Now, when the story begins.

Writer1020 said:

But what if the uncle (i'll call him uncle 1) that is his king killed his parents along with his grandmother and then when war starts beetween one of his uncles and the other (uncle 2) you don't really know why unless the past, and his uncle killed everyone who knew the past so there is really no one who could tell him it unless the uncle (2) who wan'ts to kill him since he thinks he is trying to attack his kingdom...
Ah, i'm confusing myself already....
Thanks for the reply by the way.

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Okay, that IS a bit confusing but perhaps part of what can make for great tension is that the reader DOESN'T know why all these guys hate each other. You can dole it out as the path to war escalates, giving the reader bits of the past so the reason for war becomes clearer as you go along.

Writer1020 said:

the first part is about his parents, and grandparents past and all the things that happend with them, which are really important to know to understand for the rest of the story.

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Single biggest cop-out in defense of un-needed backstory. Period.

Did the audience need to know about Luke Skywalker's father when Star Wars started? Did they need to know how the Jedi order worked or that somewhere out there was a tiny green mentor in waiting? Or that Leia was his sister? Or that there had been an epic massacre? Or any of the stuff in Episodes 1-3? At all?

Was the story understandable starting with Luke (and Obi-wan)? Yes. Yes it was.

When George Lucas wrote Star Wars, it was 9 parts long, but he zeroed in on the "important" part of the story, which were the 3 parts pertaining to Luke Skywalker and his journey. What the audience needed to know about his past and the Jedi order and the Sith (who wasn't even called that...) was learned in the course of the story.

Make your book like that. Kill the infodump, and start with Ch. 10 if Ch. 10 is where your MC comes. You call him the "main" character for a reason - don't let the others rob him of that status by hijacking his story.

It seems interesting, but you're right; it DOES prove several marketing issues. I suggest a Chapter 1 starting from the main character and then having Chapter 2 go back in time, so you read both stories unfolding until you catch up.

My suggestion, however, it's probably not a good idea. I don't know.

I'd argue for zooming in on the main character's point of view, and having the backstory be divided between his reactions to ongoing events (his judgment of those will be deeply affected by his past experience) and the things he discovers as events unfold. Laying out all the backstory can actually cause you to lose an opportunity to give the reader curiosity. Make them pursue the story to find out more.

As a reader, I get annoyed when an author does that. I want the character(s) I get to care about to be with me through the whole novel, not just disappear to be replaced by new 'real' main characters.

I also suggest starting the story with your main character and introducing the reader to the past as the story goes on. Even if your main character knows what is going on, the story may be able to be written so the reader is curious about what is going on - which is a very good thing.

Every story has its pros and cons about which way to tackle the plot. It's just good to find the one that would work best for your story without being confusing.

Cyia said:

When George Lucas wrote Star Wars, it was 9 parts long, but he zeroed in on the "important" part of the story, which were the 3 parts pertaining to Luke Skywalker and his journey. What the audience needed to know about his past and the Jedi order and the Sith (who wasn't even called that...) was learned in the course of the story.

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If your book is a success, you can add in all the back story you want in later books, in just the same way as Lucas made three completely irrelevant prequel films in the nineties.

AllieKat said:

I want the character(s) I get to care about to be with me through the whole novel, not just disappear to be replaced by new 'real' main characters.

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QFT. Unless there is a real reason why you're changing the cast, it is inadvisable to annoy people with major changes in the lineup of characters.

Cyia said:

When George Lucas wrote Star Wars, it was 9 parts long, but he zeroed in on the "important" part of the story, which were the 3 parts pertaining to Luke Skywalker and his journey. What the audience needed to know about his past and the Jedi order and the Sith (who wasn't even called that...) was learned in the course of the story.

Make your book like that. Kill the infodump, and start with Ch. 10 if Ch. 10 is where your MC comes. You call him the "main" character for a reason - don't let the others rob him of that status by hijacking his story.

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Well said. Expanding on Star Wars, I recall hearing something about it.

Originally, Lucas wanted to do the first three films first. (They weren't anything like the movies that came out this decade.) Someone told him "Nobody wants to watch three movies connected only by a couple of robots before they get to see the interesting stuff." He wisely agreed and started with Episode 4. (And because of what he learned with Episodes 4-6, his later Episodes 1-3 were much better than they probably would have been, even if I didn't personally like them so much.)

Also, almost nobody reads the Silmarillion before reading The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. That's because the Silmarillion is boring, and nobody cares about it unless they get really attached to the setting due to interesting characters like Bilbo and Frodo.

Here's another example. Nobody would have watched the Underworld movies if they'd started with Underworld 3, which is the backstory movie set hundreds of years before the other two. The series would have flopped. Underworld 3 is a good movie, but it benefits from emotional investment. (On the other hand, it's important that it's a self-contained story, and you don't have to see the other two to like it.)

EDIT: One more. David Eddings wrote two 5-book series about a few years' worth of conflicts in a certain world. After that, he wrote two more books, told from the perspective of immortals who'd lived in the setting. Those books told all the backstory, nearly stretching to the creation of the world. Nobody would have ever published those books if the other 10 books hadn't sold so well, and those had been the first novels he ever submitted.

Nobody's going to want to know about your character's ancestors unless they like your character. That means introducing the character first, then introducing the ancestors. (Possibly through indirect references or later books.) You've already gotten to know your character, so you'll be interested, but remember your readers haven't. They have no way of knowing up front that there's a payoff for reading about all these other people.

If you've absolutely got to do it in chronological order, I'd suggest treating it as an anthology of several different novellas, each with different MCs. Also, I'd suggest publishing a few successful novels first so that a publisher will give this a chance. It just rarely works anymore. I'm sorry to be a downer.

But hey, if you start with the main character and use your knowledge of the backstory to write an awesome story, it could still grab all sorts of reader attention. Once you have their attention, you can tell the backstory.

It is possible to bring your protagonist in late. A good example, though a cinematic one, is the film Witness - Harrison Ford doesn't appear until twenty minutes in, but by then we've been introduced to the second and third leads (the characters played by Kelly McGillis and Lukas Haas), seen some of their world (the Amish community much of the film takes place in) and the plot has got started (Haas's character witnesses a murder).

This may be easier to do in film, as (voiceovers apart) you aren't in characters' heads but are watching them from the outside. It can be structurally awkward to bring in a new viewpoint character in later, as the reader has to do a mental gearshift - and if it's badly done, it can wreck a novel entirely.

So yes, like all rules it can be broken, but you will have to know what you're doing to break it - and you need something pretty strong to sustain a narrative without the main protagonist.

What Idiots said.
Sounds like you have 9 chapters of back story before getting to the real story.
Either cut into those chapters severely to get to the MC's story earlier in the book or cut and save them into a file called back story.

It's tricky filling in with backstory; in my current WIP I have to explain how and why demons took over the world in the 22nd century without dumping the whole story in one long backstory dialogue, so it's scattered in informative bits and pieces throughout. My peer critiquers tell me it's working. Maybe you should try the same - it involves a lot of showing and not telling. But I think it will be better for your book in the long run.

You could also write a short prologue -- just a few pages -- that explains the key points of the backstory, then jump into the story about the main character and fill in the rest of the information as time goes on. The prologue could give you the opportunity to tell a bit of the background, and if handled well, could both set up the story about your main character and make your readers interested in learning more about the backstory at the same time.

If there is a similar theme tying the backstory and the actual story together, why not tell BOTH stories in your book? Go back and forth between your MC in the present and the MC descendant. I think it could be a neat way to tell the story, though I'd imagine it would be much more difficult than simply intertwining the backstory through the actual story.

BrooklynLee said:

You could also write a short prologue -- just a few pages -- that explains the key points of the backstory, then jump into the story about the main character and fill in the rest of the information as time goes on. The prologue could give you the opportunity to tell a bit of the background, and if handled well, could both set up the story about your main character and make your readers interested in learning more about the backstory at the same time.

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No.

Don't do this.

IF (and that's a big if) an Infodump prologue doesn't turn an agent off on the spot, it's going to get cut during their suggested edits, or during the editor's edits, so save yourself the time and grief and just leave it off.

> Might I suggest taking a look at a couple of books in a similar
> vein to yours and seeing how they handled backstory?

The Gemini Contenders by Robert Ludlum.

-cb

NB: I never finished the book. The MC-switch-a-roo pissed me off. I bought the book in a flea market for 0.25 so it's not like I've lost a lot of money on it. Just time I would had rather spent on Stieg Larsson's Millenium series instead.

VileZero said:

If there is a similar theme tying the backstory and the actual story together, why not tell BOTH stories in your book? Go back and forth between your MC in the present and the MC descendant. I think it could be a neat way to tell the story, though I'd imagine it would be much more difficult than simply intertwining the backstory through the actual story.

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Agreed. If you pull it off, it can work really well.

If you can't introduce the protagonist until Chapter 10, is he really the protagonist? I would say that you should choose which of the ancestors could be a protagonist and limit your MC's role to a very basic one.

One novel I read had 3 linked stories told in 3 separate parts. The first was a war photographer in Berlin; the second was a girl and her family running away from bombing in Berlin; and the third was a modern man struggling to come to terms with his grandfather's war crimes.

This only really works if you have a strong theme and setting.

I agree. I would either put the background in prologue (the murder scene, mind you, not the whole tale) or flashback chapters through out the book.

Or how about make the MC go through and find out the truth? Meaning, readers read and find out the background of his family history ALONG WITH the MC.

When I read your premises, I thought... it would be neat if the MC investigates. And in a way, that investigation could be what's driving the whole story...in which case, you bring the MC at the front and center (ch. 1)... and reveal that hidden skeleton a bone at a time...not in a flashback (though it can be) but through hints in a hurried letter long lost then found, and perhaps witnesses that were unaccounted for (say, a small peasant girl who witnessed someone crossing the bridge--she lives under it--on the night when important people died...but she was so insignificant that uncle 1 never found out...whom MC meets in present times as someone's mother or queen of beggars or etc)

As a reader, I think it's important to feel emotional toward the MC, and usually readers associate the most strongly with the very first character they read about.

In that sense, introducing your MC late might dilute his or her strength...unless you are feeling that gap with secondary or other MCs who are as important. In which case I think you can 'hint' the existence of your main MC.

Not sure why but I recall 'The Glass Menagerie' by Tennessee Williams. In that play, there is a portrait of MC's father. He never physically appears and the portrait is only hinted now and then...and yet the father's presence dominates. In fact, by the end of the story, you realize all the characters are STILL reacting to the existence of the father...which I thought pretty neat.

Anyway, I'll stop my rambling now.

What everyone else said...

Write your book all the way through then cut the first 9 chapters all the way up to where the first time we meet the main character. Then creatively input what we need to know about the character as we need it. You may find that half of the backstory you created is unnecessary.
Don't misunderstand...you need a backstory just as a writer's tool if nothing else. But there are better ways to do it.

See the Star Wars example above.

Tell the most interesting part of your story first to grab the reader. All the rest is just gravy.

Think about how you would feel about that as the reader. As the reader I wouldn't like that. Is there a way to weave the back story into the story?

I know there are a lot of strong opinions about prologues, but I disagree that they are the kiss of death. My current novel has one. In my first conversation with my agent, I asked her about it (since I know some people dislike them) and she said she loved it and wouldn't dream of cutting it. If there's information you really need to get in before you can start with your protagonist, it's one way of handling that.