Backstory being taught

Whatever you can do to avoid a big infodump, really. Although, as a reader I'd be less interested in her shifting in her seat and more in how it makes her feel. Or she can fill in some details from her own experience, either that she already knew or that now make sense. Keep it lively.

Having the viewpoint character passively watching history play out does not sound compelling. Rather the opposite. Would suggest you find another way to do this.

All good points:
Avoid the infodump.
Feelings trump squirming unless squirming speaks to feelings.
Passive exposition gets boring fast.

I have a very complicated backstory and I'm still just trickling it in. It makes for an unfolding mystery for the reader, hopefully.

BethS said:

Having the viewpoint character passively watching history play out does not sound compelling. Rather the opposite. Would suggest you find another way to do this.

Click to expand...

Agreed.

MaeZe said:

All good points:
I have a very complicated backstory and I'm still just trickling it in. It makes for an unfolding mystery for the reader, hopefully.

Click to expand...

As a reader, this is how I prefer getting complicated backstories. Give enough in the beginning to pique curiosity and pepper the rest in throughout the story.

jliz0808 said:

My mc is being taught about how her people were forced into hiding. How I envision it happening is she is actually visually able to see the history. It is being narrated and being played out in front of her. So my question is do I keep the action going or do I have to break it up reminding the reader that the mc is watching. With adding stuff like Liz shifted in her seat and continued watching......

I hope this doesn't confuse anyone so I would rather you ask me questions than not reply.

As always, thank you!

Click to expand...

Max Vaehling said:

Or she can fill in some details from her own experience, either that she already knew or that now make sense. Keep it lively.

Click to expand...

I can't say that I'd want to read about a character watching an educational film.
How old is this character, and why doesn't she know anything about her people's history? Was she raised in a bubble? Or in isolation?
Even if the event was long past, or too horrific to tell a child, surely she would have heard bits and pieces? Or asked why they were all in hiding? This is where Max's idea sounds about right - she's 'officially' being told things that connect the whispers and cryptic comments that she's heard for years. She's having 'A-Ha' moments right and left. Instead of giving us the transcript of the movie, show her going from screen to memory and back.

One way of getting relevant backstory out is having one character need to know it and having to tease it out of another character who - for his own reasons - is reluctant to reveal it.

Or ... take out as much backstory as you dare. Strip it right back to the point where you don't think you could cut any more.

Then take out some more backstory. Yup, I meant it. Hack it right back.

Your devoted readers will spend an eternity speculating on the internet about what it all really meant. Whole books will be written about the great mystery. You'll gain an instant and eternal reputation for being enigmatic and vaguely French in a cool black-and-white Gauloises-smoking kind of way.

Second Once!'s suggestion.

I'm a firm believer in revealing only what you need for the immediate plot. In my ongoing webcomic, I've never even revealed what the child protagonist's mother is doing for a living nor where her father is in all that because I never needed that. I have my own head canon for those details, but I might need them to be something else before I need them to be this.

Unless, of course, that revelation about the backstory is what your plot is all about. But in that case I'd doubt that showing the protagonist a movie is a very engaging way of revealing it.

Like most questions that are specific to a particular piece of writing, it's difficult to answer this without having read the piece. In my experience, when I fear that something I write feels contrived, that's usually because it is. But I have seen what are technically "infodumps" in published work that are compelling to read, so my advice would be to finish a draft and have someone read it.

I'm struggling with avoiding the info-dump-drama as well. My problem is that my MC's history is also his motivation to set out on the quest. I held off as long as I could and have tried to sprinkle lightly, but at some point I fear the reader will be wondering why he's so angry and compelled to make the choices he does, so I can't cut it all off.

Mary Love said:

I'm struggling with avoiding the info-dump-drama as well. My problem is that my MC's history is also his motivation to set out on the quest.

Click to expand...

I'm having exactly this problem with my short story. There are two big incidents in the present, but there is a major social change in the society, that's one factor in everyone's motivations, and there is major event in a childhood relationship in my adult MCs history that is the key factor that makes the 'now' events meaningful. I have yet to succeed in presenting this information in a transparent way...

It's freaking hard, but it can be done. Mix different techniques.

1) Focus on current conflict. Only give information that's needed to explain an action would surprise the reader. Give it right before or right after the action. That way it's trickled out slowly.
2) in first and 3rd person limited, how things are described are how your character directs attention and perceives things. You can hint a whole lot with this.
3) Where appropriate, allude in dialogue. Don't do "as you know..." but do mention.
4) I think you get a little leeway when showing a character mulling over a decision. Not more than a paragraph, no more info than they'd consider, but enough.
5) Important backstory is going to have a physical impact on your character, and there will be evidence of it.

I recently got feedback I did a good job on this in a scene. I have an impoverished character and I don't wanna say she's poor (like... dirt poor). So I say her teeth hurt, that she cut into grocery money to buy a suit, but it has no pockets and she has no purse. I have her carry her phone in her bra. I have her speak in an informal register. I give her struck-dog body language. I make her ignorant of basic interview conventions. I make her sure she's gonna mess up and unsure of how to avoid it. I don't have to say this is a poor person from a bad background. I never give much of her backstory. I just make sure it impacts her from her clothes to what she knows to her behavior.

BethS said:

Having the viewpoint character passively watching history play out does not sound compelling.

Click to expand...

I have to agree. Does it make sense for your character to refuse to believe? Arguing with the tutor might make it more interesting than just watching, and you can probably then pare everything down to the minimum - just get out the details you really need by making them the core of the argument.

jliz0808 said:

How I envision it happening is she is actually visually able to see the history. It is being narrated and being played out in front of her. So my question is do I keep the action going or do I have to break it up reminding the reader that the mc is watching. With adding stuff like Liz shifted in her seat and continued watching......

Click to expand...

Depends, really. Do you want that "history" to take up half the book? Or three chapters? Or fifteen pages? Or one single paragraph? There's nothing preventing you from putting your character's butt in a chair on page 1 and having her sit through the movie "Gone With The Wind", all four hours of it, and describing the movie over the next 400 pages, including your character's reactions, shifting in her seat and stuff, everything. That may work out okay.

But if you intend to describe the "history" over fifteen pages, only to send your character on a quest on page 16, that may not be okay. Because the reader would be asking, why couldn't you just tell us the short version of what was in that movie? Because all that "history" is not part of your character's story. It's not even a backstory. It's only a motivation. Your character may have needed to watch the whole movie and see every detail because they had a good reason for it - that character needed to see the events with their own eyes, they needed to make their own conclusions, build their own motivation. But your reader doesn't have those reasons. Your reader wants to read about the quest, about the character doing things.

So, first decide what your book is about, how it is going to be structured (in a way to keep the reader interested), and the rest is something you already know. Yes, do include Liz shifting in her seat.

Mary Love said:

I'm struggling with avoiding the info-dump-drama as well. My problem is that my MC's history is also his motivation to set out on the quest. I held off as long as I could and have tried to sprinkle lightly, but at some point I fear the reader will be wondering why he's so angry and compelled to make the choices he does, so I can't cut it all off.

Click to expand...

One way I handled this was to write the current story without the backstory first. You know your character's motivation, but is it needed for the steps along the way? Once you get a good way into the story (maybe you already are) it becomes more clear that you can reveal the motive but the reader doesn't need it to get started into the story.

I thought I was sprinkling, but reading back, I found a part where the lid must've fallen off the bottle. Oops. That was a dump to clog any toilet!

Flagged for later--it's nano, no time to waste!

Mrs-Q said:

It's freaking hard, but it can be done. Mix different techniques.

Click to expand...

All good techniques. Keeping in mind for later, thanks Mrs. Q!

MaeZe said:

One way I handled this was to write the current story without the backstory first. You know your character's motivation, but is it needed for the steps along the way? Once you get a good way into the story (maybe you already are) it becomes more clear that you can reveal the motive but the reader doesn't need it to get started into the story.

Click to expand...

^I am in the middle of finding this to be an extremely useful tip/trick. (I would also hazard a guess that when this struggle kind of struggle with back-story happens, it's because for some reason writing the 'now' story is kind of hard, and the back-story tends to deliver itself more readily.)

Basically, there are 2-3 components to any exposition: the information itself, the character thinking/talking about the information, and – in the case of information conveyed through dialogue rather than through the character's internal thoughts – the character recieving the information. Each character's reaction to the information – what does the conveying character think of the information, what is happening in the conveying character's immediate life that prompted him/her to think/talk about the information, how does the recieving character react to learning the information, what are they doing while the character conveys the information – is at least as important as the information itself.

John Scalzi's Old Man's War does this better than anyone else I've seen:

Chapter 2 exposits both space colonization and a recent nuclear war by having a prospective army recruit complain that his son died in the war against India, and yet India gets special treatment in sending settlers to space while Americans like him can only go as soldiers to die keeping the Indians alive. The main character points out that nuclear bombing killed millions of people in India and that large areas of the country are uninhabitable, but then the angry guy turns that around and says "Exactly! We won the war! Shouldn't that count for something?" The main character quickly decides he doesn't like this guy.

The same chapter then exposits the "science" of space elevators by having a retired engineer describe to the MC all of the reasons why the space elevator shouldn't work, then explaining that - since it works anyway - the space colonizing organization must be using advanced alien technology that they haven't shared with Earth scientists. He finally guesses that the space organization's grand gestures like the space elevator serve to protect them from interference by Earth governments: "if you can't figure out how we did this, then you're not capable of picking a fight with us."

A later chapter has a commanding officer showing the new recruits a slideshow of some of the species that they've met beyond the Solar System. The commander starts with a crustacean species that the MC reacts to as something out of a horror movie, then goes on to an anthropomorphic elk-like species that the MC associates with the wisdom of a mythical nature-spirit. The commander then explains that the crustacean species has produced some of the greatest artisans and mathematicians that humanity has ever seen, while a tribe of the elk species murdered an entire human settlement in the most sadistic ways imaginable. "If you don't get you stupid anthropocentric biases out of your head now, then you are going to get people killed."

Information is best served with attitude or in pursuit of an action, which also means with a goal because that's what a character's actions are about. The John Scalzi examples illustrate that beautifully. Of course, that doesn't necessarily help with the OP's example of a movie delivering it because movies have no goals The people making them do, though. If it's a very biased propaganda movie and the protagonist doesn't share that ideology, we have a conflict.

Max Vaehling said:

Information is best served with attitude or in pursuit of an action, which also means with a goal because that's what a character's actions are about. The John Scalzi examples illustrate that beautifully. Of course, that doesn't necessarily help with the OP's example of a movie delivering it because movies have no goals The people making them do, though. If it's a very biased propaganda movie and the protagonist doesn't share that ideology, we have a conflict.

Click to expand...

Bingo

Don't just have the movie go for paragraphs and paragraphs, interrupt the movie itself with the character's reactions to everything. Shifting in her seat helps remind the reader that this is still a scene about her, but more importantly, so would having her think in real-time about how the movie is impacting her as she's watching it.

jliz0808 said:

My mc is being taught about how her people were forced into hiding. How I envision it happening is she is actually visually able to see the history. It is being narrated and being played out in front of her. So my question is do I keep the action going or do I have to break it up reminding the reader that the mc is watching. With adding stuff like Liz shifted in her seat and continued watching......

I hope this doesn't confuse anyone so I would rather you ask me questions than not reply.

As always, thank you!

Click to expand...

Condense it to the essential points and weave it into the dialogue maybe? A little here and a little there. The reader usually needs to know less backstory to enjoy the story than the author thinks.

Essential points. No big infodumps.

jliz0808 said:

My mc is being taught about how her people were forced into hiding. How I envision it happening is she is actually visually able to see the history. It is being narrated and being played out in front of her. So my question is do I keep the action going or do I have to break it up reminding the reader that the mc is watching. With adding stuff like Liz shifted in her seat and continued watching......

I hope this doesn't confuse anyone so I would rather you ask me questions than not reply.

As always, thank you!

Click to expand...

I think it would be more interesting to show the readers what the MC is feeling while she's watching and hearing about her history. What does she think about whatever she's seeing and hearing? Does she believe the story or does she have doubts? Why? Etc. I do have to wonder why she doesn't know about this if it's her 'people' we're talking about? Hope this helps

Bufty said:

One way of getting relevant backstory out is having one character need to know it and having to tease it out of another character who - for his own reasons - is reluctant to reveal it.

Click to expand...

In other words, turn it into a conflict instead of backstory.

If you do want to show the history lesson, then I would suggest not reminding the reader the protagonist is watching it. Dramatize the action like a scene to mimic the protagonist being swept up in the action. That's how a lot of books handle scenes like that -- they turn it into a flashback.