Backstory-how and when to include it

You may be suffering from the "But-the-reader-needs-to-know-this" syndrome. Beware of it. Readers are better at inference than you may give them credit for. Try to put background information in only WHEN it is relevant to the narrative. Knowing when that is is a big part of narrative craft, and there is no cookbook recipe for it. Everything depends on the individual story itself.

caw

Some Lonely Scorpio said:

Argh. This is something I'm really struggling with in the first draft of my novel. Infodumping/excessive exposition is something I hate, yet I have a bad habit of falling victim to it myself. :/ Don't get me wrong, I know not every single character NEEDS a backstory and can be understood perfectly well without one. But in the case of my two main characters, I feel their backstories are important and explain how they became who they are now. That's why I desperately want to include them. I know, per conventional wisdom, a character's backstory should be sprinkled gradually throughout the novel. And yet for some reason I find myself struggling to do this. I want to make sure all the important parts of their stories are told, but I also don't want to bring the story to a halt to dump exposition on the reader.

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Is the bolded important?

Is what they are now important? Does that information move the plot forward? Can the reader grasp the character without it?

If it's needed, can it be conveyed in a scene that's not conveying it?

In general, I like to drip feed readers with my characters' backstories, but sometimes a hefty chunk of information is the best way to go.

Trouble is, it's hard to assess which is required during the writing process, so my mantra is, 'when in doubt, write it all out!' When the draft is finished and I have better view of the entire work, these issues become clear and are usually relatively easy to fix during editing.

I tend to go for the longer passages when I need to give readers a break after a fast-paced section, but it's ultimately a case of what works, works!

Everything is better in the imagination. A trick explained is no longer magic.

A character's backstory should influence their behaviour and can be intimated through their reactions and dialogue. It rarely if ever needs explicit exposition.

I've never had a problem with info dump, until possibly now. The lead character of the second thread is introduced (as a terrorist preparing something nasty) but immediately afterwards there is a longish piece of backstory designed to make the reader sympathetic to his situation. I do want the reader to know he's a terrorist straight away and I also want the reader to like him (important for general story reasons). Can see no other way around this, although every time I read over it I slightly agonise over the info dump.

screenscope said:

In general, I like to drip feed readers with my characters' backstories, but sometimes a hefty chunk of information is the best way to go.
Trouble is, it's hard to assess which is required during the writing process, so my mantra is, 'when in doubt, write it all out!' When the draft is finished and I have better view of the entire work, these issues become clear and are usually relatively easy to fix during editing.

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I actually agree with this. It can help to pop it into the first draft. These ugly chunks of backstory can easily be relegated to the trash heap when you do the edit. They can also function as part of the character study - as the author, you'll probably always know more about your characters than the reader. Leaving out bits of important backstory can also increase character's ambiguity in motivation, which is also a rather interesting thing to write with. Good luck!

A lot depends how the backstory is introduced. Is it reluctantly extracted by another character on a need-to-know basis in bits (as and when the 'bit' is relevant to the unfolding events? It's not an info dump if another character needs to know it.

A character's actions and re-actions and dialogue can convey a considerable amount of information about their character. That will quickly determine whether a reader likes him or not - not his backstory. Backstory may convey understanding but not necessarily likeability.

Character backstory AND world building are traps where I can easily fall into info-dumping. My current way of handling this is in drips and dribbles as is necessary to the story. As far as I know there is not nice and neat template to follow. I wish it were easy, but for me, it isn't.

Some Lonely Scorpio said:

But in the case of my two main characters, I feel their backstories are important and explain how they became who they are now.

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Why not just show it? Write a scene that shows their personality traits. Invent some event that would be innocuous to anyone but them.

Examples:

A man goes to a jewelry story to choose a wedding ring but his mind instead focuses on the alarm system and the clerk's mundane routine, then shrugs it off because now is not the time to screw up. Again.

A woman boards a bus, takes a seat at the very back where she can see everyone. She's well groomed and fit. She pops up her laptop to do some work on her way. Twenty minutes later she notices someone left a copy of Stars & Stripes behind. Old habits kick in. She picks it up and reads the necrology section, matching names with ten-year-old memories. She winces when her eyes cross the very last name.

What does that tell you about those two characters?

Innocuous scenes to anyone, but those two.

-cb

It's as others have already said. Figure out what needs showing or explaining to hint at backstory, and when and why it needs to be there. Will it remind the reader of a detail? Would it give understanding at a specific point for a reason of letting the reader and character(s) in on information? So many of us struggle with this part of writing, myself included. I have backstory I've developed for a Tomb Raider fanfiction that's 42 pages in. It branches off of lore and mythology from the 2015 game Rise of the Tomb Raider. I have yet to implement it in full and figure out where to sprinkle it and what to sprinkle. Where you need to drop details for something or someone should help the reader better make sense out of a situation. And as others above say, you don't even have to make it an info dump; you can say a small amount of details that can form backstory to elaborate on later. It's quite fascinating how you can mold backstory and info dumps into a story, and how it affects things

It's really hard to say how much is too much in one go, or how lightly you can get away with sprinkling details before it becomes too vague and obscure to be meaningful. I like to read stories that drop teasing crumbs of backstory here and there to hint at the story substructure, without interrupting the main narrative. Not only does it avoid pacing issues, but it also builds suspense, making your reader increasingly more intrigued to find out what happened in the main character's past to make them the type of character behind the action of the main plot. Sometimes that suspense can lead to a reveal that is almost a climax in its own right.

I love it when backstory reveals enhance the climax or denouement of a plot

I think everyone struggles with this. But I also think that if YOU know each character's backstory, then the part of it that the reader needs to know will flow naturally into the story. Have you thought about writing the novel without any backstory at all, and then going back and filling in any parts that actually need it?

I find sometimes if you let the character remember the past, that can be some backstory. For example if there's something that triggers a memory.
Dialogue can do this too: have one character explain something to another. If the character being instructed should already know this, have them roll their eyes and say that they already know this. Now the reader does too.
It is tricky sometimes to get backstory across.
Also the suggestion of writing a scene to show it is a good one, but sometimes awkward if you don't want to get bogged down in another scene that might not fit in the narrative and you just want to get on with telling what happens to the character from the present time onwards.