5 Tips on Telling Backstory without Interrupting the Flow
A long time ago, in a post far away, Sara, a reader of this blog (at least back then she was; I don’t know whether she still is), asked in a post comment:
“Do you have any ideas about how to incorporate backstory and the character’s thoughts into the story without interrupting the flow?”
Accomplishing this is actually much like incorporating any other description into the story, and there are several things you can do.
-
Forget about it. That is, forget about focusing on the backstory, or internal monologue, or description of the surrounding trees, or whatever has you in a bind. Rather, make the backstory part of your character, and then just tell your character’s story. Chances are, the backstory will come out by itself, at least those parts that are important.
-
Make it relevant. And by relevant, I mean “relevant to the conflict.” The story conflict is the engine that keeps the story moving forward, so whatever part of the character’s backstory (or thoughts or description) affects the conflict, that part will actually keep the story moving forward. A favorite example of this is the first chapter of Holly Lisle’s Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood, as she describes the setting Cadence Drake finds herself in.
-
Make it part of the conversation. So the realizations, reflections, and thoughts of your viewpoint character actually serve as one side of a conversation. This is what I did with my character Clydene’s thoughts during an emotionally intense conversation scene. (Note that this scene actually has two conversations going on simultaneously: that between Ted and Michael, and that between Ted-Michael and Clydene’s inner monologue.) Obviously, the other person in the conversation won’t be able to hear those thoughts (at least not normally), but you can still sometimes make it a conversation. In fact, the other “person” doesn’t even need to be a person at all. Imagine a character responding to her lap cat, or to the beauty of the scene around her.
-
Fatal error: Call to undefined function tweetmeme() in /home/timk/bethestory.com/wp-content/plugins/exec-php/includes/runtime.php(42) : eval()'d code on line 3