The Importance of Backstory: A Guest Post by Lynn Slaughter
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Backstory’s Bad Rap: A Guest Post by Lynn Slaughter
In grad school, we students were repeatedly warned about the dangers of backstory. “This isn’t the nineteenth century anymore,” one professor intoned. “You can’t spend pages on backstory before your story gets started. Instead, begin in the midst of the action.”
Closely related was the admonition to avoid “info dumps” in which we awkwardly interrupt the story to tell our readers what we want them to know about our characters’ pasts or their areas of expertise.
Then there’s the writerly sin of inserting information into dialogue: “Answer the door, Richard! It’s Dr. Hughes, your physician who treated your cancer.” Unless Richard suffers from an acute case of memory loss, we can assume he knows that Dr. Hughes treated his cancer.
Here’s the thing. All of this is solid advice. But when it comes to developing our stories, creating detailed backstories for our characters pays huge dividends. In fact, as Elizabeth George says in her craft books, Write Away and Mastering the Process, understanding characters’ backgrounds and personalities provides an abundance of ideas for plot complications and conflicts.
I’ve found George’s approach enormously helpful to my own work. For example, for my YA novel, Deadly Setup, I got an idea loosely inspired by a long-ago case of actress Lana Turner’s daughter shooting her mother’s boyfriend. What if my teenage protagonist was accused of murdering her mother’s fiancé?
Before plunging into plotting my tale, I started with backstory. Sam, my seventeen-year-old protagonist, had been very close to her father, who died from brain cancer when she was twelve. Shortly before his death, he told her: “Take care of your mother for me.”
Sam has taken her father’s dying wish seriously. But her mother, an impulsive, romance-writing heiress, has never been interested in much of anything her daughter says. In fact, she’s not going to win any awards for her parenting skills. When her husband was alive, she left parenting their daughter to him. Having been ignored and shuttled off to boarding schools and summer camps while her parents partied on the Riviera, Sam’s mother has learned to be charming and mostly hide the narcissism that grew out of her painful and lonely childhood.
From exploring the backgrounds of Sam and her mom, plot ideas pop out as I play the “What if?” game. What if Sam’s mom can’t get enough of the praise and adoring attention heaped on her by her fiancé? Her insatiable need for validation leads her to ignore obvious warning signs. His last wealthy wife died under suspicious circumstances. She knows his past includes a gambling addiction. But so what? She’s convinced he’s her “happily ever after,” the wrongly accused, roguish “bad boy” who’s morphed into her hero—just like in the romance novels she writes.
What if Sam is suspicious of this man and concerned that her mother is jumping into marriage with someone who might be after her trust fund? And what if she learns about his background and is horrified?
Her mom isn’t about to listen to her daughter’s concerns. In fact, she’ll resent Sam’s raining on her love parade. It occurs to me that she’ll threaten to send Sam away to boarding school if she doesn’t get “on board” with her marital plans.
Even before the shooting death of her mother’s fiancé, Sam’s distress is understandable. Her dad gave her a hopeless task. There’s no way she can “take care” of her mother.
And yet, like all kids with difficult parents, Sam loves her mother—which will make it incredibly painful when her mom refuses to believe her assertions of innocence and views her daughter’s predicament as a way to advance her own writing career.
My tale becomes richer and deeper because it becomes not just about whether Sam can manage to prove her innocence, but about her longing for a family. Even as Sam fights for her life, she craves the caring and acceptance her mother is simply unwilling and unable to provide.
For my novel, Leisha’s Song, my initial premise was that a teenager of color on scholarship at a prestigious boarding school has a beloved teacher who goes missing. As I worked on Leisha’s backstory, I decided that that she’d been raised by her grandfather and identified as academically gifted at a young age. Her mother had run away to sing at a nightclub, and Leisha’s grandfather blamed his daughter’s subsequent drug addiction and death on a white boyfriend. Leisha has inherited her mother’s beautiful singing voice, but her grandfather has an entire script mapped out for her life that doesn’t include singing. He wants Leisha to become a physician and to stay away from white boys who might lead her astray.
Leisha is a pleaser, and she adores her grandfather. But what if she falls in love with classical singing and feels strongly attracted to Cody, a sensitive cellist from a wealthy white family?
Right away, I get ideas about why Leisha is so conflicted about allowing herself to act on her feelings about Cody and her desire to pursue music rather than medicine. The story becomes more than a “What happened to Leisha’s missing music teacher?” It’s also a coming-of-age story about Leisha’s growing realization that she must learn to stand up for herself and live her own life.
Of course, readers wouldn’t keep reading if I dumped all this information about Sam’s history or Leisha’s background before I began my stories. Instead, I sprinkle information in. A natural way is for story events to spur character’s revelatory thoughts and behaviors. For example, when Sam’s mother announces her intention to marry a guy Sam distrusts, Sam retreats to her bedroom and immediately picks up a picture of her dad: “His sandy hair was falling into his eyes. He was laughing, and I was perched high on his shoulders, holding an ice cream cone, which had begun dripping down on his head. ‘It’s raining chocolate,’ he’d said, ‘and I forgot my umbrella.’”
Right away, we get a sense that her late father had been a lovely parent, and that she misses him terribly.
In sum, I advise being skeptical of folks who give backstory a bad rap. Paying close attention to backstory can lead you into the meat of your tale where you can sprinkle in details as needed.
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The Importance of Backstory: A Guest Post by Lynn Slaughter
About DEADLY SETUP:
Seventeen-year-old Sam’s life implodes when her mom’s fiancé turns up dead, and a mountain of circumstantial evidence points to Sam as the killer. On trial for murder, she fights to prove her innocence with the help of her boyfriend’s dad, an ex-homicide cop.
Bio:
After a long dance career, Lynn earned her MFA in Writing from Seton Hill University. She is the author of Deadly Setup, a Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards silver medalist; Leisha’s Song, an Agatha nominee, Silver Falchion Award winner, Imadjinn Award winner, and Moonbeam bronze medalist; While I Danced, an EPIC finalist; and It Should Have Been You, a Silver Falchion finalist. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky where she’s the outgoing president of Derby Rotten Scoundrels, the Ohio River Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime.
Lynn loves to hear from readers and can be reached through her website, www.lynnslaughter.com
The Importance of Backstory: A Guest Post by Lynn Slaughter
