Welcome back; in this part, we look at how to bring your backstory into your main story.

Infusing Your Backstory into Your Novel

You may have some of the richest characters in your novel, but that doesn’t mean your readers need to know every single piece of information. You already know that only about 20% of the research you do winds up in your story; in the same way, you should only have a small amount of backstory in the final draft.

Action is what drives your story. You know what your character’s bigger picture is, and it's down to you to reveal it by way of their actions, and their reactions as the story moves on. What it's not about is providing your readers with a novel’s worth of information about something that happened in the past.

Your readers will learn about those characters in the same way that we all learn about others in our real lives – through their actions.

If you give too much information about the past, your story will slow down, and your readers will get bored. Use that backstory to give color to each character’s present actions. The only way to ensure your readers stay engaged is by keeping the story moving forward, by moving the story through the behavior and actions of the characters; you don’t do it by including long, rambling passages about something that happened before the story began.

Think about real life. Think about someone you know who had something happen to them in the past. You don’t learn about that event in one go; you learn about it in bits and pieces, through actions and hints your friend might have dropped. Your protagonist could do the same, just to bring that backstory into the main story.

Flashbacks are one literary device a writer can use to get a backstory across. Don’t do it. Use small references where you can to drop bits of the relevant history, rather than using large flashbacks. Use small ones if you need to use them.

The same goes for dreams. Try to make your story run without the need for them. Too many authors use things like dreams and flashbacks, and, to be fair, they are old hat now. If you must add a dream, make sure it is relevant to your current story, not the backstory.

When you meet someone in real life, you don’t drop your entire life history on them, ugly bits and all. At least, not straight away, and the same applies to the backstory in your novel. Introduce the odd detail about a previous event, make a small reference in dialog or a kind of internal memory.

Keep one thing in mind – relevance. If your story can work without it, don’t use it.

You Need it More Than Your Readers Do

The backstory is a great way of helping you understand your own characters. It can add dimension and depth to your characters and it can help you move the story forward. The important thing to remember is not to let the backstory overshadow your main story.