I got your answer for you right up front. What’s the best way to show
backstory? Don’t.
I’m not saying don’t have
backstory. Have the heck out of it. Write up a 50,000 word manual meticulously
detailing the history of your characters, your world, your interrelationships.
Then take that manual and put it on the shelf. Let it seep into your
subconscious but keep it as far away from your novel as possible. The only
thing less interesting than expository is backstory expository. What’s
interesting, what’s real, what’s urgent is the present: the now of your eye
touching the word on the page and the moment coming alive for the reader between
the characters and their story.
Say you’ve given some character a trait where she’s always flipping a
coin. It’s a nervous habit. She flips it, she catches it, she doesn’t care if
it’s heads or tails, she barely even knows she’s doing it. But you know. You know that twenty years ago
after the house burned down and they were all outside watching the fire trucks
your heroine saw her dad holding onto the one thing he saved other than his
family—that near mint-condition Japanese yen his grandfather had brought back after the war. And something about
the way it caught the firelight as every possession they owned went to hell,
and the way her father comforted her with one hand and flipped that yen with
the other while they waited for what seemed like ever under the orange midnight
stars, all this still turns over and over like a crank in her subconscious so
when she’s nervous or anxious or bored or turned on or ready to kill something,
out comes the nearest coin. The reader doesn’t have to know any of this. But any
time you write her into a scene that history will be there fidgeting with the
change in her pocket, and your reader will feel it.
Everything your character does and everything he or she has become is a
result of what came before. Your characters are the final draft of their
backstories. If you’ve developed them with care behind the scenes and written
them as fully-realized products of their pasts, then backstory will seep into
your scenes in subtle and surprising ways. No one will be able to point to any
specific place in your book and say, “there’s backstory”, but it will be there
haunting your scenes the same way memories haunt our day-to-day. Your readers
will tune into it and your characters will be rich
and complex and painfully unaware of all the forces that motivate them—just
like the rest of us.
Josh Wagner is the author of "Smashing Laptops" and "Deadwind Sea".
He is also the creator of the Graphic Novel "Fiction Clemens" and
several short stories in prose and comic form. His work in theater
includes two full-length plays, several one-acts, and as producer and
lead writer of the devised spectacle, "This Illusionment", currently in
development. Wagner is an avid traveler and waster of time. He's still
not sure what hit him.
Website: http://www.joshwagner.org
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