Are you worried that there’s too much backstory and flashback in your novel as you write your first draft?

Writerly Dilemmas

Handling Backstory as you write a first draft

A great question to be asking yourself.

First and foremost, let me reassure you that in a first draft, you're often finding out what happened before to shape what's happening now.

The first draft is an excellent time to give yourself some leeway to fully imagine those scenes from the past, even if in the second draft, you integrate them differently.

Secondly, temporality in novels is a critical and challenging part of writing a novel.

Handling backstories so that readers can make sense of the meaning of the present without halting the pace of the story is one of the biggest challenges of the first act of a novel. It's something everyone comes up against.

We have so many ways to handle illuminating the relationship between different times as novelists.

You can have a character telling an entire story from a position of hindsight or as it unfolds.

You can have dual timelines that ultimately intersect in some way in the last act.

There are many ways to weave memories into the forward motion of the plot without a complete flashback.

In a final draft of a novel, full-on flashbacks are justified when they are a natural way of showing a character making meaning in the present. The flashback tells us why what's happening now matters.

So, this is a sophisticated problem, and it’s also 'the thing'. Figuring out how to use the past to enrich the present with meaning is a massive part of learning to write a novel. It’s great that you’re thinking about it, but don’t let that become a voice of severe criticism that hinders you as you discover the story. As Terry Pratchett is said to have said, “the first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”

Further Reading

For further reading, Lisa Cron is great on the use of backstory. I recommend my authors consult Wired for Story, pages 209-214 and Story Genius pages 30-32 (which has the subheading "You can't have an after without a before".)

Here is a remarkably insightful quote from Story Genius:

"Here's the real truth: your novel itself begins 'in the middle of the thing' -the 'thing' being the story. What starts on page one is the second half of the story, when the plot kicks in. The second half -the novel itself -will contain large parts of the first in the form of flashbacks, dialogue, and snippets of memory as the protagonist struggles to make sense of what's happening, and what to do about it.[...] But the simple fact remains that without the first half of the story, there can be no second half. The first half establishes where the problem came from and who the protagonist is to begin with, so that the plot you then create can force her to struggle with that problem and, in the process, change."

I hope that gives you some food for thought and reassurance that this juggling of flashbacks as your write the first draft is all part of the process.

Work with Me

If you’d like this kind of one-to-one reassurance and craft insight as your write your first draft or revise a finished novel, I’d love to hear from you. Check out how we might work together here.