I started reading a couple of novels recently that made me realize I’m developing a new pet peeve: the tragic back story infodump in the first few chapters. One of the books had about three different tragic back story infodumps (for the same character no less!) in the first thirty pages. Enough already! I want story! Stop trying to explain to me why the main character is so sad and messed up and move this puppy along, already!
Let me unpack this, because it bothers me on a couple of levels.
First, the tragic back story is often a cliché. The “anti-hero” has always been popular. The badass, kick ass hero/heroine who walks that thin line of morality and often slips over, who makes the hard choices and does the hard deeds that the rest of society is too soft for. Now, in order to make this character more sympathetic, writers will often explain how the character got that way: the tragic past. Her parents died (or were hideously murdered) when she was a child. She was abused in an orphanage. She was horribly and repeatedly abused by someone she trusted, or by a pack of ravening strangers. Her entire village was wiped out in a hideous war in a distant country. Or all of the above, to make her really hard core. The back story is offered as the reason for why she’s so mean, why she can’t trust anyone, why she works so hard to be so badass. Why she’s so conflicted, because conflict is good, right?
I think this is a crutch. Because in many of the stories I read where this happens, this background is never explored, never portrayed, never really dealt with. It’s pinned to the wall as an explanation. As wallpaper. And I think it removes a potential layer of conflict from the story. Because with the tragic back story, the character never has to actually face all the badass morally questionable things she does because it’s all explained away by the back story. The tragic back story feels more like a line lifted from the character sketch rather than an integrated part of the story. At best it’s cliché and derivative. At worst it’s exploitative — if an author is going to include real-world tragedies as part of a character’s background, I’d like to see them treated realistically and with some amount of significance rather than as a device.
Second: the info dump. Especially when the tragic back story is dumped on me in the first couple of chapters, before I’ve even had time to get attached to the main character. It’s like I’m supposed to automatically feel sorry for her and be sympathetic toward her because of this tragic thing that happened. When in reality I don’t actually care at this point in the story. Not to mention the first few chapters are when I’m supposed to be getting hooked, getting sucked into a new world. If the story comes to a screeching halt so I can learn about something that happened a long time ago and may not even be relevant? Not so cool.
This drives me bonkers. There are so many better ways of illuminating the character than simply telling me everything about her right from the start. See, it’s that show don’t tell thing again. Why not make her tragic back story a mystery than can be revealed later? Why not make me ask, “Gosh, why is she like this?” and then make me keep reading for the answer? Instead of telling me the story in a big chunk, why not show me how other people relate to her because of this back story? Why not show me in snippets of thought how her tragic past is with her throughout her day? Why not push someone from her tragic past onstage, and make the character deal with all this trauma that she thought she’d successfully overcome?
Or maybe, and here’s a shocker, maybe the character is just like that. Maybe she’s just a badass. Maybe she was good at martial arts and decided she kinda likes beating people up, and she tries to make sure she only beats up bad guys. Maybe the trauma that’s going to make her question all of this is in her future instead of in her past. Maybe the story isn’t how she got this way, but how it’s all going to bite her in the ass in the future.
Now, I’m sure we can all come up with examples of tragic backstory infodumps in the first few chapters that work really well. Of course we can — it’s because it works really well sometimes that we see it at all. It’s a tool in the tool box. A tool helps you build a better story. But a crutch, well. . .a crutch is something else.
So, is it just me? Anyone have any other infodump pet peeves?
