Last Monday on Twitter, I had a short conversation with Jim Duncan.
Me: Trying to decide if WAY complicated backstory / history is going to be worth all this frackin’ WORK, argh!
Jim: I’ve had the issue with my epic fantasy. Soooo much material that could be fleshed out, but then how much do you really need?
Me: *I* need to know it all, but how much goes into the synopsis for my agent, and how much into the book for the reader?
Jim: Good question. My fantasy story is very suspense/thriller oriented, and goes light on the immersion, so worried it’ll throw folk
Jim: as a reader, I only need to know enough to explain things in the presented story. Do I want more? probably. Put it on ur site.
So here I am, putting it on my site. *g* How much backstory / history does an author need to know before writing, while writing, and how much of that needs to go into the book for the reader?
Simple answer? That depends. And it actually depends on two things: the book and the author.
It’s easiest to give examples from my own experience, so here are three. The first is the project I mentioned in this post. The second is a project my agent will be shopping as soon as I get it tweaked and back to her! The third is the project I will tackle next in my never to be thwarted efforts to be published well!
The “Letting Go” project is the most traditional in its use of backstory. It’s set in the present day. Circumstances bring a 17 year old “incident” into the lives of my story people. Each member of the affected family has to deal with what is essentially a betrayal by someone dear to all of them. Each has to rethink how much they allowed this person to impact their lives. Do they continue on as they have been? Or does this new information negate everything they thought they knew about themselves?
For this story, all I need to know of the past is what inspired this incident, what about the characters involved evoked their flaws, their weaknesses, that they allowed this to happen? Would they have considered the affect on their families should the betrayal be discovered? Most of that is for me only. The two main characters involved died before the story opened. They won’t be on the page to show any of this, but as the author, *I* need to know in order to make their motivations believable.
The third example (yes, I’m skipping around) has a backstory element that occurred in 1950 but drove everything one of the characters would do for the rest of her life. 
She’s already passed on when the story opens, but the mystery surrounding her life is a a major part of the plot. The husband and I were dicussing this idea, as we do with most of my books (he is the best story sounding board ever, no matter how often we fight our way through), and he disagreed with a direction I’d gone. He said it wasn’t in character. He was wrong. *g*
The character was born in 1922. She grew up during the depression, saw WWII, Vietnam, the sexual revolution, the women’s rights movement. She started her family in the 1940s, and would have been a traditional homemaker, not a woman of the world. The backstory had everything to do with who she was, the choices she made through the years before her death at 86. To portray her honestly, *I* had to know what she experienced, how societal changes shaped her.
Not all of those things will make it onto the page as the story takes place in the present day, but as the author, *I* must be aware of them. This character would not ring true if I used my own world view to create her. I wasn’t born in 1922. I haven’t lived through the things she did, so it’s important I take all of those influences into consideration when writing her.
However, I don’t need to give readers a history lesson, explaining the depression or women’s rights. Those things are part of our culture. We’ve studied them in school and know (or once did) names and dates and other facts. They’re in our collective subconsious. They don’t need to be infodumped into the book.
Example #2 (yeah, yeah) is a bit different. I’ve gone back to 1540s Chile and the invasion of the Spanish for my backstory. I have learned more about the Mapuche people of Chile and Argentina than anyone will ever need to know. 
(The colors of their flag each have meaning: red – blood drained in the wars: green – nature, earth: blue – sky, hope: yellow – sun, light: white – the Mountains of the Mapuche Land. See? No one needs to know that!) What all this research has done, however, is given me a firm foundation on which to build.
The Mapuche mythology will be born out in my characters, but readers won’t necessarily know that. Or what bits I reveal will be enough to answer their questions about why something has happened, or what a certain tradition means. Much more of this project’s backstory will be given to the reader than the backstory in the other two proposals. Or at least given directly as opposed to just being used to shape the characters. Wherein readers don’t need a refresher course on WWII or Vietnam, most won’t know that the Mapuche vice toqui Lautaro, once a captive of the Spaniards, used their own weapons against them and led his indigenous army to victory. If I find when writing that I need to give that bit of history to readers, I’ll need to find a non-Dan-Brown-infodump way to do so. Honestly, I won’t know that until I get there. But when I do get there, it’ll come naturally because it’s something I’ve already learned and used in my world-building.
Now, I know that a lot of authors only do research as they need it. They don’t pour over Websites about the Mapuche people unless they find a place in their stories where the information needs to be inserted for the reader to understand the plot or the character development. I’m of the other school. I need to know as much as possible before writing because I won’t know I need something if it’s not there waiting for me to use. The devil is in the details. Make sense? And, yes, when I put together a proposal, I do include all of my research with my pitch package so my agent will see that I know what I’m doing. *g*
What about the rest of you? Do you create monstrous backstories before you settle in to work, or do you put your characters’ histories together as you write? Do you find all or little of what you develop making its way into your story?
detail of a life history photo courtesy of *madalena-pestana* – half of me
Comment
Guilty of the monster backstory here. I’m not a make-it-up-as-I-go type of person, and the more I know about a character, place, time period or event before I write, the more comfortable I feel on the page. Over time I’ve learned to condense my notes quite a bit, though, and distill huge hunks of info into a kind of writing shorthand/prompt form that probably makes sense to no one but me.
I’d say about a quarter of what I develop makes it into the story as something I show the reader. The other seventy-five percent are the bricks and mortar of the story, but aren’t in a form that most readers can point to and say “Aha!” Occasionally some very intuitive readers or readers who are writers recognize a foundation or a deliberate construct here and there, but that’s pretty rare. It’s not meant to be seen, in the same way studs in a wall or struts in a roof aren’t evident unless you go looking for them (and know where to look.)
Excellent post.
Comment
I do a lot of research. I like it. *g* But then I try not to bog the story down in it. Instead, it helps me decide logically what could or couldn’t happen, or at least where there’s enough flexibility that my choice *could* have happened. Without the upfront research, I don’t know enough to know if XYZ is logical or plausible.
Comment
Since I’m a pantser, I do my research as I go, which isn’t always conducive to writing consistently. I will research something involved with the story’s turn of events and one thing leads to another until I’ve spent the entire day following wonderful rabbit trails of more and more stuff. Yes, I am that veritable fount of useless information.
But for me, it works. And sometimes the story takes a turn that makes it much better than the direction I thought it would go.
Comment
I does really depend on the kind of story you are writing. Fantasy and sf by their nature require more of it I think, mostly because the world is different than our own, so you need to know all the ins and outs so it can be presented in a fashion to the reader that makes sense and allows them to understand what is going on and why. My epic fantasy, which is a ‘big’ story in that it involves nine characters being drawn together to fight a battle contrived by their delusional deity, involves nine different places with their own histories, cultures, etc. There are conspiracies going on all over the place to keep these nine from joining up at the end since only togehter can they be victorious. Nine characters and cultures is a holy crapload of background to deal with. On the one hand, it’s a lot of fun to build this kind of material.
I could likely write a novel around each of the nine people. So the tough decisions come in figuring exactly what the reader needs in order to make sense of where they are all coming from and what makes them tick. To make things harder on myself, the overall story arc is really suspense driven. Things are happening at breakneck speed, people being chased, people giving chase, narrow timeframes to accomplish goals, and so on.
I have read a decent amount of epic fantasy, and most of them spend a lot of time in the details, immersion in the world. Fantasy readers like this. I like it. So, my dilemma then comes in how to get a sense of immersion in a different world while characters are running around like crazy people trying to keep bad things from happening. Needless to say, I’ve had a couple readers say that things seem to be happening so fast. You have an interesting world here, and I want to see more of it. Slow things down and my planned trilogy balloons into god knows what.
I’ve tried querying it in the more traditional epic fantasy sense, but I’m beginning to think I need to try something different, since it has garnered no interest to this point.
On the other hand, my new story, is light on backstory. I’m trying it different this time, filling in stuff as I go. Very different experience compared to my normal ‘get everything setup before you write’ approach. I’m constantly pausing as I go to figure out backstory to explain motivation and current context. This story is modern day paranormal suspense, and a very different kind of animal. Going about writing like this feels awkward to this point. Not sure I like it or not, other than the fact it allows for that itch to write to be scratched far sooner than if I was plotting everything out ahead of time. Will just have to see how it pans out in the end. I’ve a feeling it means more editing in the end (blech).
Comment
I do a little of both–inevitably I hit the “need more info” wall pretty early on, especially if I”m doing world building. At the very least, I have to nail down and understand the majority of the WB to get any writing done. I guess that goes w/out saying LOL With contemporaries it’s a little easier for me to wing it.