Backstory

Backstory is everything that happened before the book’s true beginning. Writers love it because they know it, and because it feels like work. Readers experience a long opening flashback as a delay. They came for the trouble that is happening now.

Start at the interesting moment and smuggle the past. A fact should arrive because someone needs it: to win an argument, to hide a shame, to explain a flinch the other character has just noticed. If you can move a paragraph of history to later in the book, do. The later reader is a friend. The reader on page two is still deciding.

A flashback is justified when the present scene cannot be understood without leaving it, and when the past scene is itself dramatic — a want, a conflict, a consequence — rather than a tour of context. Mark the door in and the door out clearly. A reader who is lost in time will blame you, correctly.

Keep a separate note of the biography if you must. It does not all have to be in the novel. You need to know it so the character behaves consistently. The reader needs only the scars that show.