This week editor Linda Clare tackles Fatal Flaw #4—Too Much Backstory. In this month’s posts, we’re looking at the pitfalls of dumping backstory into our scenes and showing ways writers might creatively introduce important information pertaining to a character’s past or necessary to understand the world of the story.
When you use backstory in fiction to deepen characterization or add information about the story, it’s easy for readers to become confused. If readers enter a flashback or backstory and wonder when or where they are supposed to be, confusion often turns to frustration and they stop reading. That’s why it’s so important to craft backstory in an effective way.
Backstory is any narrative passage or scene which occurred in time before the “present-time story.” Your POV character is in a scene when her “mind reels back.” How can readers keep a firm understanding of when and where, in time and space, the story takes them? Continue Reading…
