You need backstory to help readers understand your character’s motivations and choices.
But the moment you pause your story to explain what happened years ago, readers start skimming.
In this episode, you’ll learn three specific strategies for writing backstory without killing your story’s momentum, including the exact moment backstory should arrive, how to anchor memories in present action, and why the best backstory complicates what’s happening now instead of just explaining what happened then.
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Episode at a glance:
[03:05] The Purpose of Backstory
Good backstory does three things simultaneously.
1. It deepens the present moment, making what’s happening right now more urgent and emotionally resonant.
2. It creates or complicates the stakes.
3. It reveals character through specificity, helping us understand how your character came into the story wanting what he or she wants.
When backstory does all three, it doesn’t feel like a detour. It feels like a deepening of the story you’re already telling
[03:37] Timing
When you reveal backstory matters as much as how you reveal it. Front-loaded backstory can take us on a detour before we’ve developed an appetite for the current situation or come to care for your character. So what works? You want to deliver backstory when the present urgently needs it.
[07:16] Filter Backstory Through Present Action
This strategy is about how you deliver backstory. You always want to filter it through something happening in the present. So the principle is that backstory should be triggered by current events, not narrated as a separate information dump.
Memories should arise because something in the present calls them up. It could be a smell, it could be a sound, it could be a gesture, it could be a choice that echoes – a choice they made before. What doesn’t work is stopping time for exposition.
[10:38] Let Backstory Create New Problems
What the character remembers should complicate what they’re doing now, not just provide historical context.
This is the difference between backstory that feels essential and backstory that just feels like filler.
The most powerful backstory doesn’t just tell us what happened, it shows us how what happened is still happening, how the past is an active force in the present story.
Links Mentioned In This Episode:
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
You Are Here by David Nicholls
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
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