In a recent interview with Hank Phillippi Ryan, best selling author, I heard her give a GREAT answer to why you don’t start a novel with backstory. Let’s say you are going to tell a friend a story about what happened to you at the pool today.
How do you start?
When I was seven, I learned to swim. As I got older. I learned new strokes and even joined the swim team at school…
NO! You don’t start by giving the history of all your swimming experiences. You start with what happened at the pool YESTERDAY. You are in story present. You may include an aside here and there for context or to make it clear why you had the reaction you did to whatever happened to you, but you instinctively know as a storyteller that you will lose your audience’s attention if you start at the beginning of time.
So why is the temptation so strong in writers to start with backstory?
It’s complicated, and has a lot to do with how you build the story world in your head. As the writer, you must know all of that backstory. It informs your writing and it makes the characters round as opposed to flat, and it adds depth to your writing. But, and it is a big but, the reader doesn’t need to know it all. Really.
Here is the question to ask yourself: what does the reader need to know to understand what is happening in this scene right now? That is how much backstory you include, and pro-tip—it doesn’t start at the beginning of time.