I'm also reminded of this passage from Stephen King's amazing
On Writing: (read now if you haven't)
"Back story is all the stuff that happened before your tale began but which has an impact on the front story. Back story helps define character and establish motivation. I think it's important to get the back story in as quickly as possible, but it's also important to do it with some grace. As an example of what's not graceful, consider this line of dialogue:
"Hello, ex-wife," Tom said to Doris as she entered the room.
Now, it may be important to the story that Tom and Doris are divorced, but there has to be a better way to do it than the above, which is about as graceful as an axe-murder. Here is one suggestion:
"Hi, Doris," Tom said. His voice sounded natural enough - to his own ears, at least - but the fingers of his right hand crept to the place where his wedding ring had been until six months ago.
Still no Pulitzer winner, and quite a bit longer than
Hello, ex-wife, but it's not all about speed, as I've already tried to point out. And if you think it's all about information, you ought to give up fiction and get a job writing instruction manuals - Dilbert's cubicle awaits.
You've probably heard the phrase
in medias res, which means "into the midst of things." This technique is an ancient and honorable one, but I don't like it.
In medias res necessitates flashbacks, which strike me as boring and sort of corny. They always make me think of those movies from the forties and fifties where the picture gets all swimmy, the voices get all echoey, and suddenly it's sixteen months ago and the mud-splashed convict we just saw trying to outrun the bloodhounds is an up-and-coming young lawyer who hasn't yet been framed for the murder of the crooked police chief.
As a reader, I'm a lot more interested in what's going to happen than what already
did. Yes, there are brilliant novels that run counter to this preference (or maybe it's a prejudice) -
Rebecca by by Daphne du Maurier, for one;
A Dark- Adapted Eye, by Barbara Vine, for another - but I like to start at square one, dead even with the writer. I'm an A-to-Z man; serve me the appetizer first and give the dessert if I eat my veggies.
Even when you tell your story in this straightforward manner, you'll discover you can't escape at least some back story. In a very real sense, every life is
in medias res. If you introduce a forty-year-old man as your main character on page one of your novel, and if the action begins as the result of some one of your person or situation's exploding onto the stage of this fellow's life - a road accident, let's say, or doing a favor for a beautiful woman who keeps looking sexily back over her shoulder (did note the awful adverb in this bring myself to kill?) - you'll still have to deal with the first forty years of the guy's life at some point. How much and how well you deal with those years will have a lot to do with the level of success your story achieves, with whether readers think of it as "a good read" or "a big fat bore." Probably J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter stories, is the current champ when it comes to back story. You could do worse than read these, noting how effortlessly each new book recaps what has gone before. (Also, the Harry Potter novels are
fun, just pure story from beginning to end.)"
Read
On Writing now if you haven't. Hope that above passage helps.
