On Backstory: Part 3

I was yammering on about backstory this week, which was kind of fun, actually. (See Part 1 here and Part 2 here.) It’s much more fun than cleaning the house and all those other things I’ve been meaning to do. I realized afterwards that I should probably toss out some examples on what I think are some stellar displays of weaving in a character’s backstory. These examples are a form of ‘telling’, yes, but it is done in such a simple and straight forward way that it does not slow down the story, is a nice little tidbit where we need it/want it in the story and it gives the reader more than one might realize at first glance.
Here are two examples that I like:

“It didn’t spill over so that he could relax, and instead he grew angry at his mother for crashing her car, at the doctors for not saving her, at his father for being his father, at himself for drinking, at Ming for being scared.” (From Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lamb. Fitzgerald is a pre-med student and Ming is his love interest. She has rejected him, and he is getting drunk.)

A bit on what is important here. The orange bit, to me, says why he wants to become a doctor. It speaks to his motivations as a character and where he is mentally and physically as well as speaks to an event that has shaped his life and continues to shape it. Lamb could have gone on for a few paragraphs about Fitzgerald’s motivations and how his mother’s death affected him and that he aspires to be that doctor who doesn’t let moms die, etc, etc. Or, he could have done like he did. Simple. To the point. And for me, so much more effective.

The second example is trickier to show. It is from Meg Cabot’s Size 14 Is Not Fat Either. It is a sequel to Size 12 is Not Fat and it covers a lot of ground in the first 2-3 pages in terms of catching new readers up on who this Heather Wells person is. Yet, it is still entertaining for those readers who are already familiar with Heather Wells and what she stands for. In the second paragraph we are already discovering that she is a musician when she is getting a coffee on the way to work. She slips it in with comments referring to the barista and back to herself like so: “I bet he plays the guitar. I bet he stays up way too late at night, strumming, the way I do.” And later in the paragraph: “No time to shower before work, because he was up so late practicing. Just like me.” So, by having the main character comparing herself to another character, we learn a lot about her. A few paragraphs later we learn that she is a former popstar, she is overweight, she has a new job, she doubts her song writing talents, and on and on. But the important thing here is that we discover this all in an entertaining way that pulls us deeper into the story, gets us feeling those same emotions as Heather and keeps tugging that story forward. We are so interested in finding out if this cute 20-something barista is going to ask her out (he did check her out after all), that we breeze right past all these backstory tidbits, right up to the burn at the end of the scene. Ouch! That rejection totally stung!

In a nutshell: brilliant.