Want to Improve Your Writing? Skip the Backstory and Keep Your Narrative Moving
When it comes to drag shows, too much is never enough. The more over the top, the better. But when it comes to backstory in the book you’re reading (or writing)? Just say no.
I’ve been enjoying the Mattie Winston series, and I’m currently a few chapters into Book 8. But if anything could convince me to avoid inserting backstory infodumps into my own writing, it’s this series.
I believe each book in a series should be able to stand on its own. Of course it builds on the events and characters of previous books, but if a reader picks up a volume mid-series and is interested enough, she’ll likely go back and read the previous installments.
Unless you try to summarize the entire freaking series, interrupting the current narrative in a big way when you do it.
Some series are really good at handling backstory. In the Mrs. Pollifax series, which I’m currently rereading, there will be some language that shows her thinking about John Sebastian Farrell, that hardened spy she met when the Mexico adventure blew up in their faces, which makes her smile. That tells the reader everything she needs to know.
But in this series. . . oops! Each book of the series has included more and more paragraphs and pages of backstory. We don’t need to be told, in book 8, the entire history of the cottage Mattie lived in quite happily for two years and moved out of in book 5 or 6. (That only took a page and a half.) We don’t need to be reminded of Mattie’s father’s checkered history and how it affected her relationship with her husband (4-1/2 pages). We don’t need a fresh play-by-play of the crime committed and solved in the previous book. I’m estimating there are about 15 pages of backstory here.
Yawn. The backstory doesn’t inspire me to want to go back and read the previous books, it just annoys me because it interrupts what’s happening now.
Providing a backstory infodump just says that you don’t trust your readers.
What I’m Reading
I’ve finally finished the Mattie Winston series, and moved on to a shorter series featuring Cleopatra (call me Cleo) Fox. First up, Murder at the Mayfair Hotel.
Cleo is new to London. Her parents died when she was young, and her grandparents raised her after that. But her grandfather died about three years ago, and her grandmother passed away last month, leaving her alone in the world.
Except for her mother’s family, from whom she was estranged. Although Cleo’s mother was the daughter of a wealthy businessman, she inherited nothing because her father disapproved of her choice of a husband, a gifted academic.
Cleo is homeless and alone when she receives an invitation from her mother’s sister inviting her to live with them in London at the Mayfair Hotel, which they own. With no other options available to her, as a young unmarried woman in 1899, she agrees.
Shortly after she arrives, one of the hotel’s guests is murdered.
The story is populated with a cast of interesting characters, including family members, hotel staff, and hotel guests. There are plenty of red herrings, and Cleo creates a few difficulties for herself and others along the way before she finally figures it out.
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Notable Quotes
. . . as companions go, Hoover is damned near perfect. He senses when my mood needs lifting, listens patiently to everything I say, keeps me warm in bed at night, and shares my taste in ice cream. If only I could find all those traits in a man.
- Frozen Stiff by Annelise Ryan
Ah, the ideal man is a yellow lab.
During the last few months of my marriage, sex ranked just below plucking my eyebrows and cleaning out the toilet bowl on my list of things to do.
- Working Stiff by Annelise Ryan
How can you not love a protagonist who’s so brutally honest with herself? I understand eyebrow plucking is painful (I’ve never done it, myself), and I know how much I adore cleaning toilets, so equating those with marital sex is pretty descriptive of how she felt about it.
A small tea table, laden with paraphernalia for afternoon tea, loitered between us.
- Murder is a Family Business by Heather Haven
Really? The tea table loitered? I thought loitering was something people did at bus stations, 7-Elevens, parks, and on stakeouts. Nice to know furniture can also loiter.