Defining the Problem
N o backstory allowed. That’s the rule anyway, but so many authors are quick to violate it. Usually it is because we feel the need to justify a character’s actions rather than trusting the reader to figure out that if the character is doing something then there’s something in the character’s past that caused it. As my pastor likes to say, when you see a turtle sitting on a fence post, you know he didn’t get there by himself. In writing, it’s sufficient to write about how the turtle gets down from the fence post. But we still have a tendency to explain the whole thing. Backstory is a story that happens before the story. It isn’t actually part of our story, but how can we tell the difference between things of the past that are part of our story and things that aren’t. Using our turtle example, if the turtle got even with the person who put him on the post, then the action of putting the turtle on the post is part of our story rather than being backstory. And I’ve thought about the mo...