Backstory, or Story History

Every story has a backstory, what led up to the moment the story starts. In some cases we don't have to really know what it is because it is explained in the story (Dover Street Bridge, Conning Bubba). In others it has a central impact on the story (any of the Families stories, or Kassandra's Song). And in some, it is the story (Counterfeit Line). So how do we develop one?

In theory the backstory should be dropped into the story in dribs and drabs. This is a lot of work, but is worth the effort. It shows the reader that we are in a different world, and it does so casually. The classic example is Robert Heinlein's "the door dilated". The door doesn't open, it dilates, which means it acts like an iris. Which means the people there found it better to open doors that way than by swinging them open. Right away we get a technical point, a look at the society, and we move the story along, all in three words! Now that is real efficiency.

Usually people are a bit clunkier when putting in the backstory. You don't want to lecture to the reader, or if you do, you must make it necessary within the story for that lecture to be there. In Three Valleys - Sammi, the main character wants to be a teacher. She has to listen to some kids reading their papers about the history of 'First Phase', a colony established in an alternate history in 18,000 years BC (at the height of the ice age). She gets bored with this constant rehashing of what everybody knows, and so loses interest in the details, concentrating on how the students are presenting the material (which is one of the things a teacher is supposed to do). We get some of the history, and then, before I can really lecture the reader, I shift over to technique and presentation. It was clunky, but it got the job done.

In some cases you handle the backstory through flashback. I know there are people who insist you eschew flashbacks. They can't be helped, and you need to learn how to get into them, how to get out of them, and when you need to use them. I know you'll get addicted to them. Resist the urge. Use them only to make a point. For example, in Kassandra's Song, Kit (Kassandra) is worried that she will end up killing the bad guy, not an undesirable outcome. She remembers a similar instance in the 1150s when she murdered an important Venetian who wanted to attack Constantinople. This put off the Fourth Crusade by 50 years, which her foresight saw was a good thing. She's worried that that is the answer to her problem (and she's a cop; she'd rather take him alive and try him). But I handled this in a flashback with a dream thrown in. I handled her murdering an NKVD agent in Berlin in late 1945 as part of that, too.

Above all, DO NOT USE the hackneyed phrase "As we all know...". Why are your characters telling each other things they already know. The ONLY time I've seen it used in a story where I could believe it was a scene in a political thriller. The person talking was the Speaker of the House, and he said "As we all know, there's a barbecue waiting for us. We can either keep debating this issue, or we can vote on it and get to the grub."

So let's look at a backstory in action? In Counterfeit Line I start with Germany, August 1, 1759. We are just outside of Minden, in northern Germany. Lord George Sackville charges the French and dies a heroes death as he shatters the French Army of the Lower Rhine (in our history he was stopped by a courier). The French army is so badly mangled that it is knocked out of the war. Coupled with Quiberon Bay a few months later, it is too much, and France bows out of the Third Silesian War. This frees up reinforcements for Frederick the Great, and....

Lord George had been one of the politicians who helped bring about the American Revolution through proposing a series of taxes on the colonies, and refusing to consult with the colonies for their own defense (he was Secretary of State for the Colonies for a while). Without his intransigence the British let the colonies assume the burden for their own defense, and let them figure out how to pay for it (which they do). The primary spark of the American Revolution is averted, and North America basically remains English.

Fast forward to 1851. The North American colonies become the Dominion of America (like what the Canadians did). Fast forward a few more years (about 44). In a downtown stable in the city of New Essex, a rapidly growing city on Puget Sound in the province of South Columbia, a door in a wall opens, and a detective from 2003, from a history and country where there was an American Revolution, lands in the hay. She finds a mostly Victorian World.

Now when you do things like this you can have some fun. You don't have to be strictly logical because history doesn't always flow through the straightforward path. In mine, Victoria dies from an infection incurred during childbirth. Prince Albert serves on a Regency Council (another relative is the titular Regent) for young Edward VII, who eventually passes away in the 1880s. So I can have a Victorian world, but make whatever changes I want, mostly for plot purposes. One of which was a muting of the health fastidiousness that Victoria promulgated in the 1860s following the death of Albert.

I put a history of how I got to New Essex as an appendix.

In the Families stories I was a little more direct, even though I had a cleaner canvas. The Families were a nearly failed colonization attempt that ended up off-course and having to terraform a planet before settling on it. Their total numbers were reduced to 500 living, breathing people, and a large gene bank that they can use. To build up their numbers, Families Geneticists tinker with the DNA so all female births are triplets, while male births are singles. This is because when the population is reduced that far you need wombs. I drop bits and pieces of this into the story.

What I don't put in the beginning of the story is that there are three other characteristics of the Families: their logical approach to most problems (you just have to figure out where their logic starts from); their ruthlessness when it comes to their own survival; and that they just don't quit. This all has to appear from time to time (sometimes as one character joking to another -- a good way to handle information like this), and sometimes in a character explaining it to someone from outside the culture.

To make the story interesting, I looked at the conservative nature of a culture that has had a close brush with oblivion. Thus I drop in a 'business as usual' bureaucracy (see Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister for examples of this), and a brilliant naval mind (not a 'Tom Cruise' as one person put it; Corey Andersen might be a gifted fighter pilot, but she learns to run fleets, not a single fighter; there is a BIG difference). And thus elements of conflict are brought in, along with the backstory, and we are off on our merry way.

In any Fantasy or Science Fiction story you need backstory. We don't have the luxury of 'contemporary' fiction (a.k.a. literary fiction) where the backstory is just confined to how a single character got into the story. Just as important, but in my mind, not as interesting.

As a side note, building a complete world is a backstory. But that's a completely different post.