How do you tell a character's backstory without explicitly telling it?

This is another version of this question: Intentionally leaving out a part of the story, for a more interesting reveal?

In other words, it is a how do I tell something given that I have chosen a narrative point of view that is not suitable to telling it.

The answer is, you don't.

In the default narrative mode of western literature, which is third person omniscient (in other words, the author says, I am the narrator, telling you this story), there is no limit on what the author can tell the reader or how they can tell them and the only responsibility the writers has it to make the telling interesting.

As soon as you choose any other narrative mode, you are placing limits on what you can say without doing something obviously false. That is fine as long as you accept those limits. But if you can't live within those limits, then the only non-false way to escape them is to switch to a narrative mode in which those limits do not apply.

The most limited narrative mode of all is first person stream of consciousness. (In other words, the narrator is pretending that they are not narrating a story at all, but merely reporting their experiences as they occur.) The only reason to adopt this narrative mode is because your story is served by staying within the limits it imposes. If you have chosen this mode, you can't fill in backstory by any mechanism that will not obviously feel false, will not obviously involve behavior or a chain of thought that the narrator would not naturally engage in at that point of the story.

So if you have to get that information in to make the story make sense, choose a different narrative mode.

posted about 6 years ago

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Mark Baker‭

4351 reputation 12 1104 742 58

Simply think about how you learn the background of other people in real life.

You get some hints from what people do, what others say about them, and from the context in which they appear. Then you get to know them, but at first your don't directly ask them for the story of their lives (unless you're a clod). Nevertheless you learn more about them from talking to them, and eventually they will tell you more about themselves, if you get closer.

Fictional characters should be described the same way. If you happen on them the first time, the narrator shouldn't break the narrative to draw up the character file and give it to the reader. Instead, the reader should learn about the character as this person interacts with their environment.

Getting to know a character, should be a process that runs along parallel to the storyline.

posted about 6 years ago

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System‭

3221 reputation 147 213 552 0

You do it in chunks. Let the character explain that he is the right one for the job because he has done this thing in the past. Let another character a chapter later point out that they knew this character for years and can always trust that this character will get it done. Let him share something at the fireplace from his past in exchange for information about the other character. Another chapter later you see this character do something incredibly good - another character murmurs that it must have taken him years of hard training to achieve this mastery.

You don't want to simply tell the reader in a long monologue, but you need to show it somehow. As long as you don't dump the information on the reader and instead introduce it whenever it's relevant this is fine - it doesn't matter whether the character explains it themselves or another character or someone just thinks they know something. And you should only ever show your reader the important parts of the backstory. It doesn't matter how many sisters the character had - except for when finding one of them is his motivation, or they collectively taught him something, or they are individually important to him or the story.

posted about 6 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Secespitus‭

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