Seeking advice on establishing the emotional impact of backstory
I am drafting a novel outline. The interesting part (and thus the part I should be writing) would come with several characters with preexisting romantic relationships. The choices they make will have a massive impact on those relationships, especially after the final reveal.
The emotional tone of the entire story rests on the strength of these pre-existing connections which I want the reader to become invested in too.
How can I make those existing relationships matter to the reader so that they feel the punch of the ending but without writing a whole bunch of prologue chapters?
I've toyed with using flashbacks (a lot of flashbacks) but this too just feels like an emotional "info dump" and could spoil the pace of the main conflict.
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1 answer
I suspect you may be miscalculating where your story begins. A story arc whose climax has a massive impact on a relationship generally begins with the beginning of that relationship, with all the things that shaped and defined that relationship, with all the things that make it vulnerable to the crisis, and all the things that make it worthy of surviving the crisis.
The interesting part, as you call it, may be the part where all the fireworks happen, but a change in a relationship is only interesting if the relationship itself is interesting. There are plenty of books in which relationships develop slowly, through the ordinary interactions of ordinary couples, without fireworks, storms, or floods. Such writing requires sensitive observation of human beings, their hope and affections, their pride and their prejudices. But it is very much the stuff of novels.
The reason that people used to "skip to the good bits" in Lady Chatterly's Lover, and that no one reads it at all today, is that the rest of it is just lousy writing. Laurence was a great novelist, but not in this book. Maybe Laurence himself was too keen to get to writing "the good bits" and did not give the rest of the book the attention and imagination it required.
So the answer may be as simple as that you must begin at the beginning, and that you must do the work of imagination, and of storytelling, to make the development of those relationships compelling as you lead up to the crisis of your story.
There is also a technique that you see use occasionally, when a story has many miles to cover to get to its climax, and that is the flash forward. In the flashforward, you begin by telling the crisis, briefly, and then go back to the natural beginning of the story and relate it up to the crisis point, and then proceed to the resolution.
The flash forward is not use that often, and I think that is for a good reason. The crisis is not particularly compelling unless you are invested in the characters. Certain kinds of engagement can be created very quickly, so you certainly can develop the required engagement to make the crisis interesting in itself, but the interest alone is not likely to sustain the reader through all the narration that follows if that narration is not compelling in itself. And if it is, why bother with the flash forward at all?
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