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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35627
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

It is good that you have identified a problem that seems to permeate your writing.

If I understand the feedback you are getting correctly, the problem is that your beta readers simply don't care for the first third of your novels.

The reason, as you describe it, seems to be that for some reason you feel that, before you can tell someone's story, you must take about a third of a novel to establish who they are and how they became who they are. I believe that is not necessary.

Readers today are familiar with military bootcamps, and they have seen enough movies about nerds that they have a clear image of what the personal history of a nerd might look like. You don't have to go into all that and can get right to the point.

In most novels today, the exposition does not take longer than half a chapter, and it is done parallel to the inciting incident. Bella in _Twilight_ moves to a new town on the first page, we learn a few sentences about her family background, and on page 20 or so she has already bumped into her vampire classmate. There is no third of the novel that explains how her childhood made her into the reclusive loner she is at the novel's beginning.

The [Bildungsroman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildungsroman), as it was written in the 17th and 18th centuries, with its sprawling narrative of the protagonist's whole life, is no longer a bestselling formula for fiction today. You can write it, and I'm sure there are still readers who love to read a few hundred pages of the protagonist going through their military education before the actual plot starts, but most readers today want to begin _[in medias res](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res)_.

So either kill your darlings or [weave in the backstory in a more natural manner](https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/34308/how-do-you-tell-a-characters-backstory-without-explicitly-telling-it), but begin your narrative where the plot begins.

Original score: 6