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Is there such a thing as too much back story?

I’m not really talking so much about the synopsis of a character you might do to place them in the events of story, give them at least the thinnest thumbnail of personality and motivation. I’m talking more about an in-depth sort of back story, more like chapters that won’t ever be used. You know they won’t but write them anyhow. I’m not sure there can be too much back-story, except that it seems like you might run the risk of losing focus. I certainly get side-tracked. A couple months ago, I got writers block pretty bad, and instead of trying to figure out why I got stuck, I spent about a week and a half developing verb conjugations for three dialects of one of my constructed languages. (See, there I went). Anyhow, I suppose many writers would write these in-depth histories as standard practice, I don’t know, it certainly didn’t occur to me as a new writer.

For each of two of my main characters, I’ve got what I would consider a chapter or two of events in their own history which serve to place them in the story for me. I wrote both of these as if I’d intended to put them into the story, with as much attention to setting and action as I might for any draft. In both cases they’re key to the plot of my story, but need to come out slowly to the reader as events unfold. So far, this approach feels good to me, because it helps me understand the character’s motives and place in a way that a few bullet-points or paragraphs in a notebook might not. It makes the events real for me as the writer because they happened. At the moment, I’m working on a similar chapter for a third character who didn’t get the same treatment initially, and I realized not having done that was a mistake even though the character really came alive as soon as she appeared. It left a big hole in the plot, which seemed like a nice thing to have at the time, you know for flexibility, but in filling that hole, the main plot gains credibility and I now have the basis for action that needs to happen in later chapters. When I finish it, I’ll continue revising from where I stopped, and in all likelihood I’ll be writing another of these when I introduce the next character.

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I’ve gotten to the point in a pretty thorough revision, rewrite really, where I introduce a new character. She has great chemistry with the main character, and does a lot to keep things flowing, but she has no business on that long deserted road. So, now what?

But why is she there?

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Start at the beginning

Such great advice. Not that anyone actually follows it. I’m certain I didn’t anyhow. The current fantasy project I’m working on started out as a single hand-written page concept for a science fiction story, my notes put it sometime in 2004. Although I had a character and some very basic ideas about his circumstances, I didn’t have a beginning. So, I went looking for one. The circumstances for my character were somewhat fantastical and so the history became fantastical, which eventually led me to a setting in which you would expect a high fantasy to occur. This process also introduced other characters and conflicts, which eventually eclipsed the original concept as the more interesting story. Even then, I still didn’t have a beginning. In the vain hope of a beginning coming to me, I spent years creating maps and languages, people and history. After that, I still didn’t have a beginning, so I started writing-up the back-stories of characters I’d developed for this world. Finally, in desperation, I did a global search and replace of a name in one of these back-stories just to see what might happen, and suddenly I had my beginning. The next few chapters came easily over the course of a couple of weeks. I felt really good about them too. Then, I asked several people to read over the work. Needless to say, the beginning, and the bulk of the subsequent chapters, only vaguely resemble what I started with, but the core of my story remains, and I’m still making progress.