Move along now...

[John Dean]

As you may know, I have written blogs on the theme of back story before but the subject has come to mind again because I am well into the latest DCI Jack Harris novel for the excellent people at The Book Folks, which involves the detective revisiting events from his earlier career.

As authors, we need to be careful with back story, because, for all a character’s history is an important part of what they are, every instance of us delving into their past can have the effect of slowing the novel’s forward momentum.

One of the most common mistakes I note when I’m called upon to offer comments on inexperienced writers’ manuscripts is that they have spent too much time establishing the background to the story early on in the book, which slows the pace. Lose pace and you lose your reader.

Often, indeed usually, the reader will not wait for the story to get into gear. In fact, there’s very little that readers need to know about our characters’ history from the outset that they won’t learn as the story unfolds.

By all means, refer to the past, slot in passages of flashback even, but keep the story in the present. In the case of the new Harris novel, the story begins very much in the present and the focus throughout will remain on the present with fragments of back story slotted in as the novel unfolds.

Why do it that way? Because readers exist in the present, look to the future and do not allow themselves to be behoven to the past. And so must it be in fiction.