Backstory: How Not to Tell Too Much

This Article is from my Teyla Rachel Branton blog.

Novice writers who don’t know their characters tend to bog down their novels with backstory. They’ll be writing along, telling a great story, and then suddenly they’ll deviate into paragraph after paragraph of backstory that described why their character responds a certain way. Unfortunately, backstory is one way to kill your readers’ attention faster than just about anything else beside terrible grammar. One way to avoid this is to write a character before you begin the book. Give her a background, a history, and motivation for why she will respond the way she does. Spend time getting to know your character.

Then leave 90% of it out of the actual book. Post it on your blog, send it in an email, but leave it out of the book.

Will you use any of it? Yes . . .

Click here to read the full article. Enjoy!