…and still more ways to tell them

… I bog down in considerations of what the readers need to know, and if don’t put it right at the beginning then when, and how many flashbacks can one novel support?

This is part three of the answer to that question, which can be summed up as “There are a lot of ways to fill in background besides flashbacks” and/or “Everything in the story can and should demonstrate background/culture/setting, because setting/culture/background affects everything in the story.”

Last post was mainly variations on ways to work background information into dialog. This is the part on narrative, defined here as “everything that isn’t dialog or speech tags.”

Setting, background, and backstory build over the course of a story. Front-loading the background and then forgetting about it for the last two-thirds of the book rarely has effective results. Background, by definition, is what is in back of everything that’s happening “in front.” Ignoring it only means that your characters are moving through a blank white space, which the reader will automatically fill in with something familiar, no matter what you’ve told them ought to be there.

The culture, history, and physical attributes of the place in which the story takes place affect everything in the story, from what things are considered rare and valuable vs. what is commonplace, to how people greet each other, who gets an education and what they learn, what colors people wear, who is “family” and who is merely a blood relative, what most people think is important, food, architecture, and so on.

What each character does, says, notices, and reacts to reflects their personal cultural background and life experience. Even character names reflect cultural naming conventions. For instance, the names Alexandr Ivanovich Romanov, John Farmer, Chuanli Wang, and Juan Garcia Rodriguez clearly did not originate in the same place. If these people run into each other at the pub, they’re probably living in a multicultural society, or at least a cosmopolitan trade center.

Picking out the right word for the time/place/setting of a story can save paragraphs of explanation. Possibly the best-known example is “The door dilated.” That three-word sentence from Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon is enough to tell readers that they are in some probably-future place where doors open like the iris of an eye instead of swinging in or out. The fact that it’s only three words, in a tight-third-person viewpoint, tells the reader that such doors are so normal that they don’t deserve further comment, as far as the viewpoint character is concerned. Using a specific term like “dilated” instead of “stretched” or “expanded” indicates that this is probably a high-technology future, rather than a fantasy setting. All in three words.

Careful word choice is therefore really important for building up the background/backstory/setting. A writer who provides an accurate and detailed summary of a  medieval culture in narrative, and who then has the lord of the castle grab a seat at the trestle-table, turn to his wife and say “Come on, baby, let’s chow down!” has just undone many pages of work. That is admittedly an extreme example, but whenever the actions and dialog of the characters are at odds with the narrative, either the actions/dialog win, or the dissonance eventually becomes so great that the reader gives up on the story.

Narrative summary can be either a curse or blessing, depending on how the author uses it. Having the POV character simply summarize things for the reader can work really well to simultaneously reveal background/setting/culture and characterization. It can also end up being five pages of boring digression that brings everything to a halt. Whatever type of viewpoint you’re using—first, second, third-limited, omniscient, etc.—the first rule of narrative summary is that it needs to be interesting, and the longer it is, the more interesting it needs to be. If it starts to run more than three to five manuscript pages, narrative summary starts edging from “needs to be interesting” to “needs to be utterly fascinating.”

The easiest way to keep narrative interesting is to keep the background information short and directly relevant to the current scene. It’s a lot easier to slip a sentence or a short paragraph of description into a scene than it is to slip in a page or more. Furthermore, keeping it short makes it more likely that the reader will read and remember it.

One way of keeping things short is to parcel descriptive/background information out slowly. If the narrative refers to “Marvin’s prized Ilmari vase” and then follows with a paragraph or six on the history of Ilmari porcelain, why it’s considered valuable, and how or why Marvin got it, the reader probably won’t retain specifics other than “the vase is valuable and Marvin likes it a lot,” which they could already deduce from the initial description. If the narrative does not go into details until a couple of scenes later, when Marvin spots a forged Ilmari vase in an antique shop and starts ranting about it (either mentally or aloud), the reader is more likely to remember more of the specifics, as well as the fact that Marvin is an expert on Ilmari porcelain.

Dribbling out information this way is especially useful for things that are eventual plot points, as the technique keeps reminding readers that the vase and/or Marvin’s expertise exist, so the information doesn’t feel like it comes out of left field when it’s needed for a plot twist. If the vase is just in there for background flavor, the four-word description is probably all you need, even if you have eight pages of fascinating notes on Ilmari history and culture that you just can’t fit into the story anywhere else. If there’s only one place in the story where it can possibly fit, it probably isn’t background the reader needs, no matter how interesting you think it is or how much time you spent working it out. Save it for another book.