The reader doesn’t need to know why he never unpacks. The reader needs to watch him not unpack, again and again, until the other man finally asks.
Chapter two of many manuscripts is a dossier. The hero arrives in his new town, and before he has done anything interesting, the narration stops to explain him. His father left when he was nine. His first boyfriend outed him. He served two tours and came home different. He doesn’t trust easily, and here, in three paragraphs, is every reason why. By the end of the chapter, the reader knows the man’s entire history and has no reason to keep reading to discover it.
Writers front-load backstory for understandable reasons. They’ve spent months with this man and know what shaped him. They fear the reader won’t sympathize without the full context. They want the reader to understand why he behaves badly before he does it, so the bad behavior won’t cost him the reader’s goodwill. Each of those motives is reasonable, and each produces the same result. The past arrives as information instead of experience, and the present loses the tension the past should have created.
Backstory works best when it changes what happens now. A history the reader learns through a man’s habits, the objects he can’t throw away, the mistakes he keeps making, and the decisions he makes under strain is a history the reader feels. A history delivered as summary is a history the reader merely knows. This essay is about the difference, about when the reader truly needs an explanation, and about what a flashback has to do to justify interrupting the present.
The research here comes from cognitive psychology, narrative theory, and the study of how people construct life stories. None of it tells a writer where to put a flashback. It does suggest why readers become curious, how they fill gaps on their own, how the past shows up in behavior, and why how a person tells his history reveals as much as the history itself. The craft conclusions are mine.
Curiosity runs on a gap
George Loewenstein proposed an influential account of curiosity he called the information-gap theory. Curiosity, in his view, arises when people notice a gap between what they know and what they want to know, and it registers as a kind of deprivation that motivates them to close the gap. Curiosity tends to be strongest when people already know something about a subject and can sense that the missing piece is within reach.[1] The theory was built from a wide range of research rather than from studies of fiction, and later work has refined it. As a model for how readers relate to a character’s past, it’s remarkably useful.
An early inventory of damage closes every gap before the reader has a chance to feel it. The reader learns why the man is guarded before wondering, so the guardedness becomes a fact rather than a mystery. Compare that with a man who flinches when someone raises a voice in a bar, then laughs it off, then flinches again three chapters later in a different context. The reader now has a gap. Something happened to him. The reader knows enough to sense the answer is out there and not enough to have it. That gap pulls the reader forward.
Readers are also better at filling gaps than writers assume. Arthur Graesser, Murray Singer, and Tom Trabasso proposed that readers actively construct explanations as they read, generating inferences about why characters act and why events happen, especially when those inferences are needed to make the story coherent.[2] Their theory has been tested and debated, and readers don’t infer everything. The main point holds well enough for craft. Readers want to understand causes and will work to find them. A writer who supplies every cause in advance takes away work readers enjoy doing.
The practical rule is to open gaps early and close them late. Let the reader see the effects of the past before the causes. Each effect should be sharp enough to register and consistent enough to form a pattern. By the time the cause arrives, the reader should want it, and its arrival should change how the reader understands everything that came before.
Open with the present, not the file
If the dossier comes out of chapter two, something has to replace it. Writers sometimes fear that without the history, the reader won’t know who the man is. The opening needs less than that fear suggests. It needs a man who wants something now, a habit the reader can see, and one detail that doesn’t quite add up.
Here’s an opening built as a file.
Ansel Kerr had been moving his whole life. When he was twelve, the bank took his family’s house in Dayton, and for two years they drifted between motels and relatives. He learned not to get attached to rooms. Now, at thirty-four, he tuned pianos for a living, which suited a man who never stayed anywhere long.
And here’s one built from the present.
The upright at Mateo’s bar was a 1938 Baldwin with a cracked soundboard and three dead keys in the bass. Ansel quoted the job at four days. He’d already decided to do it in three.
The first version answers every question before the reader can ask it. The second establishes competence, a job, and a man who has decided to leave before he arrives, without saying why. The reader notices the decision. It’s odd. Why rush a job nobody asked him to rush? That question is the first gap, and the book has opened it in two sentences.
Prologues deserve a word here. A prologue set in the character’s past is often the dossier in disguise—the foreclosure, dramatized, before the story begins. It can work when the past event is itself gripping and when the present story will reframe it. It fails when it exists mainly to explain the hero in advance. A useful test is to imagine the book without the prologue and ask whether the reader would be more curious or less. If more, the prologue was closing a gap the book needed open.
The past lives in habits
People carry their histories in what they do automatically. Wendy Wood and David Neal reviewed research on habits and described them as responses triggered by context, formed through repetition and capable of persisting even after the goals that originally produced them have changed.[3] A person may develop a behavior for a good reason and keep doing it long after the reason has disappeared, because the cue still fires the response.
That description is close to a definition of how backstory should appear in fiction. A habit formed under past conditions keeps firing in present ones, often where it no longer fits. The reader sees the mismatch and senses the history behind it without needing the history explained.
Meet Ansel, a piano tuner who travels between jobs, and Mateo, who owns a bar with an old upright he wants restored. Ansel’s family lost their house when he was twelve, and he moved seven times in the next two years. The book doesn’t have to say any of that early. It can show his habits instead. He keeps everything he owns in one duffel bag. He never unpacks in a rented room, even for a month. He pays for things in cash and keeps the receipts. He chose a job that lets him walk into a stranger’s house, do excellent work for two hours, and leave.
Mateo had cleared a drawer for him. Ansel thanked him, folded two shirts into it, and kept the rest in the bag by the door.
That sentence carries a whole childhood. The reader doesn’t know the foreclosure yet, but the reader knows Ansel lives as if he might have to leave at any moment, and that he isn’t ready to stop. The reader also knows Mateo noticed, because the drawer was an offer and the bag by the door was an answer.
Habits work as backstory because they’re active in the present. They affect decisions, cause friction, and create moments the other man can respond to. Mateo can ask about the bag, or not ask. He can start leaving space in the closet without comment. He can lose patience. Each choice moves the relationship, and each draws on Ansel’s past without stopping the story to narrate it.
Habits also change, and the change is a plot. The day Ansel unpacks the bag is a turning point the reader has been waiting for since the drawer, and it needs no explanation at all. The reader knows what it means.
Objects, mistakes, and decisions
Habits are one channel for the past. Three others do similar work, each with its own strengths.
Objects. A thing a character keeps can hold a history the narration never has to state. Ansel carries a tuning hammer that’s older and heavier than the ones he uses, and he never works with it. Mateo keeps a ledger from the bar’s first year in a locked drawer, even though everything has been digital for a decade. The reader wonders about both. An object becomes most powerful when someone else handles it. If Mateo picks up the old hammer and Ansel takes it out of his hand too fast, the reader learns that the object matters and that touching it touches something raw. The story behind it can wait.
Mistakes. The past often shows up when a reflex built for old conditions misfires in new ones. Mateo counts the till twice every night because, years ago, a partner drained the bar’s savings and disappeared. When Ansel offers to close up one night and Mateo recounts the drawer after him, Ansel notices, and the moment hurts both of them. Mateo didn’t mean it as an accusation. It was a habit. But it lands as one, and now the past has done damage in the present, which means it has to be dealt with. Mistakes like this are among the most efficient ways to reveal history, because they create conflict and invite explanation at the same time.
Decisions. Under strain, characters choose, and their choices reveal what their pasts taught them to value or fear. When the bar floods and Mateo needs help, Ansel can stay or take the job he’s booked in another city. A man who learned that every home disappears might choose the job, telling himself it’s practical. A man starting to believe this home might hold could stay. Whatever Ansel decides, the reader learns what his history has made him capable of, and the decision does more characterization than a page of summary.
All four channels—habits, objects, mistakes, and decisions—share one quality. They show the past operating now. Summary shows the past as something that happened then. A reader feels the difference immediately, even without words for it.
When the reader needs the explanation
Implication can carry a great deal, but it can’t carry everything. Some histories have to be stated, and withholding them too long turns a mystery into a frustration. The question is when.
The reader needs an explanation when the action is incomprehensible without it. If a man’s response to a situation is so extreme or strange that the reader can’t follow the scene, the reader needs enough context to understand what is happening. This doesn’t mean the full history. It may mean a single sentence that tells the reader what the character is reacting to, held back until the reaction has registered.
An explanation also becomes necessary when the stakes depend on it. If the third act turns on whether Ansel will stay, the reader must understand, by then, what staying costs him. A reader who doesn’t know about the foreclosure may see his leaving as mere restlessness, which drains the climax of meaning. The explanation has to arrive before the moment that depends on it, though not long before.
Most important, the telling can itself be an event. In a romance, a man revealing his past to the man he loves is an act of intimacy, and the timing of that revelation is one of the best tools a writer has. The reader learns the history at the moment it costs the character something to share it, and the scene becomes about trust rather than information.
“We moved seven times,” Ansel said. “I stopped unpacking after the third. There didn’t seem to be any point.” He looked at the bag by the door. “I know you’ve noticed.”
“I noticed.”
“You never asked.”
“I figured you’d tell me when you wanted me to know.”
The reader has waited two hundred pages for this. The explanation arrives as a gift from one man to the other, and Mateo’s restraint in never asking becomes, in retrospect, part of why Ansel can finally say it. The history matters less than the fact that he chose this man and this moment to tell it.
Two pasts in one romance
A romance usually has two histories in play, and they interact. Each man’s past produces habits, and those habits collide in the present. Ansel pays cash and keeps receipts because money once disappeared. Mateo counts the till twice because money once disappeared. The two habits come from similar wounds and point in different directions. One man protects himself by being ready to leave. The other protects himself by watching what stays. Put them together and their histories start creating friction neither man can explain, because neither has told the other where his habit came from.
That friction is one of the best reasons to delay explanation. While the histories stay unspoken, the men misread each other. Mateo sees the bag by the door and assumes Ansel isn’t serious. Ansel sees the recounted till and assumes Mateo doesn’t trust him. Both readings are wrong, and both are understandable. When the explanations finally come, they don’t just inform the reader. They correct each man’s reading of the other, and the relationship shifts.
The order of revelation matters too. Who tells first? A man who shares his history before the other has shared his takes a risk without any guarantee of reciprocity. The other man may respond by opening up, or may not be ready. That asymmetry gives the writer a scene with real stakes. A book in which both men exchange their wounds in a single late-night conversation, trading damage like cards, often wastes both histories. Spread the revelations out. Let one man go first and wait, and let the second revelation arrive when it costs the most.
The other man is also the reader’s proxy for discovery. When Mateo notices the bag, the reader notices with him. When he decides not to ask, the reader learns something about Mateo while still wondering about Ansel. Backstory in a romance is never only about one character. It’s about how the other man learns it, and what he does with what he learns.
How a man tells his past is characterization
When the explanation finally comes, how the character tells it matters as much as what happened. Psychologists who study narrative identity argue that people make sense of their lives by constructing stories about them, and that the shape of those stories reflects and influences who they are. Dan McAdams and Kate McLean summarize research suggesting that the meaning people draw from difficult experiences, and how they structure their life stories, relate to well-being and personal growth.[4] Jerome Bruner made a related argument decades earlier, proposing that people come to understand their lives through the narratives they tell about them.[5]
McAdams and his colleagues also distinguished two patterns in life stories. In a redemption sequence, a bad event leads to something good. In a contamination sequence, a good event is spoiled by something bad. People whose stories featured more redemption sequences tended to report greater well-being, while contamination sequences were associated with lower well-being.[6] The research is correlational and based mostly on American samples, and redemption narratives reflect cultural values as much as personal psychology. For a writer, the distinction is still useful, because it gives two very different ways for a character to tell the same history.
Ansel can tell the foreclosure story as contamination. Everything was fine until it wasn’t, and nothing has been safe since. Or he can tell it as something closer to redemption. Moving taught him how to read a room in five minutes and leave before he wears out his welcome, which is why he’s good at his job. Both versions describe the same facts. The first reveals a man still inside the wound. The second reveals a man who has built a life around it, maybe too successfully. Which version he tells, and whether Mateo hears the first underneath the second, is characterization of the most intimate kind.
The telling can also change over the course of a book. A man might tell the story one way early and another way late, and the difference marks how far he has come. If Ansel tells the foreclosure as a source of competence in chapter ten and as a loss he never grieved in chapter thirty, the reader has watched him move, and the history has become an arc rather than a background.
What a flashback must accomplish
Flashbacks are the most dramatic way to deliver backstory, and the most expensive. Every flashback stops the present story. Gérard Genette’s analysis of narrative time gives writers precise terms for this. A flashback, or analepsis in his vocabulary, has a reach—how far back it goes—and an extent—how much time it covers—and it always interrupts the main narrative.[7] The interruption is the cost. The flashback has to repay it.
Research on involuntary memory suggests what a convincing flashback looks like. Dorthe Berntsen studied memories that come to mind spontaneously, without deliberate recall, and found that they’re usually triggered by cues in the present environment—a sound, a place, an object, a phrase.[8] Her early work relied on diary studies with modest samples, and later research has expanded it considerably. The core finding fits a writer’s needs. Memory intrudes when something in the present calls it up.
That gives the first requirement. A flashback should be cued. Something in the present scene—an object, a smell, a line of dialogue, a situation that echoes an old one—should trigger it. An uncued flashback feels like the author deciding it’s time for exposition. A cued one feels like the character’s mind behaving as minds do.
The second requirement is that the flashback change what happens next. The character returns from the memory and does something different from what he’d have done otherwise. If Ansel remembers standing on the sidewalk outside his childhood house while a bank officer changed the locks, and then turns down Mateo’s offer of a key, the flashback has done work. If he remembers and then the scene continues as if nothing happened, the flashback was decoration.
The third requirement is that the flashback show something the present can’t. Summary can tell the reader that Ansel’s family lost their house. A flashback can put the reader on the sidewalk, show the twelve-year-old holding a box of his own things, and let the reader feel what the adult carries. If the flashback contains nothing summary couldn’t deliver, it should be summary, and a short one.
I’ve argued in Rebuilding After the Break that in second-chance romance, the past should arrive when it changes the meaning of a present choice. That principle applies to every flashback. And in The Home That Isn’t I wrote about how a man’s body can remember a geography that no longer exists. Physical memory is one of the richest cues a flashback can use, because it puts the past in the character’s hands before it reaches his conscious mind.
Implication carries more than you think
Many writers who cut their opening dossiers find that much of the cut material never needs to return. The reader understood Ansel from the bag, the drawer, the cash, and the old hammer. The full story of the foreclosure can arrive in one scene of a few paragraphs late in the book, and those paragraphs carry far more weight than three pages in chapter two would have, because the reader has spent the whole book wanting them.
Some history never needs to be explained at all. A reader can understand that a man’s relationship with his brother is difficult without learning the full story of why. A reader can sense that a past relationship ended badly from how a man reacts to a name. Leaving some of the past implied gives a character depth beyond the page. He seems to have a life larger than the book, which is exactly how real people seem.
The danger runs the other way too. A book can withhold so much that the reader stops caring. If every effect remains unexplained for too long, the gaps stop pulling and start annoying. Withholding works when the reader can sense the shape of what’s missing and trusts the book to deliver it. It fails when the reader suspects the author is hiding things merely to create suspense, or when the hidden information is less interesting than the hiding promised. The reveal should be worth the wait, and the wait should never feel like stalling.
Revising backstory that explains instead of acts
These questions help locate where history has become a dossier.
- Where does the narration stop to explain the past before the reader has seen its effects?
- What habits does the past produce in the present, and has the reader watched them misfire?
- Which objects carry history, and has anyone else handled them?
- What mistake does the past cause, and who gets hurt by it?
- What decision under strain reveals what the past taught him?
- Does the reader need this explanation to follow the action, to understand the stakes, or because the telling is itself an event?
- When he finally tells his history, how does he tell it, and does the telling change over the book?
- Is each flashback cued by the present, and does it change what happens next?
- Which parts of the past could remain implied without losing the reader?
- Is any withholding protecting the reader’s curiosity, or only delaying the book?
Let the past act
The past in a novel isn’t a file to be read. It’s a force acting on the present, visible in what a man does without thinking, what he keeps, what he breaks, and what he chooses when it matters. Show that force at work, and the reader will want to know where it came from. Make the reader wait, and the eventual answer will land as discovery rather than data.
Cut the inventory. Keep the bag by the door. Let the other man notice it, and let him wait. When the history finally comes, let it come as something one man gives the other, at a moment it costs him to give it. The reader will remember that scene long after forgetting any summary.
Sources
These works inform my craft argument; none is offered as proof of how a fictional scene must unfold. The psychological research studies real readers and real memory, which fiction shapes for its own purposes.
- George Loewenstein, “The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation,” Psychological Bulletin 116, no. 1 (1994): 75–98, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.116.1.75. ↩
- Arthur C. Graesser, Murray Singer, and Tom Trabasso, “Constructing Inferences During Narrative Text Comprehension,” Psychological Review 101, no. 3 (1994): 371–95, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.101.3.371. ↩
- Wendy Wood and David T. Neal, “A New Look at Habits and the Habit–Goal Interface,” Psychological Review 114, no. 4 (2007): 843–63, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.114.4.843. ↩
- Dan P. McAdams and Kate C. McLean, “Narrative Identity,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 22, no. 3 (2013): 233–38, https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721413475622. ↩
- Jerome Bruner, “Life as Narrative,” Social Research 54, no. 1 (1987): 11–32. ↩
- Dan P. McAdams, Jeffrey Reynolds, Martha Lewis, Allison H. Patten, and Phillip J. Bowman, “When Bad Things Turn Good and Good Things Turn Bad: Sequences of Redemption and Contamination in Life Narrative and Their Relation to Psychosocial Adaptation in Midlife Adults and in Students,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27, no. 4 (2001): 474–85, https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167201274008. ↩
- Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cornell University Press, 1980). ↩
- Dorthe Berntsen, “Involuntary Autobiographical Memories,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 10, no. 5 (1996): 435–54, https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-0720(199610)10:5<435::AID-ACP408>3.0.CO;2-L. ↩