How not to introduce backstory, maybe

A meditation on immediate vs reflective reading

A friend asked me to beta-read a story the other day. She had done something that is widely recommended to writers these days. She had scattered bits of backstory through her opening scene, which was a battle scene. I objected to this, saying that it pushed me back from the immediacy of the scene. She defended the practice as something commonly recommended, which it absolutely is. But I have never liked that approach. I have never liked the openings that result from using it. Our debate got me thinking more about why it does not work for me.

I think there are four modes of reading, which I will call the immediate, the reflective, the critical, and the analytical. (All classification schemes are ad hoc, incomplete, and subject to change.) The immediate and the reflective are the modes that concern us here. The critical and the analytical belong to editors, writers, and scholars, not, hopefully, to the average reader.

In immediate mode, the reader is in the events of the moment, witnessing the unfolding drama. In reflective mode, they are standing back from the events of the moment to reflect on them, understand them, and put them in context. This kind of reflection is not of the critical or analytical sort that you may have been taught to do in English class or a writing workshop. It is the same kind of reflection you do on real events in your real life. We can’t live our life helter-skelter all the time. We have to stop and consider what we have experienced, understand it, and put it into context. If we did not pause to reflect sometimes, we would be overwhelmed and descend into confusion and, I dare say, madness.

There are two ways this type of reflection happens in a story. The first is when the reader voluntarily puts their book down, open on their knee, and reflects on what they have just read. The second is when the author steps back from narrating immediate action and provides the same understanding and context setting that we would supply for ourselves in real life. This is necessary simply because a story comes to us out of the blue. We don’t have the information or experience we need to understand everything or put it into context if we are presented only with a constant stream of action.

When we are in the moment of action, whether in a story or in real life, we are focused on what is before us. Depending on the intensity of events, we may have little or no attention available for reflection. All our attention is focused on the moment. Such moments are often thrilling in one way or another. Sometimes we go out of our way to seek or create such moments for the excitement they bring and the pleasurable emotions they evoke. This is one reason we seek out stories of danger and adventure in our otherwise safe, dull, modern lives. But just as in life, so in stories, we can’t be in a perpetual state of excitement. Sometimes we need to withdraw from the immediate action to rest, reflect, and make sense of what we have experienced.

Typically, a story moves back and forth between the two modes, for much the same reason as we move back and forth between them in real life. It is often in reflective mode that we discover the possibilities suggested by the drama we have just witnessed, which then motivates us to read on to discover what happens next. Without those pauses for reflection, we might miss the essential tension that drives the story. Constant unremitting action quickly becomes meaningless noise.

I often say that stories create experiences, and this mirroring of the two modes of consciousness in the two modes of reading helps explain why our brains process stories the way they process real experiences, and why we have such a hunger for stories.

But one of the key lessons in this for the writer is that they need to manage the transitions between the immediate and reflective parts of their story in a way that matches the reader’s natural way of moving between immediate and reflective modes in real life. Get this wrong, and the story loses its natural flow and feels awkward and clunky. If the story switches to reflective mode in the middle of an active scene, when the reader’s consciousness is in immediate mode, that intrusion will pull them out of the scene. It will force them out of immediate mode and into reflective mode.

This is why I object to the idea of scattering bits of backstory through the action of an opening scene. Unless it is immediately relevant to the present moment of action, backstory is a reflective element. It exists to explain the current action or to suggest the direction of future action. If a character would not pause to reflect on the causes of war when a large, angry man is swinging a heavy chunk of metal at his head, then the story should not reflect on it in that moment either. Doing so yanks the reader out of the immediate experience of dodging a swinging sword and bumps them back into an historical analysis of the cause of the war. This breaks the drama of the scene. It takes the wind out of its sails. The thrill is gone. The adrenaline drops.

Now, I do understand the thinking behind this idea of sprinkling in the backstory throughout the early action. The thought is that the reader’s adrenaline is up. They are desperate to know what happens next. This creates some momentum that the writer can exploit to drop in some boring backstory while the reader’s excitement propels them through to the next bit of action. It’s basically the strategy of hiding a pill in a spoonful of jam. But as anyone who has tried that knows, every child quickly learns to eat the jam and spit out the pill. When it comes to a story, though, the jam loses its sweetness as soon as the action is interrupted, and the result is more likely to be that the reader spits out the whole story, jam and pill together, because the interruption has robbed them of the immediacy that made the story pleasurable in the first place.

Why can’t the reader just flip back and forth between immediate and reflective mode at will? Why should this technique create such a problem? I suspect that the entry into immediate mode is expensive. It is expensive in the literary sense in that it requires some number of well-chosen words to beguile the reader into seeing the world of the story with the same kind of immediacy with which they see immediate events in real life. The brain has to interpret words to form the immediate picture of a story, and that burns the glucose that fuels the synapses.

But more fundamentally, I believe, it is mentally taxing to make these transitions in real life. If we are interrupted by a sudden event while in a reflective state in real life, we are, quite literally, startled, and it takes a moment to compose ourselves and get our bearings in immediate things. The reflective mind has ceased to track events in the outside world and is focused inward, and it takes a moment to orient itself to the immediate once again. And similarly, if one is in a busy place with lots of coming and going, lots of noises and lights and movement, it is hard to block it out and reflect inwardly. The transitions between immediate and reflective modes are expensive in both directions.

This does not mean that the brain never wants to make the transition. After a period of intense action, the brain is desperate to reflect and consolidate the impressions of the experience it has just had. When a period of reflection is complete and there is little more to ponder, the brain becomes hungry for sensation once again. In other words, after action, we seek contemplation. After contemplation, we seek action. But the desire to transition from one to the other is driven by satiation or exhaustion in the current mode.

By the same token, forcing these transitions when we are not in a state of satiation or exhaustion with the current mode is both distracting and tiring. This being the case, the idea that one can slip in a quick bit of backstory without killing the momentum of the reader’s attention from one immediate passage to the next across a gulf of dreary backstory is not nearly as clever as it might sound.

Or at least, it is so for me. But given how ubiquitous the advice is to do exactly this to get your backstory in, and given that my friend apparently does not find it distracting in the same way I do, I have to wonder why. Am I the oddball here? Is mine the only brain that can’t make these frequent mode shifts effortlessly? Is my whole theory simply nonsense? Or is it the case that for some readers, no such mode shifts are taking place, and that they are staying in one mode or the other through the whole passage?

That last possibility is worth talking about. For one thing, it is certainly possible to bring backstory into a scene without leaving immediate mode. This can occur in a number of ways. The key is that the backstory must have immediate relevance to the moment in which it is mentioned, and it must be plausible that it would occur to the character in that moment, despite all that is going on around them. A soldier sees a figure on the battlefield who looks like his father. A mother finds a doll that her missing daughter used to carry everywhere. A girl catches the scent of lilacs on the wind that reminds her of home. All these reflections belong to and are triggered by the action of the moment. The past and the present are entwined with each other, and as long as we present them as entwined in a way that is plausible in the moment, we both can and should bring scenes of the past into the immediate action.

But simply dumping backstory into an action scene is not entwining past and present as they are sometimes entwined in life. If the action of the moment would not provoke the remembrance in the moment, then it seems to me unlikely that it will fit smoothly into the reader’s immediate experience of the scene. It certainly does not do so for me.

Similarly, the vivid recall of immediate events can and does occur in moments of reflection. They are what we reflect on, after all. Indeed, we may observe a scene unfolding before our eyes while remaining in reflective mode. We will often do so if there is nothing in the scene to surprise us or engage our emotions. Our reaction to such events in reflective mode is analytical rather than visceral. And this may be what the author of a particular work intends. It is characteristic of literary fiction, for instance, to invite us to receive the work and its incidents in an analytical spirit rather than in the mode of immersion in the action.

This means that in the kind of scene that my friend and I were talking about—a battle scene frequently intercut with snippets of backstory—a reader might receive the whole thing in reflective mode. Indeed, that was the problem that I had with the scene. The frequent changes from immediate scene to backstory caused my brain to observe the whole scene in reflective mode. After the first backstory insertion, I could no longer transition back to immediate mode. I read the rest of it in reflective mode. But in reflective mode, I found little in it to engage me.

Maybe the problem is that I wanted to read that scene in immediate mode, whereas my friend, and presumably the many people who follow the rule of sprinkling backstory into your action scenes, and their many readers, are reading the whole thing in reflective mode and not expecting to read it any other way.

After all, you can certainly relate action scenes in reflective mode, just as you can review evidence in a court of law. The exact same events can be related in a way that invites us to stand back and reflect on them, or in a way that invites us to become absorbed in them as if we were there in real life. Both these approaches have a legitimate place in literature. Both of them can produce a satisfactory reading experience in the right context. Could it be that readers who prefer their backstory dribbled into their action scenes are reading in reflective mode all along and therefore accept the backstory as simply more fodder for reflection?

Or maybe it is just the opposite. Maybe their minds are so fixed in immediate mode when they read a story that these insertions of backstory are not distracting enough to bump them out of it. Maybe I am wrong about the cost of such transitions, and other people can move back and forth between modes with little or no cost. I am, I will admit, a very easily distracted reader.

All the same, I don’t think that this is the right way to deal with backstory. I think that backstory should come in only when it adds to the tension of the story, at which point it can all come in together, as long as it is actually relevant and actually adds to the tension rather than being a lot of feigned history with no relevance to the present moment in the story. Backstory should still be a good story, and if it is a good story, it does it no good to chop it up into little pieces and scatter it into another story.

Now I should say at this point that I do think there is a role for inserting backstory into an action scene, even when the characters themselves would not naturally reflect on the backstory at that point in the action. This arises because the reader is, as it were, arriving in the middle. It is like observing a quarrel between two people who have known each other all their lives and turning to a bystander to explain what it is they are fighting about. The key here is that without the backstory, you can’t understand what is at stake, and so the argument is just generic shouting. You need the backstory to provide the context that adds tension and drama to the scene. But this is by no means an easy thing to pull off, and in many cases, the writer might have been better advised to choose a different starting point.

All that said, I don’t think my simple dichotomy of immediate and reflective modes entirely captures the nature of reading. The reader, I think, has a dual presence even in the most immediate parts of the story. Even though our minds process a story the same way they process real experience, yet when we read, we do not forget that we are reading a story. However vividly we may be on a battlefield or on the deck of a storm-tossed ship, we are also sitting in our chair with our book in our hands and our cup of tea on the table beside us. This is why I chose the term immediate, meaning being in the moment, as opposed to the term immersive, which seems to imply being fully and exclusively in the experience. A reader, I think, is never immersed in quite the same way as they can be in a movie, which operates by bombarding the senses. A book operates by an appeal to memory, and thus seems always to involve a degree of dual presence which is perhaps one of the principal virtues of text as a medium. A book can scare you much more deeply than a movie can, but it cannot startle you with sound and light the way a movie can.

A movie has trouble trying to pull back from the immediate and the immersive, while the author of a story can at one point plunge us into immediate experience and at another pull us back for a reflective interlude. A movie is action all the time, even if that action is sometimes fast and sometimes slow. This is why “show, don’t tell” is good advice for movies and bad advice for novels.

But even within an immediate passage, we as readers can pause at any time, even in the most thrilling scene, and reflect for ourselves on what we are seeing. This capacity for reflection in the midst of action may exist to some extent in life and in other media, but written fiction provides the greatest scope for such reflection. Our dual presence, both in the moment of the action and in reflective leisure in our armchair, is nowhere more available, or more enriching, than when we are reading a book.

Of course, the author cannot directly induce such reflections, nor can they directly control them. All they can do is to create a story so vivid and immediate that the reader will be moved to reflect on something strikingly real, and thus perhaps to become better acquainted with reality. That is, presumably, what the author wants, unless they are a propagandist. But often the author will not trust themselves to have adequately shown the real, or trust their reader to have correctly perceived what they were being shown. The author may then try to direct the reflections, to lead them, or to include them specifically in the text, to force the reader to reflect as the author directs. And perhaps this causes the author, consciously or subconsciously, to push the reader into reflective mode rather than active mode in the hope of better directing the message that they take from the story.

And perhaps, in some cases at least, the reader prefers to be led in this way, assuredly into the path of familiar and safe reflections. Perhaps untamed experience is more than the reader dares face, knowing that it contains within it the possibility of shattering their comfortable worldview. Perhaps they prefer to be guided through the gory action bits in much the same way that they would rather review the details of a crime outlined by a prosecutor in a courtroom than be present at the scene of a crime. And this is not simply because the scene of the crime is a physically dangerous place, but because we can trust the prosecutor, by his office, to present a clear version of the crime with a clear sense of right and wrong and a clear and fixed bias towards law and order. Seeing the thing play out in real time might be messier, not only physically but morally. Perhaps the general preference is the version of the story that has been sanitized for your protection.

But I don’t know. I’m groping for an explanation of why anyone would want backstory dribbled into an action scene before it has any relevance to the present moment of the story. Is this just lazy advice given to writers who cannot figure out where their story properly begins, or who do not know how to structure a story to establish and maintain tension through the development of the narrative? Or does it accomplish something that the typical reader who is not me actually wants from a story? And if so, is it for the reasons I speculated on above? Or have I missed the point of it entirely? Instruct me in the comments.