Okay, so this is part writing tip, part rant. Generally I get excellent reviews for ‘Maldene’, but a couple of them also asked, “But where are all the character backstories?”, as if every character involved must have a backstory before Chapter Two. There’s just a few problems with that philosophy (besides ending up with things like endless numbers of spinoffs of even the least tertiary characters in a certain space fantasy franchise).

First off, not all characters need a backstory, at least not right off the bat, and some don’t need any at all. Using my own Maldene novels as an example (why not?), there’s a group of mercenaries in there, and being what they are you can basically guess their backstories; no need to devote extra time and space to the minutia of why they became mercenaries (unless there’s one particular character with a very particular background that figures into the main plot). Then there’s a couple of main characters of whom we get all the backstory that we need in the first couple of paragraphs of Sabu’s first diary entry: Bronto came from a vineyard family and got bored, Candol’s a priest who grew up in a church (you can tell that much from the way he acts), Sabu says of himself that he just graduated wizard school, and so on. What more do you need? Sometimes lesser is better and you can fill in more details later on.

Then there’s the mystery. Remember Clint Eastwood and the Man With No Name? I don’t think anyone ever found out his backstory. No backstory up front means you can carry the mystery along for a while. For example, in Maldene, the backstory of the character ‘Mauklo’ is about as forthcoming as anything that man says; oh we find out bits and pieces of it over time, but that’s over the course of the first THREE novels. Or Miro, my big bad (or any Big Bad, for that matter), finding out HIS backstory is really the whole point of the entire thirteen book series. Supply too much backstory and you take all the mystery out of Mystery.

Not everyone needs a backstory, and for others you can reveal parts of it as you go along when or if it is relevant. Now, the writer can have some backstories for each of his characters written up somewhere in his notes, but he needn’t state it flat out like a dictionary definition, but rather, knowing what a character’s backstory is, the writer can use that knowledge to affect that character’s actions and attitudes (then let the reader’s guess the rest). For example, if a man absolutely hates all Dwarves and just grunts or says, “I don’t wanna talk about it,” then the reader might guess he had some defining incident at some time in his past; no reason to come right out and state everything. Inserting endless backstories can slow down the story, insert irrelevant and meaningless details, and even result in information overload.

On the other hand, there are times when a certain amount of backstory is required, but only as much as needed. In the first book in my Cyberdawn series, the first section is basically devoted to a series of backstories for the key characters, but never in any grand mini-series detail. You get that the character Blackjack is a tough cop within a paragraph and find out over time that he’s ex-military, then the rest of his ‘backstory’ chapter involves how he gets involved with things. Anya is a corporate assassin of whom you find out enough of her past to explain a few things, but no need to go through a play by play of her entire childhood.

There are books where you see all you need to know about a given character in the first paragraph, others where the character’s initial appearance and the first line he says is all you need; it’s called efficiency in storytelling. Or Luke in the original Star Wars; you get all you need of his backstory when he walks out onto the sands from his pit of a home complaining about shooting womp rats out in Begger’s Canyon. Never a need to over-tell things.

Then there are movie franchises where every least little character gets an 8-episode, 3-season, series explaining everything of that character’s backstory and it all ends up as tedious as one might imagine, with fans complaining while the movie execs point out that everyone had been asking for endless ‘content’.

Content gets you tedium; measured dissemination of information gets you storytelling, and in the end that’s the whole point.