The Year of the Villain: Discovering the Engine of Story Through Your Antagonist 

Stories are built on the premise that the past shapes the present. Regret, nostalgia, guilt, grief—they are the building blocks of fiction. Ever since Lot’s wife glanced back at the city she was fleeing, the characters we’ve encountered in literature have been unable to keep themselves from looking to the past. It’s human nature, after all. Despite the warnings—don’t look back or you’ll turn to salt—we are preoccupied with our own personal histories, and with our inability to change or reclaim them.

So I was puzzled when I opened the November/December 2012 issue of this magazine and read Benjamin Percy’s essay “Don’t Look Back: The Problem With Backstory,” in which he argues that backstory is “almost always unnecessary.” Almost always unnecessary? I scratched my head. I might have scoffed. I felt like Jay Gatsby, breathless with disbelief. “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!”

Sure, there are writers who manage to tell knockout stories with virtually no backstory. Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, and J. D. Salinger all wrote deeply involving stories without offering backstage access to their characters’ histories. These kinds of stories, often told in objective or nearly objective points of view, over compressed periods of time, offer a special kind of pleasure—the pleasure of intuiting what lies beneath the surface of the iceberg.

But fiction offers endless other pleasures. What about Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (Knopf, 2010), a book that defies genre and redefines time? What about Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (Amistad, 2003), a novel that leaps forward as frequently as it flashes back? What about Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which, perhaps more than any other work of fiction, seeks to capture the act of remembrance? All of these works have only a token relationship to any present, and any emotional effect achieved there depends upon the backward glance. To dismiss backstory is to dismiss a powerful technique, one that deserves closer attention.

I share Percy’s frustration with poorly dispatched backstory. I too have read my fill of workshop manuscripts that interpret backstory exclusively through the aptly named “Scooby-Doo trick,” the clunky device borrowed from television and film, which too often form the frame of reference for young writers. Here is a story about John, beating the crap out of his kid. Space break, and cue flashback to John’s dad, beating the crap out of John. Got it. At its worst, backstory is reduced to diagnosis, a lame game of connect-the-dots. 

But I’m even more disappointed with the workshop story that has no sense of the past whatsoever. Page after page, John goes around beating the crap out of people with no rhyme or reason. John’s author has not chosen to cleverly reveal the past through dialogue or action or some other objective correlative, but has left it out altogether. Why? I find myself writing in the margin. What happened? What about his father? When I ask the author these questions, I discover that John indeed has no father, that he sprang from the mind of the author alone, in middle age. This is unfortunate. I’m left craving backstory, the weight of history, the magic of motivation. Too many amateur stories are built on the thin and faulty foundation of the present. Well, characters weren’t born yesterday, and neither were most readers. 

What do we mean when we say backstory? Sometimes we conflate this term with flashback, but they’re not quite the same thing. To use the term of French literary theorist Gérard Genette, backstory is any incident of analepsis: “any evocation after the fact of an event that took place earlier than the point in the story where we are at any given moment.” That evocation can come through either scene or summary. Janet Burroway and Elizabeth and Ned Stuckey-French, the authors of the very good textbook Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (the eighth edition of which was published by Longman in 2010), acknowledge that “many beginning writers use unnecessary flashbacks.” But they also write that “Flashback—in either scene or summary—is one of the most magical of fiction’s contrivances, easier and more effective in this medium than in any other, because the reader’s mind is a swifter mechanism for getting into the past than anything that has been devised for stage and film.” The authors equate the word backstory with background. I tend to use flashback to refer to scene and backstory to refer to summary.

It’s as easy to write weak backstory as it is to write a clunky and obvious flashback. No reader of fiction wants to read biography, and yet many beginning writers believe that the fastest way to develop a story is to hand over a character’s résumé on a silver platter. This is generally a bad idea. We don’t need to know the answers to the character’s password-protection questions—the name of his first pet, the city where his father was born (though, off-page, the author should have some idea). We all know that we should resist the impulse to tell, to explain.

But backstory and flashback are no more vulnerable to the threats of bad writing than frontstory—if I may argue for this handy term. Bad backstory explains. Good backstory uses the same tools available at any other point in a narrative to invite the reader into a world more three-dimensional than the present alone.

Benjamin Percy seems to suggest a reasonable kind of compromise: a restrained, summarized slice of history tucked surreptitiously, here and there, into a briskly moving frontstory scene, like a little shredded carrot in the banana bread. He also says that backstory can work when arranged as the answer to a cliffhanger, as in Michael Chabon’s newest novel, Telegraph Avenue (Harper, 2012).

I agree that these are skillful methods of managing backstory, and that Chabon is a master of this particular trick. A closer look at Chabon’s body of work, however, reveals dozens more backstory flavors. I could offer examples from all over literature; finding stories and novels without effective backstory is the challenge. But Chabon’s fiction is a great place to start. Indeed, it proves that backstory isn’t a burden to be managed but an opportunity to be mined.

Sometimes backstory simply demands the primacy of flashback. Indeed, if it’s showing we’re after, why not go for broke with the immediacy of a full-fledged scene? Chabon does just this in Telegraph Avenue. Twenty pages into the novel, after getting to know Luther Stallings and Chandler Bankwell Flowers III in the 2004 frontstory, we suddenly climb into their DeLorean and travel back three decades: “On a Saturday night in August 1973, outside the Bit o’Honey Lounge, a crocodile-green ’70 Toronado sat purring its crocodile purr. Its chrome grin stretched beguiling and wide as the western horizon.” There’s nothing parenthetical about this backstory. It’s a wholly formed scene with seven luxurious pages to develop, enough time for a gun to be introduced and for it to go off. 

Could the novel survive without this scene? Probably. Perhaps Chabon could simply allude to this night in casual conversation. But what a shame that would be! We’d be deprived of the chance to see these characters in their reckless youth, to breathe inside that Toronado with them, and to fully appreciate the road they’ve traveled together since that day. Traditional flashbacks are used to equally dazzling effect in many of Chabon’s other novels. What would The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Random House, 2000) be, after all, without the return to Joe Kavalier’s epic escape out of Prague in the Golem’s coffin?

Novelists, of course, can afford to spend a greater proportion of their pages in backstory since they are under less pressure to make each word matter. Furthermore, the grander scale of the novel, the necessary architecture of plot and subplot, often require a more detailed attention to the events of the past. But even Chabon’s short fiction is soaked with backstory. 

His wonderful story “Mrs. Box,” from Werewolves in Their Youth (Random House, 1999), about a bankrupt optometrist named Eddie Zwang, is as good an example as any. In an effort to both outrun and salvage his past, Eddie takes a detour down memory lane, paying a surprise visit to his ex-wife’s senile grandmother, Oriole. Chabon paints a terrifically detailed picture of Oriole’s sour-smelling apartment, in which every trinket, photograph, and piece of furniture tells us volumes about her very long life. Halfway through the story, Oriole’s necklace, an anniversary gift from her dead husband, begins to take on a literal weight. But Chabon doesn’t just let these objects speak for themselves; he uses them as a departure for his character’s own associations:

“I sleep with it on, you know,” she said, “though at times it lies quite heavy on my windpipe.”

“Seventy-two years,” said Eddie, enviously, too softly for Oriole to hear. He and Dolores had been married thirty-one months before parting. There had been an extramarital kiss, entrepreneurial disaster, a miscarried baby, sexual malaise, and then very soon they had been forced to confront the failure of an expedition for which they had set out remarkably ill-equipped, like a couple of trans-Arctic travelers who through lack of preparation find themselves stranded and are forced to eat their dogs. Eddie had known for a long time—since his wedding day—that it was not a strong marriage, but now, for the first time, it occurred to him that this was because he and Dolores were not strong people; they had not been able to bear the weight of married love upon their windpipes.

The backstory continues for another full page, in which we learn more about Eddie and Dolores’s disastrous end. Is this summary explaining? Maybe. But I can’t help but think that, if this backstory were amputated, the story would feel incomplete, unrealized. I might feel pleasantly involved in decoding the mystery of this family through the clues around me, but in the end, I’d feel locked out of the room, disregarded. In the margin, I’d write Why? 

A more cautious writer might shy away from such an obvious use of symbol-as-memory-jogger. This is the third kind of “recognition” in Aristotle’s Poetics, the one that “depends on memory when the sight of some object awakens a feeling.” In Chabon’s hands, the technique is subtly effective, and realistic: We do associate objects with memories, after all. And this summarized backstory doesn’t interrupt the narrative; it enriches it. If the past is on a character’s mind—and in this story, the insufferable weight of Eddie’s past is the whole point—why shouldn’t we have access to those memories? Why play a guessing game?

Chabon’s short story “Along the Frontage Road” gives us one more powerful example of backstory. The background we get here, about a page into a father and son’s visit to a pumpkin farm, is carefully controlled, the restraint matching the numb state of the narrator:

But we had both wanted to get out of the house, where ordinary sounds—a fork against a plate, the creak of a stair tread—felt like portents, and you could not escape the smell of the flowers, heaped everywhere, as if some venerable mobster had died. In fact the deceased was a girl of seventeen weeks, a theoretical daughter startled in the darkness and warmth of her mother’s body, or so I imagine it, by a jet of cool air and a fatal glint of light. It was my wife who had suggested that Nicky and I might as well go and pick out the pumpkin for that year.

I can’t help but think of Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Ele-phants,” also about the distressing effects of an abortion. That story offers us nothing but surface clues; it is a guessing game of sorts. Part of the pleasure of reading it is figuring out what kind of “procedure” the couple is talking about. Here, the pleasure isn’t in figuring out what—Chabon’s narrator has graciously filled us in with a swift summary—but in understanding how: how the family got to this point, and how they will manage to move on. This example also teaches us that backstory doesn’t have to reach back to childhood; it can simply reach back to last week. It can even reach back to this morning, when the eggs were burned at breakfast. Good backstory comes in countless forms, but it always establishes the emotional stakes on which the present action hinges. Chabon’s command of backstory reminds us that characters very often live in their memories, and by allowing us a peek into their memory vaults, he invites us to bear witness to the wistful, bittersweet connection between past and present, which happens to be, as much as anything, what his work—and so much of literature—is about. 

The world would be a bland place without backstory, and yet the story doesn’t stop there. There are a thousand and one ways to use backstory in fiction—just as many ways as there are to manipulate time. Indeed, the term backstory assumes a profluent, primarily linear story with a clear “first narrative”—another concept Genette examines in his classic Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Cornell University Press, 1983)—and a traditional relationship between that narrative and the important events in the past. Thankfully, literature offers as many exceptions to that rule as the rule itself. Some stories don’t flow forward at all; some flow backward. For example, Lorrie Moore’s wonderful “How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes),” from Self-Help (Knopf, 1985), operates on what Genette calls “retrograde movement.” Some stories operate on “Switchback Time,” a term proposed by Joan Silber in The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes (Graywolf Press, 2009). She holds up Alice Munro as a master of this mode, in which the narrative time periods are so interdependent that no single one is dominant; instead, two or more related periods of time “switch” back and forth, like a winding mountain road. Edward P. Jones’s intricately woven and obsessively backward-glancing stories, many of which span three generations in thirty pages, belong in this category as well. Yes, a story can capture time, moment by moment, but it can also compress it or extend it; it can flash back or zoom forward; it can walk; it can skip; it can circle the block until it finds a parking space; it can haunt; it can expect; it can forget.

To assume that all narratives must flow forward, then—and that backstory is a sandbag to narrative velocity—is to limit a story’s potential for interpreting the experience of time passing. And writers have been taking important advantage of anachrony—a disruption of a purely chronological narrative—since the Iliad. “We will not be so foolish as to claim that anachrony is either a rarity or a modern invention,” writes Genette. “On the contrary, it is one of the traditional resources of literary narration.” 

Benjamin Percy concludes that you can do anything if you do it well. Here we can wholeheartedly agree. But backstory is not a technique so advanced you need a black belt to attempt it. You just need curiosity, control, and an appreciation for time travel—that Gatsbyesque desire to repeat the past. In real life, we may not be able to go back in time, but in fiction? Why, of course we can. 

Eleanor Henderson is the author of the novel Ten Thousand Saints (Ecco), which was named one of the Top Ten Books of 2011 by the New York Times and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction. She is an assistant professor at Ithaca College.