What Is a Novel?

on backstory as “research”

When I started drafting my novel-in-progress, I kept getting sucked into backstory, like the quicksand in a ‘90s kids show. I’d try to write a scene with two characters, and I could not stop myself from delving into the entire story of their relationship, from how they met and what they first bonded over to their biggest fight and what private resentments each might still carry from it and the origins of their inside jokes and on and on. The protagonist’s mother entered a scene, and the story jumped back decades, to her upbringing and how she met the protagonist’s father and the letter he wrote after he left her alone to raise their daughter.

At first I resisted this urge, tried to keep myself focused on the scenes I’d set out to write. But the pull of backstory was so strong, I soon gave in—everyone who watched those kids shows knows that struggling against quicksand is futile. It was clear I needed to get this stuff onto the page, if only for myself.

I spent most of a year writing tens of thousands of words of backstory, knowing I would probably use very little of it, if any. Scenes from the protagonist’s childhood relationship with her grandfather were not going to be part of the book, I was pretty sure, but apparently I needed to know the stories her grandfather told her in order to know how she would act and what she would feel during the novel’s main action. Not because she would draw on any of those stories directly—never anything as didactic as that—but because they were part of the makeup of her psyche, and so I needed to know them.

It’s hard enough to make real people feel like multidimensional, believable characters on the page in nonfiction. (I’ve even written about how hard it is.) But when you’re dealing with real people, at least the quirks and layers and contradictions are all there already, even if you don’t understand them or know how best to describe them. Whatever a real person does is by necessity an authentic expression of the depth of their character (even when they’re doing something “out of character”). But with fiction, that depth is only there if you tunnel in and make it.

This may sound obvious, but it’s also been one of the biggest new challenges of this new-to-me genre, so I’ve been thinking about it a lot: Not just the fact of having to create characters from scratch, but what that really entails, and how it compares to rendering the already extant characters from my real life in nonfiction.

I started to think of this backstory work as getting to the starting line of a memoir project, or equivalent to the research stage in other kinds of nonfiction: With memoir you go into it knowing your own life story (at least generally), with researched nonfiction you may have to conduct interviews or read journals or letters or secondary accounts to get to the point where you can start writing the story you want to write, and with fiction you have to build the equivalent foundational knowledge by making it up. Once I started to think of this backstory I was writing as a corollary to research, it made a lot more sense to me, and I stopped feeling like I should rush through it.

I imagined at first that creating characters might be a muscle that gets stronger with use, until eventually you can dream up a multidimensional little weirdo fully formed, without having to give them a whole life story and all of the attendant baggage. And this may be true. But, I’ve also learned, sometimes even the pros need to spend a long time getting to know a character before they can tell their story.

I mentioned to a few novelist friends that I kept getting sucked into the quicksand of backstory, had to write tens of thousands of words of it before I could get to the story I was trying to tell, and every one of them gave a slow nod of recognition, a look coming into their eyes like they were remembering many many pages of their own unused material. In a (wonderful) recent interview with

Frump Feelings

, celebrated mystery writer Liz Moore talked about doing the same. All of this felt like confirmation I was on the right track.

It's been a relief to discover how many nonfiction skills carry over to fiction (the building blocks of narrative construction, pacing, description, etc.), but it’s been especially fun to get a deeper understanding of exactly what I don’t know. Which is what learning really is, right? Getting a clearer, more detailed picture of what you don’t know, so you can start to fill in the gaps. It feels like the difference between wanting to learn ballet, and wanting to get better extension in a saut de chat: One feels huge, amorphous and impenetrable, while the other may be challenging, but it’s concrete and therefore possible.

Finding my way into the difficult but more and more concrete challenge of making fictional characters feel real has been one of the biggest thrills of this process so far.

“What Is a Novel?” is an ongoing series of dispatches from a work-in-progress, a record of the trial-and-error process of teaching myself how to write a novel. Read past installments here.