Backstory includes all the events from your characters’ pasts, details about their origins, plus any essential background information necessary to advance the narrative. These elements are necessary for building well-conceived characters and a story that builds in meaning as it progresses.
Your characters don’t just emerge from nowhere; they have lives prior to the events of the story.
In this article, I’ll explore the variety of ways to incorporate backstory, why backstory is an essential aspect of good storytelling, then I’ll give you a Story Weapon to show you how to use it strategically for a more compelling narrative.
Backstory is the past that shapes your characters’ motivations, emotions, and capacity for change, giving depth and meaning to the present story. Used with restraint and revealed only when it serves the narrative, backstory strengthens character arcs, raises emotional stakes, and makes transformation feel earned rather than explained.
What is Backstory?
Backstory covers the history that existed before page one. This includes the experiences, relationships, defining moments, and even environments that shape who a character is before the story begins.
Backstory gives readers the sense that your story didn’t just somehow come into existence on page one — that there’s depth beneath the surface. Backstory works best when it isn’t just told, but felt in the way that characters behave, react, and make decisions.
Backstory vs biography
It’s important to understand that backstory differs from character biography. A detailed account of your protagonist’s birth, the schools they attended, the milestones and specific accomplishments achieved may be useful to you as the writer, but will likely be irrelevant to the reader, unless the details somehow affect what’s happening in the “now.”
Why Backstory Matters
When used properly, backstory performs three critical jobs.
Explains motivation
A character’s actions aren’t random. Obsessions, fears, loyalties, and flaws all come from somewhere. Backstory is what gives the cause-and-effect logic to a character’s behaviors and decisions.
A detective who won’t let a case go. A parent who refuses to take risks. A partner who avoids intimacy. These behaviors become meaningful to a reader when they understand what shaped them in the past.
Adds emotional depth
Backstory carries emotional weight. It allows readers to understand not just what a character is doing, but why they are doing it. When readers understand the emotional history behind a moment in your story, you can increase the stakes without employing bigger explosions or a rising body count. Your story becomes richer because the emotions are anchored by a lived experience.
Fuels character change
In many stories, especially character-driven ones, backstory is the engine behind a character arc.
At the beginning of a story, the protagonist is beset by a dilemma and tends to have a limiting belief about themselves or the world. This belief was built and cemented by a past experience, a detail from their backstory. Whether it’s trauma, loss, or a deeply ingrained worldview, their backstory explains why change is difficult and why the story is necessary to dramatize their transformation.
Backstory for the writer vs. Backstory for the reader
As mentioned before, what a reader and a writer need to know are rarely the same, and aren’t known at the same time.
Being the writer, you are the one who knows everything about your characters. More than you will ever put on the page. Building timelines, imagining key moments and experiences, and exploring emotional history are all valuable parts in creating a character and their story.
But readers don’t need all of that information to connect with a character or understand your story.
For readers, backstory has to earn its place. When it doesn’t, those details can become an unnecessary bump in an otherwise smooth-flowing story.
Here’s a useful rule to keep in mind: if a piece of backstory doesn’t affect the plot, the conflict, or the character’s decisions in the present, it probably doesn’t belong in the story.
Backstory exists to serve and strengthen the narrative — not to showcase your preparation or character-building skills.
Main types of backstory
When choosing the type of backstory you want to incorporate into your own story, take into account that each form has its own strengths, drawbacks, and risks.
Context backstory
This often appears through the description of past environments like homes, time periods, cultures, or emotional climates. Context backstory ties the past to objects that carry significance.
This type of backstory works best when it enriches the mood and theme without stalling the story.
Memory and recollection
This type of backstory occurs in moments that are brief and often internal when a character remembers the past. These moments are often triggered by something in the present: a person, a smell, a song, maybe an event.
Memory and recollection are used to offer insight, but shouldn’t pull the story fully backward.
Flashbacks
These are fully dramatized scenes from the past. Flashbacks can be powerful because they show rather than just tell, allowing readers to immerse more fully in formative moments.
Despite their power, this type of backstory has a high cost: flashbacks interrupt the narrative momentum and flow. These need to be reserved for moments when the emotional payoff justifies that interruption.
Drip backstory
As its name implies, drip backstory reveals information gradually across the story. Over time, small details come to light, slowly building curiosity and emotional investment. This is the most versatile and widely effective approach, especially when it comes to longer works.
Exposition or summary
This is known as one of the most efficient ways to share backstory — simply by telling it. However, you should only use this type of backstory in small, controlled amounts. Exposition can ground readers quickly, but too much of it turns into a boring information dump. Restraint is key here.
Dialogue-based backstory
Dialogue can be a natural way to carry backstory, especially when characters have a logical reason to talk about the past. What you need to watch out for here is creating artificial conversations where characters explain things they already know just for the reader’s benefit. Keep in mind that any information shared in dialogue should come up from tension or need in the present of the story.
When to reveal backstory
Timing matters more than quantity.
Revealing backstory moves the story backward and pauses the narrative’s forward motion. This means you need to control when backstory details appear.
Loading the backstory into the opening pages is one of the most common mistakes a writer can make. Often, this feels like a necessary step to set up the story, but it can feel like a delay to readers. Strong openings should raise questions and focus on the present moment.
Again, keep in mind this rule of thumb: revealing backstory isn’t necessary until the reader needs it to understand what’s happening in the now of a narrative.
Withholding backstory builds tension and subtext. Consider only telling your reader what they need to know in order to advance the story. Readers typically enjoy piecing together clues and forming theories — having light bulb moments when new information emerges is one of the quiet thrills in reading a well-told story..
Common backstory mistakes
Okay, now let’s go over some of the common mistakes you need to avoid:
- Revealing too much too soon
- Including details that don’t affect the present story
- Explaining emotions instead of letting readers feel them
- Writing backstory to satisfy the author rather than the narrative
If you find yourself in doubt, try cutting the backstory and check if your story gets stronger. If it does, then omitting those backstory details, at least for now, is the right move.
Your story weapon: Disguising and dramatizing backstory
Although backstory can pause, or even pull a story narrative backwards, it doesn’t have. The goal is to integrate it so smoothly that readers barely notice it as a separate element.
Showing instead of telling becomes very important here. A character’s past can be hinted at through behavior, emotional reactions, and sensory details. Readers can be very observant and often infer more from these instead of any written explanation.
Backstory works best as a way to reveal rather than justify. Allow behavior to come first. Habits. Reactions. Beliefs. Don’t explain them before they happen. Then, when the past is revealed, your readers delight in their light bulb moment by reframing what they’ve just seen.
Finally, let characters “earn” their backstory. Revelations are the most effective when they occur when silence isn’t possible anymore — when stakes, conflict, or heavy emotion force the past into the open.
Backstory is about how the past presses against the present of the narrative: shaping choices, raising stakes, and making change meaningful.
If you use this tool with intention and restraint, backstory can deepen character, strengthen motivation, and give emotional weight to the now of your story. The key to backstory is keeping in mind that your readers don’t need every detail — only what matters, when it matters.
Join one of my next workshops, The 90-Day Novel or The 90-Day Memoir, where we’ll practice weaving backstory into action, dialogue, and character choices. Let the history beneath your story deepen the present instead of slowing it down.
