• Welcome to The Cave of Dragonflies forums, where the smallest bugs live alongside the strongest dragons.

    Guests are not able to post messages or even read certain areas of the forums. Now, that's boring, don't you think? Registration, on the other hand, is simple, completely free of charge, and does not require you to give out any personal information at all. As soon as you register, you can take part in some of the happy fun things at the forums such as posting messages, voting in polls, sending private messages to people and being told that this is where we drink tea and eat cod.

    Of course I'm not forcing you to do anything if you don't want to, but seriously, what have you got to lose? Five seconds of your life?

Backstory-showing Help

hopeandjoy

hopeandjoy

yan ya yan ya yaa iii yaaa
All of my characters have backstories to explain their past and motives. They're actually some of my favorite things about writing, other than killing them all off.

The problem is, I'm writing in third limited and I don't think dialogue can do it as much justice as a flashback.

Also, I really need to explain my villian, but I don't want his ranting to be too forced.

Any advice?
 
You could, in a certain chapter or whatever, switch the point of view to that of the character who needs to, erm mentally explain the backstory. But I'd be careful not to just suddenly change the point-of-view mid-scene, of course.
 
if you have a significant amount of backstory-explaining to do, and the characters can't each explain all of it, you have quite a bit more explaining to do than just the backstories.
 
Show the flashbacks? Third-limited is what Harry Potter is written in, right? Or alternatively, third-limited is when the narration is in third person and you can see inside one character's head?

Well, it didn't stop J.K. from making chapters like The Boy Who Lived or The Riddle House, so it shouldn't stop you from just sneaking in a section or two where the reader sees past events unfold as if they were there. We don't have to see the action from the perspective of the main character, we can just watch it as if we were a security camera, as if you, the author, were simply taking notes. I think this would give the reader the desired message efficiently enough?
 
Be wary of what the readers do and don't need to know. What might seem necessary to you might be superfluous to others. Things can be pieced together over the course of a story if they really need to be known, and you can also use dialogue to infer a wide variety of ideas and motivations. Let the mystery be part of the tension, building to a fever pitch until the hero screams at the villain, "Why would you do this?!"

When you really do need to introduce some backstory, devoting a chapter to it is a fair method. It allows you to take a snapshot of that moment in the past, opening and closing that one story without puncturing the overarching plot. That's sort of the point of division by chapters, anyway.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom