Backstory-Only What We Need to Know

The backstory is often a place where the story gets lost. There feels a need (I find this in my own writing process) to explain everything into being: "But before I tell you that, you should know…" and "And the reason she was like this is because when she was a child…" This may be a necessary part of the writing process, for some writers, but it also, in the words of Xu Xi, must be revisted and "slashed and burned." Writing "This had happened once before" is often more powerful alone than with a subsequent paragraph that begins, "The first time it happened had been when she was seven…" Amy Hempel is a master of this. She shows how a frontstory and backstory can work together to create a whole story, how a backstory can be used succinctly to inform the character and the reality in which she (or he) lives.

One method Hempel uses to minimize the meandering backstory is the non-linear narrative. Hempel's stories are often constructed with disparate blocks of time, with fragmented memories or moments that congeal only toward the end, that are linked with only a few recurring words. Backstory pieces mixed in with frontstory pieces, so that they are all frontstory and backstory at the same time. In "Tom Rock Through The Eels", for example, the narrator separates her story with white spaces. First, we get the story of her mother and the bribe she gave her daughter to swim down for the Tom rock. Second, we see the grown daughter sleeping in her father's bed and remembering her dead mother. Third is her grandmother, and the grandmother's pain of losing her daughter. These are disparate, non-linear memories, but they are held together by the memory of the dead mother and the family members' singular and collective pain around the issue. But the story is also held together with other small details. The father section begins: "In California, you are not supposed to sleep beneath bookshelves or paintings or mirrors on the wall." In the grandmother's section (the entire fourth paragraph): "My grandmother sleeps beneath a portrait of her daughter." In this way, Hempel tells a far-reaching story but with incredible economy of words. The backstory and the frontstory are one. We feel the singular and collective pain of the mother/daughter/wife's loss without a long history of each of these relationships and the particular holes left. We don't need to—the small details we get let us know: these holes are present. We feel them.

The fourth section of the story is just this: "My mother said, 'What?' I said, 'I forgot. I forgot what I was going to say.' 'Then it must have been a lie," my mother said.'" This short paragraph gives us no backstory, but tells us a great deal. This is a paragraph about memory, and what it means to forget. The larger story is about remembering the narrator's mother, and other mothers, and about trying to remember "the good things". We are not told where they are when this event occurs, or how old either the mother or the daughter is. It could be on the mother's deathbed, it could be driving the car. Did the daughter ever remember? We don't know. Details are not extrapolated, here. Hempel doesn't tell us, because what she does is distil the moment. Details are extraneous: the point is only what she has left. Backstory, then, in both the story's form and figuratively in the daughter's life, is gone.

Another place we see this is in "Church Cancels Cow." In this short two-page story, the woman walks her dog in the cemetery across from her house. Another woman gets angry because she has found "faces"—feces—on her mother's grave and thinks it to be the woman's dog. They fight, and the other woman follows the woman with the dog. The woman with the dog lies and says that she has relatives buried in the cemetery, when she doesn't. "For peace of mind I will lie about anything at any time." This is where the backstory comes in. "In fact, she says, she has counted three dogs the other day from her car. Like counting cows, in the game I played in cars when the family went out on long drives. My brother and I were told to count cows in the fields we passed along the way…" The sister (after this short paragraph, she is grounded as a person with a relationship—she has a brother, and so is now not just a woman but a sister) remembers the game one way, but her brother reminds her: it was cemetery that cancels cow, not a church, in that counting game they played as children. So the backstory we are given leads us back to the present moment, in which the lying woman is making peace with the woman who found feces on her mother's grave (this character entered the story as a daughter, rather than just as a woman with a dog). The backstory paragraph, if we can call it that, does not give us a lot of information. Was the brother older or younger? Where were they going on the drives? Where did they live? Who would generally win the game? There was no specific anecdote, just a generalized "we would play this game." The specifics that are left out don't matter. What matters is: the cemetery cancels things, it erases, it makes the woman with the dog start over in her counting.

What do backstories add? Backstory seems to be a method useful for the writer to ground his or herself in time, in place, to explore where the character has been before he/she has arrived at the moment of import, that is, the moment that is the center of the story. Stories are stronger without a long backstory, and Hempel shows us how the necessary information of past can be communicated without the heavy-handed "And the other thing you should know,"s or the "One more thing I'd like to tell you"s to which writers (including myself) are sometimes prone.

This method if distillation of the backstory to the essential, the "need to know" information that propels the story forward, shows a great deal of trust in the reader. We don't have to know where or when the conversation happened, or what happened to the brother later, or where they lived, or what kind of sickness she had—unless we need to. The "information" of it is extraneous if it doesn't round the character; it is also extraneous if it pumps a character so full if rounding devices and complete histories that he or she pops. As readers, we are happy with what we are given, and happy when a writer like Hempel trusts us to trust her with the details she gives, and nothing more.