Your Guide to Writing the Perfect Story

Writing Effective Background

Writing your character's back-story is a skill that, unfortunately, most Wattpad users don't yet have. I'm here to teach you the effective ways of using background by going over some rules. Let's begin.

Rule #1

Don't use background too soon. A lot of published authors suggest no background whatsoever until page thirty. I realize that pages are weird on Wattpad, however, so instead just try to put it off until it is absolutely necessary to reveal the information. Don't force it to happen when it doesn't need to. So many times I read stories where I am pounded with information in the first few pages. That is boring. It's an immediate turn-off.

Rule #2

Use background information like a strong spice: just a little bit sprinkled here and there. I'm not quite sure who originally said that, but the point remains. It's easy to get carried away with background and think that you must go into a long explanation about what happened to your character just so they don't get confused. Your readers are smart; they'll understand that there is something that happened to your character by their actions and they'll wait and see what it is. Don't disrespect their intelligence by bombarding them with information they don't want just yet. If you need to say anything, drop subtle hints here and there and let the pieces fall into place over time until the big reveal.

Rule #3

Tease your readers! Bring questions into their heads. Give them vague sentences to work with until they are dying to know what happened in the past. Then, when they want the information most, don't give it to them! Keep it as a mystery for just a bit longer and then they will be astonished by what really happened.

Rule #4

Everything has a back-story. In your book, everything must happen for a reason. Plan out every important character's background. That one character hates the protagonist? Maybe it's because they got their father killed five years in the past. There should be more to your book than 2D plot lines and characters. It must have layers.

Rule #5

When in doubt, cut it out. Have you ever written a chapter that left you less than satisfied but when you kept re-reading it you just couldn't finger what it was? There's a high chance you ended up filling the pages with too much back-story. What you should do is copy the chapter and put it in a Word document and then go through your chapter on there and cut out every instance where you used back-story, even if you thought it was important. After you're done, read it. If it is awkward, put in only the back-story that is necessary and then use that copy. It is very effective in creating suspense.

Rule #6

Raise more questions than you answer! The suspense of not knowing is what makes a reader enjoy the story. If you give your reader all the answers, what are they supposed to go on? This is easy to do. Once you reveal one angle of the background information, bring up another point that your readers hadn't pondered yet and play with that.

Rule #7

When writing back-story, you have to learn to follow through with what you indirectly promised your readers. If you've been making a huge deal of something terrible your protagonist did in the past that's going to haunt him/her forever, they're expecting to discover something really dark and twisted that they did. If your big reveal is that they hit a deer in their truck, expect some shaking fists. Why is this so bad?

a) The path to redemption that your character must endure is now very short and uneventful. Your readers will be beyond disappointed and most likely bored to death.

b) Your readers will begin to think that you are all talk and no show. They'll doubt every time that you build up suspense that you are actually going to pull through with a good story.

That's all of my pointers on background information at the moment. Hopefully this was helpful and you'll use all of these tips! Thanks for reading.