TMI

Now, I know this whole time I’ve been talking about topics that you shouldn’t try to master in a short story, but today I want to talk about something that you shouldn’t do in a short story. It’s almost impossible to do, really, again because of the limited number of words we’re allowed to have in a short story.

Full Backstories

Don’t take that to mean that you shouldn’t put any backstory into your short stories. Quite the opposite, in fact. Almost every story requires at least a little bit of backstory, something to ground it in whatever world where it takes place. Backstory is the thing that sets a story in time, that makes characters and setting fuller and richer.

But you should never try to put a full backstory in a short story. It’s just not possible.

What you should do, instead, is put snippets of backstory into your work. Your readers want to know about your characters and your setting, but they don’t want to know everything about them. Tell your readers what they need to know, and leave out what they don’t. Of course, that’s what you should be doing anyway, but when it comes to short stories you’ll have to be a little more limiting.

Do not, I repeat, do not, even think about fully fleshing out your characters in a short story. You can get close, but you won’t be able to do it completely.

Take your time when writing a short story, focus on the story. Make your character vivid and real, but don’t feel like you have to add a mass of backstory in order to do it. You don’t. In fact, in a short story, we frequently don’t need more than a hundred words of backstory in all, if even that much.

Backstory is one of those things on which you’ll walk a fine line, and in short stories more than novels. Just remember that we only need enough grounding information to help us understand what’s going on, and not so much that we’ll be drowning between the story and what happened before it.

[love]

{rani d.}