: How do you tell a character's backstory without explicitly telling it? I want to tell a character's backstory, but I don't want that character to tell it directly to the protagonist, or to

Vote Up Vote Down

I love the answers already given. But I find something missing: hints.
There's no rule that says you have to tell or show much of anything about someone's backstory. You have to know it, and you had better know it. But you don't give 4, you give 2+2 and let your audience figure it out.

She stood there, eyes angry as she clutched her right forearm, the scars were somewhat faded but all too evident under her touch.

This makes the reader want to know. Why is she angry, what happened to her arm, what injured her enough to leave scars.
Think of it like breadcrumbs in the forest. Some readers will ignore them and admire the trees, the chirping birds, the rustling leaves. Some will obsess over the breadcrumbs, it will tease their curiosity and make them crave the answers to the little puzzle pieces you give them over the course of your story.

Every time Cassie looked at her, her arm itched. As bad, sometimes worse, than her recovery.

Now we have a name to work with. Cassie. How is she connected to the injury? What is their relationship now, what was it then?
This way, if you lay your crumbs right, with little windows into the past, you can show the backstory of little things that forged your Point of View Character, or whoever this is about, into the person they are now.
A great example of this can be found in how JK Rowling wrote the Harry Potter series. She leaves the breadcrumbs for any who is looking to find them, but she nestles them between so many other things going on that you sometimes only find them after reading the book again and again.

The sole lightbulb in the room flickered. Off and on, on and off. Suddenly, she was no longer in the dank and gloomy attic.
Cassie stood over her, baseball bat in hand, hoisted high over her head with a crazed look in her eyes.
Her chest tightened, tears stung her eyes as she held up her right arm.
Gasping for air, she jerked back from the ghost that lingered. Sweat poured down her pale brow, eyes desperate to find herself alone.

And now you know. The tale of her injury. The tale of the scars in her mind, and not just her arm.

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

Mostly, you'd want the other characters to provide the backstory, in bits and pieces, relevant to the main story. But in a pinch, have the narrator (or point of view character) fill in what is necessary.

In this case, you would be "explicitly" informing the readers, but not the protagonist. The protagonist probably doesn't need to know the backstory (until the end) but the readers may. Sometimes it's best to have the readers slightly more informed than the characters (although you'll want to let them discover "most" of it for themselves).

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

In addition to the advice of weaving it in, in pieces, I'd suggest trying to add it not through exposition, not even exposition in dialog, but rather through action and then an offhand not-quite-exposing remark.

Example:
Backstory - Trixie had been trained as a ninja, a secret weapon for the other side, she was their ultimate assassin.

But we don't know that. We just know that:

Trixie is a seemingly sweet twenty-something. She's tagging along with
Pancho for reasons we don't know. He's on a mission to save the
resistance. He's the guy with all the amazing power. They get in
a scrap with a bad guy, who throws a knife at
Pancho, but Trixie catches the knife mid-air. (Bad guy runs off.)

Pancho says, "Whoa. How did you do that?"

"You'll find I'm full of surprises," Trixie replied.

^ No exposition, except the amazing ability to catch the knife mid-air (which is shown.). But now Pancho wants to know (that's some tension.) Of course the reader does too.

Pancho starts to nag her, but she won't tell him (tension).

Eventually, other hints come out, through a variety of incidents, and there's some sort of nice reveal chapters later. Dribbling out the backstory gives the reader the sense of progress in addition to the other plot points that are progressing.

This backstory should be integral to the plot, but I assume you have that covered.

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

You do it in chunks. Let the character explain that he is the right one for the job because he has done this thing in the past. Let another character a chapter later point out that they knew this character for years and can always trust that this character will get it done. Let him share something at the fireplace from his past in exchange for information about the other character. Another chapter later you see this character do something incredibly good - another character murmurs that it must have taken him years of hard training to achieve this mastery.

You don't want to simply tell the reader in a long monologue, but you need to show it somehow. As long as you don't dump the information on the reader and instead introduce it whenever it's relevant this is fine - it doesn't matter whether the character explains it themselves or another character or someone just thinks they know something. And you should only ever show your reader the important parts of the backstory. It doesn't matter how many sisters the character had - except for when finding one of them is his motivation, or they collectively taught him something, or they are individually important to him or the story.

(0)