writing the heart of your story Read Online Free

poem off the top of your head. A novel comprises thousands and thousands of words. Each word must somehow string together with other words into sentences and paragraphs and scenes and chapters and create a holistic, cohesive whole. Throwing one hundred thousand words into a blender and spilling them out onto a page does not a brilliant novel make. There are way too many elements that must fit together beautifully, and every word should count and every nonessential piece discarded.
    With that said, let’s take a look at the most important element that needs to be omitted from your first chapters—backstory.
     
    Take a Backseat, Backstory!
     
    Okay, we’ve heard that forever. But it’s true. In order to start your story with a punch and draw your reader in, you need to construct a scene happening right here and now (or with something in the past, like a historical, right then and now). Regardless of the semantics here, you get the point.
    Some writing instructors say things like “no backstory in the first fifty pages.” Some editors at publishing houses will be so bold as to say they would be happy if they saw none in an entire book. Maybe that won’t quite work for your book, but it’s sad to say that countless scenes start with a line or two in the present, and then, whoosh! There you are reading about the character’s early life or marriage or something she did right before the scene started. Which should make you ask . . .
    Are you really starting your story in the right place? More often than not, the answer is no. That’s what second and third drafts are for—throwing out your first scene or two.
    At the Breakout Novel workshop given by Donald Maass that I attended, he commented that a good number of novel submissions he reads should really be starting with chapter three or four. He noted that a lot of beginning writers spend ten, twenty, or thirty pages just “setting up” the story by explaining a mountain of information they think the reader must have before the story can actually be underway.
    In an exercise he had us do, we went through the first thirty pages of our novel, removed every single instance where we used backstory or informative narration, and then chose only three brief sentences containing a “backstory fact” we felt we really must include in the opening chapters so the reader would “get” the story. These three sentences were to be conveyed by the protagonist in dialog to another character (forcing us to avoid narrative and share backstory via dialog, which is usually the best way to do so) or as a thought in the character’s head. Needless to say, when asked, we students all agreed our novels read much better without the backstory, and we had indeed learned our lesson.
     
    Give Readers Some Credit
     
    So think about weaning yourself off the need to explain—or as it’s put in writer’s circles, RUE: Resist the Urge to Explain. Your readers aren’t dumb—really! They don’t need you to explain everything, and they actually enjoy a mystery and being allowed to start figuring out the puzzle you are presenting. Don’t just eliminate backstory—think about all that excessive explanation and narrative and description that goes on and on and delays the reader getting into the mine shaft to take the journey you want them to take.
     
    Dump the Excessive Explanation
     
    Every time an author stops the present action of a scene to explain, it’s akin to a playwright stepping on stage in the middle of an act, pushing aside the actors, and telling the audience something she thinks they absolutely have to know about why or how she wrote the play or what is really going on behind the scenes. I wouldn’t be surprised if the audience started throwing tomatoes at the writer and yelling, “Get off the stage! We didn’t come to see you!”
    That’s exactly what the reader feels like when the author of a novel interrupts a scene to give “a word from your sponsor.” No one likes