The Importance of Old Story for Writers

When authors are told to start in media res (in the middle of things), this means starting with the action, the inciting incident, the new story world.

When a book starts with the inciting incident, it leaves much of the actual old story world, or Old World, to the reader's imagination, flashbacks, or internal monologue cues. I'm going to expound on why I think this cheats the reader, because there is benefit to starting the book with a little glimpse into the Old World.

What Old World Is Not

It's not backstory.

Backstory is everything that happened before your novel starts. If your character is 21, then his backstory would cover his birth, childhood, teenage years...everything up until the scene you open with that he's in. Backstory could even cover generations before he was born, such as family traditions and secrets that affect him.

What Old World Is

Old World encompasses the plans your character has, whether those plans are to change or to keep things exactly the way they are. The character might be completely ignorant of the issue(s) they need to face, or they are in complete and utter denial about it. But this is their life, and it's "working" for them (whether it truly is functional or dysfunctional).

Old World v. New World

There should be some major tension between the New World and the Old World.

Of course, this makes sense. We wouldn't want to read about someone just ho-humming it through their regular, Old World life. That would be b o r i n g.

When the New World breaks through on the page, it interrupts the Old World. Those plans the character had? Toast. Previous goals? History. But the Old World should rear its head occasionally through the book.

The reader might not understand the huge impact the inciting incident has, though, without some Old World first. (Click to Tweet!) This is my primary reason for writing this post, because for a therapist, understanding the environment, the Old World, is just as crucial as knowing the backstory. I couldn't do my job if I didn't know what had been going on in someone's life before they lost their house, or before their father died, or before they were put into foster care.

A Great Example of Old World

Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind starts with Scarlett doing what Scarlett does best...flirting with boys, attending parties, and planning to marry Ashley Wilkes. This was her life, her Old World.

There are arguably two inciting incidents that happen, one right after the other. First, she learns that Ashley is to marry his cousin Melanie. Second, the Civil War starts. Life as she knows it takes a drastic change...which is the New World.

The Old World should complicate the New World in some way, in much the same way the New World obliterates the Old World. What I mean by this, is that the person's life trajectory...the Old World that's in place when the book begins, should be at odds with the New World.

Scarlett just wants things to go back to the way they were...her having tons of beaus chasing after her, attending soirees, having money at her disposal, and having Ashley in her back pocket. She keeps hankering after these Old World relics while the New World plays out...and it disrupts her life further.

How Much Old World do You Include?

No hard and fast rule here. I've seen Old Worlds that were one paragraph of page one. I've seen some that were a few pages. Usually the New World interrupts at some point in the first chapter, but this isn't written in stone, like I said, but a good rule of thumb.

Remember, there's no limit to how much Old World you can retroactively put in a book, via flashbacks or internal dialogue. We're always told to stay away from backstory dumps, so don't take this post as license to put a dump back in.

I Don't have Old World...Now What?

The good news about Old Worlds is that adding them isn't all that difficult. If you've already started your book in the middle of the action, ask yourself a couple of questions:

1) When my character woke up the morning of page one, what were his/her plans before I interrupted them with the New World?
2) What does the character think the story is going to be from page one? (Hint: this should be different from what you as the author knows the story is.)

Once you've answered them, you'll have your Old World. All you need to do is give them a structure and copy/paste it in before your novel. Not as a prologue, but as paragraph one of page one. Just scoot that old paragraph one back a bit.

Let's Analyze

What other benefits would the reader gain if authors showed just a tad more Old World before the inciting incident? Any other books that you'd say have good Old World examples?

A Good Kind of Reader Manipulation

Two weeks ago I wrote a post about a lesser-known reason why you shouldn't dump backstory up front in a novel. (Click here for the post.) In so doing, I gave a story about how I overheard information pertaining to one of my clients that impeded how I approached/perceived the client.

But I want to direct you to the comment section of that same post. Many of the readers offered really insightful reflections on why or why not to convey certain information about a character up front, and I wanted to capitalize on one in particular.

As authors, we write for a lot of reasons. But we all have stories that we want to persuade readers to read. Every word counts in that persuasion. Sometimes we have to manipulate the information we give to readers for a variety of reasons, some of which would be to entertain, educate, inspire, and convict.

But some stories require a little misleading up front in order to accomplish those ends. (I guess it's true that sometimes the end does justify the means.) I was actually accidentally mislead by the overheard comment about my client. But one of my commenters (thanks Kerry!) made such an excellent point that we might deliberately need to mislead the reader up front.

According to the Information Manipulation theory, we have to mislead a reader by breaking one of four conversational (or literary) maxims/truths:

• Quantity: Information given will be full (as per expected by the listener/reader) and without omission.
• Quality: information given will be truthful and correct.
• Relation: information will be relevant to the subject matter of the conversation in hand.
• Manner: things will be presented in a way that enables others to understand and with aligned non-verbal language.

Think about all the ways you can use this in your stories! You give a little too much info, or not enough. Or you give absolutely irrelevant info that they think is relevant or you sneak in information in such a way that the reader thinks it has to be relevant only to discover it wasn't and they were duped!

Backstory: A Lesser Known Reason Why Not to Dump it Upfront

You've probably all heard not to dump your character's backstory anywhere inside of the first 50 pages, at least. The usual reason cited is that it pulls the reader from the story.

But I've got another one to think about, perhaps even more of a death knell than the one mentioned above. (Because, let's face it, we've all been "pulled" from a story before and kept on reading regardless.)

I'm going to illustrate my point with a story from the life of yours truly.

It was around 10:30, and I had just received the nebulous news from a potential client that she wanted to "talk to me."

"Okay," I said, scheduling her in for 2:00. 

I was curious, I must admit. I'd seen her walk by my office several times, peeking in my window, giving me a hesitant smile.

What does she want to talk to me about? I frequently fantasized about what brings clients to my office, and this woman proved no exception. Was she cheating on her husband? Secretly doing drugs? Addicted to gambling? Unable to deal with her children?

Over lunch, I overheard another staff member talking about this very woman. I leaned in closer, eager for any little tidbits I could glean before my session with her. What I heard was eye-opening popping.

"Did you know XXX is a cross-dresser?"

"What?!"

Though I said nothing, my line of thought was in sync with my coworker's.

"Yep. Goatee and all."

I left the table thinking, "Oh my. She's going to want to talk to me about cross dressing, and likely the havoc this is causing on her marriage."

I'll skip the part about not having any experience in this area therapeutically (at that time), and get to the part where she walks in my office at 2:00 on the dot, no goatee in sight. We did the usual meet and greet getting to know each other dance, and then she got down to the nitty gritty:

TOILET TRAINING.

As she talked about the troubles she was having getting her youngest daughter trained, I sat there and thought in my head: "She's a cross dresser. She's a cross dresser. Why isn't she bringing up the fact that she's a cross dresser?"

She left, with a few star charts and stickers in hand, grinning and thanking me for listening (I did manage to rally and be present for her), having said nothing about the glaring discovery I had made of her cross dressing hobby.

Unfortunately, that overheard conversation (premature backstory) of my client colored my whole perception of her from then on. I had to work to get out from under the preconceived notions that knowledge had given me.

Backstory given too early can do the same thing. It can make a person put the book down once and for all, instead of just pulling them from the story. It can be off-putting or color the reader's entire perception of the character.

Q4U: Have you ever put down a book because you learned something about the main character that was "too much" for you to carry through 300+ pages?