Backstory in Flash
Adding pressure & context to character choices
When writing flash and micro fiction or non-fiction, adding the right amount of backstory and in the best spots is a particular minefield. Due to the container of the word limit, there’s pressure to provide an immersive story with fewer words. We’ve all heard that every word counts in a flash, but what are the words or elements that we must use and those that should be left on the cutting room floor? Each story has its own pathway, but limiting the backstory or backfill is one way to stay within the flash word limit. But a flash without some hint of who these characters were before the story started can create a story without context, without pressure on the characters to act, and without a sense of emotional resonance and satisfaction for the reader. Without backstory, we don’t often figure out the why of the story, and this can leave us feeling cold toward it.
To see how backstory can add context in a dramatic way, we’re going to look at a story by SJ Sindu. The first story is “Yellow School Buses” reprinted in Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction. Sindu has a way of blending action, exposition, and backstory in small, urgent paragraphs. And while this story can be studied for many excellent craft moves, I want to concentrate on how the bacjstory functions to provide necesary context to the present story scenes. For example, the opening dances between these rhetorical devices and has us intrigued to read more.
In Singapore, halfway through her journey, Nandini sits in a cramped room memorizing her fact sheet. Hot air swirls inside the walls, unmoved by the lethargic, creaking ceiling fan. All five of them have been stacked in here for a week—Nandini, her mother, her three little brothers. Her father had stayed behind in Sri Lanka.
We meet our main character, Nandini, and are placed in the same cramped confines as she and her family are traveling without their father and away from their home. The backstory introduced here is the lack of the father and that they are willing to endure cramped facilities in order to leave Sri Lanka. We have to have this information to establish the start of the conflict, of the central problem of the story.
Every night since they left, her mother cries and prays in rapid, never-ending succession. During the days, Nandini’s mother sits exhausted against the headboard of the single bed, fanning herself with her own fact sheet. Her brothers nap in a heap, all brown tangled limbs and dirty clothes.
Sindu provides more backstory in the next two paragraphs, a move that can make some stories feel static or dull, but here it widens the context, imagine that camera lens widening, showing us how affecting this move is on her mother, on her brothers, and our main character. This move is arduous. This move is life-effecting. But there’s more to this story, and Sindu leaves the backstory behind for a scene between our main character and her mother. And while this dialogue is excellent, I love how it fades right into the next section of backstory surrounding the father, so we can see how much pressure he is putting on his family by not being there with them now.
Leaving Sri Lanka was her father’s doing. Nandini wrote something in her school newspaper, criticizing the gerrymandering by the Sri Lankan government in the latest election. She wrote the piece in a fury the night the election results were announced, and by the next morning the sol-diers were at their door, interrupting breakfast with their rifles.
This information is vital to creating the tension and urgency in this story. We learn that it’s our main character’s fault, that her willingness to speak up has put the family in possible harm’s way. (Though this is left to the reader judgment and based on inferences rather than explicitly mentioned in the text). We can infer the reasoning behind her willingness to study, to chide her mother, to grow frustrated with the mother’s lack of progress in memorizing fake histories, fake knowledge of a foreign culture.
“What color are the school buses in Toronto?”
“Black,” her mother says.
Nandini shakes her head.
“White?”
“Yellow, Amma. You need to focus.”
Here, we’re back to the present scene, and we’re starting to realize that this knowledge of the color of buses would usually be insignificant, but instead, it’s paramount for these characters to learn to ensure their safety. Sindu creates even more pressure on the mother and the knowledge of the color of buses in this next dip into backstory, into a summarized scene to show just how dangerous their lives had become in Sri Lanka, and why they had to flee!
There were two soldiers, one dark and mean with a scar running down his cheek. He pressed the barrel of the rifle in her father’s face. The other one was shorter, friendlier looking.
Her father begged them to let it go, offered them fancy English whiskey and gold necklaces from her mother’s dowry. He showed them papers detailing his appointment as a doctor at a gov-ernment hospital. They demanded to see Nandini anyway, and she came out shaking from behind her mother’s shadow. They pointed their rifles at each of her brothers, asking their ages and whether or not they were affiliated with the Tigers. After an hour, after drinking her mother’s tea and eating the European chocolate her family had gotten as a gift, the soldiers finally left with a bottle of John-ny Walker and her mother’s necklace made of real gold coins. Her father took the five of them to the embassy that day, and within a week they were on a plane to Singapore, their life savings deplet-ed.
Another lesson to learn here is how active this backstory is, how it’s almost a complete scene, that the summarizing uses such specific and unique details and objects that we feel like we’re in the moment of these clear dangers! We don’t lose urgency by dropping into backstory because it’s so well-written, and so necessary to tell the story, to add context, to have us gripped by the sheer story-telling power of Sindu’s writing!
Here’s the craft move that Sindu uses so deftly; this pushing out from the present scene into a large section of backstory, related in specific and concrete details, full of tension and conflict, and then back to the current scene again with the dialogue between the main character and the mother. Just a perfect jump from present to past to add context and to add pressure on the characters acting in the present scene! The juxtaposition between danger and violence and what would/could have been a static conversation between daughter and mother is enhanced through the backstory. The backstory matters. It’s vital to create this story, to give it both meaning in its events and in its emotional content. A very creative way to create a story of depth and resonance.
But we can’t end in the backstory, and the present story isn’t leading us toward a reckoning for our main character either, so how do we come to a satisfying ending? Sindu moves toward the future instead, giving the reader a chance to extrapolate what might happen to these characters in the white space off the page of the story. There is not a large climax here or two opposing forces coming to blows, but what will happen with Nandini? She’s forced to change against her will, to become someone else, someone who lives in Toronto and knows the color of school buses. Am insignificant knowledge for most people, but vital to her safety and security in a new city.
Nandini goes back to reading. Her name is now Preeti. She is nineteen years old. Her father will soon join them in Canada, and then none of them will have to worry about air raids or white van abductions or soldiers with guns. Nandini will get a job, will go to school, will go to college. Her brothers will be fluent in English. Her mother will be happy.
Now, we’ve left the past and we’re focused on the future! A risky move, because it relies o nthe reader to do some of the imagining of what will happen. It relies on a sense of irony, that yes, she has left these very real dangers in the past, but there are certainly dangers to be faced in this new home as well. But we only get to this irony because of the very specific details of the backstory, of the realistic fear and danger in Sri Lanka. Time has been split, metaphorical mirrors that tell contrasting stories. A magic trick of a story, a magic that flash oftens demands, and it’s performed so well here!
In part 2 we’ll look at some new stories and how they handle this task of using backstory! Coming soon!
Prompt: Play with creating a segmented flash, with clear sections of the present scene and backstory scenes that add context to the present scenes. What is your character running away from? Where will they go? Will it be safer or dangerous in a unique and different way? Consider taking the risk of using a flash forward, to use irony, to help the reader imagine what will happen to your character in the white space after the ending of the story. How can backstory make the mundane have more significance and meaning?
Try It At Home: Make a list of objects that you’ve lost over time. Make a list of places you’ve left. Make a list of the people you barely remember. Make a list of all the places you want to visit, but think you’ll never get to. Make a list of all the places you feel lucky to have visited. Are there stories in these lists?
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November 2-14, 2022: Building Fictional Relationships through Dialogue, Ritual, and Objects
“it widens the context, imagine that camera lens widening” - love this. It’s definitely a technique I’m going to use!