Community Conversation: Story First, Plot Second
Develop Your Protagonist’s Story-Specific Past
As you start the intoxicating, challenging, rewarding, and, yes, sometimes maddeningly frustrating process of writing a novel, chances are you’re wondering, Where does my novel begin? Could there be a more logical, obvious, and necessary question?
Actually, yes, there could. Especially since, as it turns out, that’s the exact wrong question to ask at the beginning of the writing process. Why? Because it refers to what happens on the first page in the novel, which is when the plot kicks in. And what you’re really writing about—what will capture your readers, make them care, and incite the sense of urgency that won’t let them put down your novel—starts long before your plot begins.
The right question to ask is: When does my story start?
Because believe it or not, your plot and your story are not synonymous.
FIND THE START OF YOUR STORY
All novels start in medias res, a nifty Latin term that means “in the middle of the thing.” Thus the first page of your novel opens with the second half of your story; the first half creates an unavoidable problem that your plot will catapult your protagonist into. And so, in order for your plot to have a story to tell, a whole lot of relevant things must happen before your novel begins. A specific cause-and-effect trajectory in your protagonist’s past has created the problem that on page 1 will hit critical mass, both in the plot and—much more important—within your protagonist herself.
Yet writers are often told to scrupulously avoid backstory as if it will only trip them up, get in the way of the story they’re telling, and alienate the reader. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Backstory is what drives your novel forward and gives meaning to everything that happens. Backstory is present, in one form or another, on every page you write. As William Faulkner so aptly said, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”
If you ignore your protagonist’s past and begin envisioning your story on the first page, you’re in essence saying, “I don’t need to know what happened before this moment in my protagonist’s life in order to write about what she’ll do from here on out.” Or, put more bluntly, “I’m going to write a three-hundred-page novel about the most crucial, meaningful turning point in someone’s life who I know absolutely nothing about.”
You can’t expect to engage your reader with that mind-set. Your protagonist must arrive on the first page of your novel with an internal problem already brewing, before the plot problem tosses her out of her easy chair and into the fray. Because that internal problem? It’s not what your novel is truly about; it’s what hooks your readers, makes them care, and brings your plot to life.
Knowing your protagonist’s internal problem is essential for two reasons:
- Your reader is biologically wired to respond to your protagonist’s inner struggle. When we’re lost in a story, our brains sync with the protagonist’s and her struggle becomes our struggle. This isn’t a metaphor—functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) reveals that when a story engages us, we experience what the protagonist is going through as if it were happening to us—because it is. We feel what she feels because her emotions travel down our neural pathways. To hell with those clunky virtual reality visors—humans already come equipped with the most effective VR of all: the ability to neurologically slip into someone else’s life, especially when she’s struggling with an unavoidable problem, trying to figure out what the heck to do. The unspoken question we’re wired to bring to every story is: What would it cost, emotionally, to have to go through that? What will I learn about what makes people tick that will help me navigate my own life?
- Developing your protagonist’s internal problem first is crucial because that’s what you’ll then use to create and spur the plot. In fact, often your protagonist’s internal struggle creates the external problem. This is especially important when the external challenge around which your plot revolves doesn’t, at first blush, seem like a problem at all. For instance, maybe your protagonist just met the love of his life or is about to be crowned the King of England or has just won the lottery. Woo-hoo! While in real life that would be pretty darn good, at the beginning of a novel, the question is: Why would such apparent good fortune be a problem for my protagonist? Because if it’s not, your reader has no reason to care and nothing to root for.
CREATE THE PAST TO GIVE MEANING TO THE PRESENT
Make no mistake; the answer to the question “Why is this a problem for my protagonist?”—the answer to why anything would matter to your protagonist—always lies in her past.
We’re not just talking about the external things that have happened in your protagonist’s past, because like the plot itself, they’re surface events. And no matter how objectively dramatic, a story is not about how the protagonist solves a surface problem. An external problem that doesn’t put your protagonist to an internal test is not a problem at all; it’s just a chore. That’s why the real question you need to ask is: How did those past events shape my protagonist’s belief system, knocking her worldview out of alignment and causing the internal conflict that my plot will then force her to confront?
Because your novel is not about the plot, nor even what happens in it. The plot is there to serve one master: the story, which is about your protagonist’s internal evolution.
The reason this might come as a surprise is that most of us don’t actually know what a story is. It’s not our fault. It’s just that we’re so familiar with stories that we feel as if we know. After all, we’re instantly captivated by an effective story and just as quickly bored by a story that’s just a bunch of things that happen. So what don’t we understand?
The problem is that there’s a massive difference between responding to a story and knowing what you’re responding to. As the great Southern writer Flannery O’Connor once quipped, “I find most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.” Turns out that the ability to recognize a story is hardwired, but the ability to write one … not so much.
As a result, while we all love stories, most of us don’t know what a story really is or what has us riveted when we’re under its spell. For readers that doesn’t matter one iota; after all, when you’re savoring a tasty morsel of chocolate, you don’t care why it tastes so good—you just want more (than is good for you, if my experience means anything). But writers who want to engage their readers need to know what lies behind the magic trick. We need to know how it actually works. Because it’s not magic at all—we’ve just been focusing on the wrong thing.
CONSIDER: WHAT IS A STORY?
Let’s begin by defining story.
A story is about how what happens externally (the plot, which is the surface of the story) affects someone (the protagonist, your reader’s avatar) who’s in pursuit of a deceptively difficult goal (the plot problem) and how that person changes internally as a result. And that, my friends, is what rivets us: the escalating internal struggle that plot events trigger within the protagonist, compelling her to change in order to achieve her goal.
If you’re wondering, Wait, change from what? To what? Why?, you’ve also pinpointed why you can’t just find your story as you go and get to know your protagonist as you write forward.
The simple truth is that your protagonist must arrive on page 1 with a fully formed story-specific worldview because humans go through their lives with their worldviews already formed. We don’t find out later what happened to us in our past. And once something’s happened to us, it becomes part of how we see the world and informs the decisions we then make. Iconic credit card taglines notwithstanding, our history is the one thing we never do leave home without. And they’re not neatly tucked away in a trunk of memories that we unpack every now and then when we’re in a reminiscent mood. They are actively present every minute of every day as we bravely forge our way through life. They are the yardstick by which we measure the meaning of everything.
When you face a difficult situation—any situation in which you have no choice but to make a decision and take action, whether it’s what to order for dinner, when to walk the dog, or whether you should investigate what’s making that odd scratching sound in the basement—you make that decision based on what your past has taught you to expect. Chicken is delicious; the dog is doing that little dance by the door, so you’d better grab the leash; you’ve seen enough horror movies to know that no good ever comes of odd sounds in the cellar! In other words, our past is the subjective lens through which we interpret and assess the present. Without it, how would you ever be able to make any decision about anything, short of forever flipping a coin?
How, indeed, would you know anything at all?
Imagine how terrifying it would feel if you walked into a room and someone you don’t know but who apparently thinks they’re your spouse says, “Listen, dearest, so much has happened. We really have to talk.” If you couldn’t access your past, you’d be racking your brain, wondering, Talk about what? Why? And pardon me for asking, but can you remind me who you are again?
Point being, if you don’t know anything about your protagonist’s story-specific past—especially what she believes and why she believes it—how will you even know what she might do? Or why she’d do it? Or how she got into this situation to begin with?
Again, the answer is simple: You won’t.
To be clear, we’re not talking about a general overview of your protagonist’s past or a lengthy-yet-random list of her heartfelt likes and dislikes, beginning with her love of bread pudding and ending with her fear of flying cockroaches (yes, they do exist; sorry). We’re talking about something far more specialized, intricate, and focused: Your protagonist’s story-specific backstory has as much specificity and depth as the novel itself because it is not separate from your novel; it’s the most seminal layer.
T.S. Eliot summed up why backstory is so crucial quite eloquently when he wrote, “The end of our exploring will be to arrive at where we started, and to know the place for the first time.” You must create the plot to help the protagonist arrive at that very insight, but in order to do so, you need to know how your protagonist sees the world, in detail, when the novel begins. Otherwise, how do you know what that change will be or why it’s necessary? The key words, as you might suspect by now, are in detail. It doesn’t work to hastily sum it up in a line or two, like this: "Ralph must change from being a self-centered jerk into a caring human being. Why? I just told you—because he’s a self-centered jerk!"
The shift we’re talking about is deeper, way less judge-y, and rife with escalating internal conflict. If that sounds vague and conceptual, let’s get specific!
DEVELOP YOUR STORY
The story that leads up to the first page of your novel revolves around two things that have been firmly established in your protagonist’s life long before the plot begins:
- something she has wanted for a really long time
- a deeply rooted misbelief that’s standing in her way; think of this as the fear that holds her back, constantly causing her to misinterpret what’s happening
Your novel is about how the plot then gives your protagonist no choice but to go after the thing she wants, and how the only way for her to get it is to face her misbelief and, hopefully, overcome it. That doesn’t mean she will overcome it, but that’s what readers are rooting for from page 1.
It goes without saying (she said anyway) that you can’t create a plot that will force your protagonist to confront her misbelief without knowing what that misbelief is, where it came from, and how it’s shaped her life.
This does not, however, mean you need to know absolutely everything about your protagonist’s past—in fact, creating a soup-to-nuts character bio tends to be just as paralyzing as knowing nothing. If you’re writing about a guy who needs to overcome his fear of commitment, you don’t need to chronicle everything about him down to his favorite color, his stance on climate change, and the evolution of his lifelong passion for comic book collecting (unless, of course, he spent every waking moment cultivating that collection as a way to avoid commitment). In other words, you’re only looking for things that are relevant to the story you’re telling.
In order to do that, you need to get specific. Otherwise, how will you know what is relevant to his particular issue with commitment? Thus the first question you’d ask is: Why, exactly, is he afraid of commitment? Again, you’re not simply looking for a short answer, like: “He’s afraid of commitment because he is afraid of getting hurt. Sheesh, who isn’t?” That, too, is general and thus too superficial to yield any real inside info. The “who isn’t?” is a dead giveaway. We come to a story for fresh insight, for ways of seeing things that aren’t obvious.
So, digging a layer deeper, the next question is: What, specifically, triggered his fear of commitment? Chances are good that this will send you back to his youth, where you’ll find the exact moment when his world shifted and this misbelief—that commitment causes pain—was born. His misbelief was something learned through experience, leaving him thinking, Aha! So this is how the world works. Got it! In other words, misbeliefs spring up organically as we struggle to master the way of the world, the better to survive—both physically and socially.
That’s why a misbelief is not something to judge lightly, nor is it proof that your protagonist is a willful fool, a scoundrel, a cad, or, even worse, a weakling. Instead, misbeliefs—the kind that hold your protagonist back by causing him to misinterpret what’s happening around him—are almost always something that saved him from pain at one time in his life. But ever since then, it’s done the opposite: kept him from the very thing he most wants. As in, that guy who fears commitment really wants connection, but his misbelief keeps undercutting his chances and guiding him away from it, all under the guise of keeping him safe from harm. And here’s the rub: He’s grateful for that guidance, and he feels lucky to have discovered this truth early in life because damn, look at all the pain it’s kept at bay!
Poor fellow, right? If only he knew the real truth! Cue the plot.
But the plot doesn’t disabuse him of his misbelief by wagging a finger at him and telling him it’s wrong like your second-grade teacher would have. Instead the plot pushes him into difficult corners where he does what we all do: calls up his past experience to make sense of what’s happening in the present so he can figure out what the hell to do.
Ah yes! His backstory. That’s why developing your story first isn’t “prewriting” that you will jettison when you begin the “real” writing. Your protagonist’s backstory will appear on every single page, from the first sentence to the last, in the form of dialogue, flashbacks, and memories called up in service of navigating the present. His backstory will be the lens through which he’ll view—and evaluate—everything that happens as the plot slowly forces him to recognize his misbelief for what it is: wrong.
As he struggles, so do your readers, who are in his skin, rooting for him, hoping against hope that he’ll overcome his misbelief and see the world with fresh eyes. And when he changes, so do your readers, who, as they close the novel, now see their world in a new light, too—whether they realize it or not. This is story’s superpower: By allowing us to viscerally experience the protagonist’s transformation, we are transformed. The plot alone? It’s just a bunch of things that happen. Worse, if those things don’t affect your protagonist internally, they’re a bunch of boring things, and regardless of how much external drama is going on, they’ll leave your reader cold.
That’s why when you sit down to write a novel, it’s really very simple: story first, plot second.
Community Conversation: Focusing on Story First
The Writer Unboxed community weighs in online. Please consider adding your voice by visiting Writer Unboxed. Join the conversation at writerunboxed.com/story-first-plot-second, and use the password “aip” (all lowercase).
Grace Wynter: With my work-in-progress, which also happens to be my first novel, I’m running into the challenge of trying to figure out how much of my character’s story-specific past to share in the present day in the form of flashbacks. The “truths” that my twenty-three-year-old protagonist has told herself stem largely from incidents that happened in high school involving her first love. Her backstory is very much “the most seminal layer” of my novel, and there are three scenes in her past that I think have to be told through backstory. But as you said, almost every writing site and advice column on writing instructs us to avoid backstory like the plague. So how do I transport my reader to these intense moments in the past, when those incidents took place, without sharing them? I’m not sure dialogue will do enough to make my reader feel what my protagonist felt in those moments. (I want my ideal reader to be crying after she reads those scenes.) I know there aren’t any hard-and-fast rules for incorporating backstory, but I sure could use some help.
Lisa Cron: The truth is that backstory is on nearly every page of every novel. It’s just that it’s done so deftly that you don’t notice it at all—unless you stop and look for it, which is hard because it means breaking the biological spell of the story. When a story grabs us, it hacks our brains, and what the protagonist experiences travels down our own neural pathways, creating the sensation that we really are there. And the seminal layer of story that keeps us there is backstory, flashbacks, and snippets of memory because they are the lens through which the protagonist makes sense of what’s happening in the moment and decides what she should do about it. Backstory is where the current meaning lies; without it, all you have are a bunch of surface things that happen.
So how do you get it onto the page so seamlessly that it facilitates your readers’ experience rather than catapulting them out of the story with a big fat info dump? Here’s how: You don’t stop the story to give us info, nor do you have a character simply state what the reader should know. Instead you tap into a memory because something in the moment has triggered it in the protagonist—not randomly but because she’s in a situation in which said memory has become relevant. She’s thinking about it because she’s grappling with something she can’t avoid in the moment.
When you come out of the flashback, the protagonist (or POV character, if it’s someone else) needs to draw a strategic conclusion—a realization—that in some way alters her plan of action or gives her a necessary insight into the situation at hand. Sometimes what the protagonist realizes is that she’s been reading the meaning of the past wrong.
In a nutshell, the goal is to have the protagonist ferret out a bit of useful information from the memory—info that she then puts to use in the current situation. Remember: Backstory is only an “info dump” if it’s done unartfully. Done right, backstory is what gives your novel the power to hack your reader’s brain.
Mike Swift: Lisa, your essay couldn’t have crossed my eyes at a more appropriate time. My work-in-progress—my debut novel, which needs to be Martha Stewart perfect—relies heavily on backstory. An internal problem (my protagonist’s lifetime of discourse with his father) escalates as he finds himself catapulted into moving back home, causing many external problems. Working through the external eventually helps him with his internal struggle, and he sees his father not as the unforgiving authoritarian he’d always known but as a misunderstood human being, full of the same fears and human frailties we all share.
Since the story begins in medias res, the circumstances that caused the move have already happened. I’m concerned that they may be too much. I have to reveal the death of my protagonist’s pregnant wife and the subsequent loss of their child, the early relationship between father and son, and the reason the son has to move back home instead of living on his own—all while the two travel across the country—just to catch up to my in medias res point. Thank goodness it’s a five-day trip! Any more backstory and they’d have to catch a slow boat to China.
Thus my question: How much is too much backstory? Yes, I have it creatively sprinkled throughout the manuscript via dialogue, flashbacks, and memories, but is there a point where I should simply move page 1—my in medias res—to an earlier point in the backstory? I really like where it starts, and to me it moves rather well—no dumps, a natural flow, compelling dialogue—and it seems to follow your advice above.
Lisa Cron: As long as we have an idea of what the story will be about (that is, your protagonist’s agenda) from the get-go, you can give us a hell of a lot of backstory. I was just looking over Donna Tartt’s The Secret History again yesterday, and she gives us a glimpse of the novel’s scope in a two-page prologue and the first couple of paragraphs, and then her protagonist, Richard, gives us a ton of backstory to get us up to speed. The difference between her method and an “info dump” is that she does it artfully, in service of the story she’s telling. Or Richard does, because the novel is in the first person. He’s giving us his backstory as he explains how they got to where the novel opens—his arrival at Hampden College. It’s not just logistically what happened that got him there; it’s why he ended up there, so we begin to understand what it means to him. Tartt then liberally sprinkles backstory throughout the novel, not in a “time out, let me explain this to you” way but because the past is what we all use as a decoder ring for the present.
So back to the question as it applies to your novel. You say, “I have to reveal the death of my protagonist’s pregnant wife and the subsequent loss of their child, the early relationship between father and son, and the reason the son has to move back home instead of living on his own …” Those things are huge—especially the death of his wife and child. Those events have already happened by the time he crosses the threshold onto page 1. And that means they are things he’d be thinking about all the time, and they’d color how he experiences everything else. Thus the truth is that you can’t keep them off the page because to do so would imply either that they hadn’t happened or that your protagonist wouldn’t ever be thinking about them or be affected by them—i.e., he wouldn’t be human. In other words, your protagonist’s past history would be the lens through which he sees everything in the present. Snippets of it would constantly inform his thoughts. Ditto the early relationship between him and his dad—especially if he’s moved back into his childhood house, which would hold memories at every turn. Memories that would shade how he feels now, what he’d think, and the meaning of which he’d struggle with. Memories that would probably shift in meaning given what he’s learning about his dad as the novel progresses.
All of that gives you a ton of room for backstory—all in service of what he’s going through now.
Barry Knister: Christopher Isherwood wrote a group of stories about his Berlin experiences between the world wars (The Berlin Stories), which inspired a play called I Am a Camera by John Van Druten. The idea of the writer being a camera, a clear, unblemished piece of polished glass through which she sees reality and records it, is as nonsensical as thinking that fictional characters—or actual people we meet in life—come from nowhere. The writer isn’t a camera. The writer is a prism, refracting what she sees and writes about according to her own experience.
It’s the same with characters. They don’t just “grow like Topsy.” They enter the first page loaded with baggage. It makes me think of the most recent installment of Better Call Saul, a hit series about a con-artist younger brother who becomes a lawyer. The protagonist is loaded with backstory, but what most caught my eye this past Monday had to do with a secondary character. He’s nebbish, a nerd who works in pharmaceuticals, and he has started selling drugs to actual drug dealers. He’s a complete innocent, oblivious to how he’s being played by others. The real drug dealers rob his house, including a collection of baseball cards. The character is so frantic about losing the cards that he risks everything by calling the police to help recover them. When his ex-cop friend asks him how he could be so foolish, he says, “Some of those cards belonged to my father.”
Backstory, a whole big chunk of it, is captured in that detail.
“If you ignore your protagonist’s past and begin envisioning your story on page 1, you’re … saying: ‘I don’t need to know what happened before this moment. …’” That won’t do. Writers are drawn to write this story instead of that one because of their own history. Their characters choose and act on the same basis.
Lisa Cron: Well said, Barry. Everything we do is driven by our past history—because said history isn’t really past. It’s with us every minute of every day, guiding us, not secretly but concretely, in the moment, as we try to figure out what the hell to do (or what story to write). Sometimes it’s implicit, but more often than not, it’s explicit.
And I loved that moment in Better Call Saul, too—it was probably the most meaningful and most honest thing that character said. It was a moment of pathos, a moment that humanized him. And yes, it suggested so much in terms of his past.
Tonia Harris: You had me at “When does your story start?” I worked on this question for months and thought I knew my protagonist’s misconception. I knew there was an instance in her childhood when her father made her watch him drown sick kittens. (“When a thing’s sickly and weak, you best put them out of their misery. Life’s a rotten chore for the strongest of us. We have no time for what can’t fend for itself.”)
I don’t think I knew until now what this meant to her and how this influenced her life and strongly affects the story. It taught her a misconception I recognize because I’ve lived it most of my life: You must be strong through anything and everything, or you have no worth. What she wants most is to be considered worthy, no matter her faults or weaknesses.
You speak of specifics, though. Is wanting to feel valued too general a motivator to keep a reader interested beyond the plot?
Lisa Cron: I love your question, Tonia, and the answer is yes and no. Here’s the thing: You only have the first layer there, the general. And in truth that’s the only place to start, so it’s a major plus. But now you have to dig down to the specifics because the question is: What do you mean by feeling “valued”? What would have to happen for her to feel valued? We need a glimpse of that from the get-go. If her misbelief is that you have to be strong or show no weakness to be worthy, then what is it costing her to be strong? What does she see as weakness, meaning: What is she afraid to show the world that will make her seem weak and thus unworthy?
Chances are this “weakness” is really her strength, and that’s what she needs to learn to tap into.
The backstory you’re looking for is story specific, and you can find it by digging into her misbelief and asking, “Why? What happened, exactly? What did she believe before it happened, and how did it shift her worldview?" Give us the defining moment when her misbelief took root by putting us in her skin as she experiences it.
The misbelief is something the protagonist is grateful for; it’s saved her from a very difficult situation and helped her see the world as it really is, and she feels lucky to have that info. That’s why she let it guide her from then on out. Once you’ve nailed down that scene, try to trace the trajectory of that misbelief through your protagonist’s life via turning-point moments—usually when she stood at a crossroads and had to make a difficult, life-changing decision driven by her misbelief. Those moments often support the misbelief and make her even more certain of its truth. In terms of your protagonist, here’s where she may think, Yes, it’s only strength that makes us worthy, and showing any weakness (e.g., vulnerability) signals unworthiness and possibly a moral failing as well.
The story is in the specifics (scenes), and the meaning your protagonist attaches to what happens always comes from her past.
Pro Tip
Think about the emotional milestones in your life, and then look to your characters. Do you know how they’ll react to similar moments in their lives? You should, because the answers to those questions shape our entire worldview and how we interact with everything around us, and will therefore play a large part in shaping the story you are trying to tell.
—Robin LaFevers
How to Get in Your Own Way, Method 6: Front-Load the Backstory
Backstory is important, but you have a whole book to explore it. Remember that date you went on where he told you about his crazy ex and how he lived in his car for a week? That’s your book when you cram all your characterization and worldbuilding into the first few pages.
—Bill Ferris