On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [117]
Hinting at what's happened to the character in the past helps to build suspense, but save the details of the backstory until it's absolutely necessary for the readers' understanding—or, as my first editor inelegantly put it, until "the reader's tongue is hanging out to know what really happened." Keep the readers wondering and guessing, and they'll keep reading.
In this example from the first few pages of her sweet traditional novel In the Arms of the Sheikh, Sophie Weston hints at her heroine's dramatic past:
Natasha's frown deepened. She had never heard Izzy sound like that before. Well, not since—
She pulled her mind away from the dark memories. The bad time was three years past. Gone. She and Izzy had got out of the jungle alive and well and so had everyone else. All was well that ended well, in fact. The nightmares would go too, in time. But that didn't explain why Izzy sounded so stiff and false.
It's another hundred and fifty pages before Weston tells us what happened to Natasha in the jungle, and even then she gives few details, just the overarching
story—because that's all we need to know in order to understand why Natasha reacted this way here.
The best place to present the details of the character's backstory is usually in dialogue. It's a powerful scene when the heroine explains to the hero how being jilted (or abandoned as a child, or accused of murder, or whatever) has made her reluctant to trust and share her life. If you simply show her thinking about it, or if she tells a secondary character who then tells the hero, the resulting scene is much less emotionally compelling.
You may be tempted to present the backstory through flashback, but that's seldom a good idea. Returning the readers to the past stops the progress of the main story. If we were to flash back to the jungle with Natasha and relive her experiences there, the past story might overwhelm the current one. Only if the backstory involves both hero and heroine can you really justify using a flashback, one that actually shows what happened between them.
No matter how you opt to share the backstory with the readers, use only as much as you absolutely must in order to make your characters' motivations clear. The story is not about the character's painful childhood or his horrible marriage. A few well-chosen examples will usually make the point; using more than that will put the current story at risk.
Keeping the Hidden Story Under Wraps
The same basic rules apply to the hidden story—what's really going on that one of the main characters (usually the heroine) doesn't know. Is the ragged-looking hero a millionaire in disguise? Why is he so reluctant to commit to a marriage? What was the real reason he didn't want to have children?
Even in a story that uses both the hero's and heroine's points of view, it's possible to keep the hidden story hidden until the readers are dying to know what's going on, and doing so increases the suspense level in the entire book.
The hero knows perfectly well why he doesn't want to have children—but it's not something he enjoys thinking about. So he veers away from the subject even in his thoughts, leaving the readers with no more than hints, intrigued but still in the dark.
In this selection from her long contemporary romance Operation: Second Chance, Roxanne Rustand hints at two hidden stories. Both the heroine and the hero are keeping secrets. The heroine's photographs show a woman very different from the one the hero meets, a contradiction the heroine would prefer not to explain. And the hero neglected to tell the heroine that he rented a room in her house because he's investigating her. With two sets of hints to follow, the readers are doubly intrigued:
He'd intended to check out the glamorous Mrs. Hilliard and carefully begin investigating her past. He'd never expected to end up living in her house. He'd also never expected to find her so ... interesting. ...
The photograph clipped from a society page of the newspaper