MEET THE READER: What’s the (Back)Story?

Ray Morton is a writer, senior contributor to Script magazine and script consultant. His new book A Quick Guide to Screenwriting is now available online and in bookstores. Follow Ray on Twitter: @RayMorton1

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In screenwriting, backstory is the story that happens before the start of the story that is seen on screen. Backstory tells how a character becomes the person we meet at the beginning of the film or it can describe how the circumstances, situations, or relationships in the main story come about.

While it is necessary that the screenwriter knows his script’s backstory, in most instances is it is not necessary for the audience to know it – in a well-written screenplay, any important textures or flavors generated by the events in the backstory should be reflected in the main narrative. For example, if two characters in the main story are meant to be life-long friends, we don’t need to see them meeting at sleepaway camp when they are both eight, then writing pen pal letters to one another all through high school before finally reuniting in college – all we need is to see them interacting with great warmth and familiarity (and perhaps making occasional references to past adventures) in the main story and we will get the idea.

The only time it is necessary for the audience to know the backstory is if something that happened in the backstory plays a vital role in the main tale. In that case, that particular piece of information must be conveyed to the audience. Doing this is always a problem. Since backstory is, by definition, not part of the main story – there is no way to incorporate it or any part of it into the main storyline without interrupting the flow and the build of the narrative.

In the old days (i.e. prior to the last ten years) the screenwriter’s goal in dealing with this problem was to finds ways to incorporate the important information from a backstory into the main narrative as discreetly and unobtrusively as possible. The preferred method was to have one character tell the information to another character in conversation. If that approach didn’t work, then the next best option was to interrupt the main storyline with a flashback (being sure to keep it as brief as possible so as to minimize the disruption to the narrative build). If neither of these methods proved viable, the final option was to add a prologue to the beginning of the story that dramatized the important bit (but only the important bit). This option was always considered a last resort because – unlike dialogue or a flashback – adding a prologue delays the start of the main story, which everyone was reluctant to do because the longer it takes for the story to get going, the higher the risk that the movie will lose the audience. Therefore, if a prologue had to be added, the goal was always to keep it as brief – to deliver the vital information as quickly as possible and then get the main storyline under way.

This is no longer the case.

In the past decade or so, movies have become enamored of backstory. A high percentage of current films and an even higher percentage of current screenplays now present enormous chunks of backstory along with the main story – usually in either a lengthy prologue or in lengthy (and often numerous) flashbacks.

Script EXTRA: Flashbacks - Storytelling Friend or Foe?

The explanation as to why this has become the norm starts with the studios. The current crop of studio executives – determined to attract as many people from all four quadrants of the potential audience as possible and fearful that any degree of confusion or ambiguity will turn viewers off and thus cause a massive drop in ticket sales for their $300 million extravaganzas – are generally very insistent that every element of a story be spelled out for viewers in as much detail as possible. They want absolutely nothing left to the imagination. Therefore, if some element in the backstory is deemed to be important to the main story, the demand is now for that element to be dramatized in great detail.

Modern screenwriters (especially spec screenwriters) have taken this mandate and run with it. It is now pretty much standard for me to receive scripts that begin with very lengthy prologues – often a quarter of the entire script and on occasion even half or more – depicting not only the vital piece of narrative information but often the entire life of the main character from birth to the beginning of the main story or every beat in the development of the circumstances, situations, or relationships seen in the main story, whether this information is necessary to the primary narrative or not. And if a script does not contain a prologue, then it will almost certainly be filled with flashbacks presenting all of this data instead.

There are a number of problems with this:

Script EXTRA: What Exactly Does a Script Reader Hope to Find in a Screenplay?

* Because so many scripts and movies include so much backstory these days, many screenwriters (especially aspirants) appear to believe that backstory is now mandatory. And this has led many of them to include a backstory in their scripts even when there’s no element in it that is relevant to the main story – so not only are the prologues and flashbacks in many scripts today too long, but they are often completely pointless as well.

* Studios want everything spelled out. But they have also lost patience with first acts. Worried audiences will be bored if they have to sit through too much set-up, execs want every script and movie to jump right into the action – to begin with an exciting sequence. These two demands might seem to be contradictory. That’s because they are. Somewhere along the line, someone came up with an ingenious way to deal with this contradiction by beginning the script with an exciting sequence from the middle of the main story somewhere and then jumping back in time to begin the backstory. Eventually, the main story begins and catches up to the exciting sequence and then the narrative rolls forward from there. The first time someone did this it was really clever. The problem is that it was such a perfect solution to the “begin with backstory but also begin with something exciting” dilemma that seemingly every writer out there has adopted it for seemingly every script. I am not exaggerating when I say that at least 80% of the specs I read these days begin in this manner. So what was once ingenious has now become a dreadful, omnipresent cliché.

Script EXTRA: Exposition Gone Bad

So, how to deal with these issues? To quote Albert Finney in Skyfall, “Sometimes the old ways are the best.” Ultimately, I think the best approach to backstory is to not have one. If you must have one – if there is some element in the backstory that is absolutely vital to your main story – then incorporate it into the primary narrative as discreetly and unobtrusively as possible: ideally through dialogue and if that doesn’t work then in a (very brief) flashback and (only) if that doesn’t work then through a (very, very brief) prologue. And then get on with telling the main story – which is (or is supposed to be, anyway) the reason you wrote your script in the first place.

THE END
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