The dialogic scene as the house for backstory: from 'echoes & originals'
The short-story-writing program is three cohorts old; here's some deliberation on a recurring point in the classes
echoes & originals, the short-story-writing program I launched in November, is now three cohorts old. We read short stories, we parse them, and we arrive at concepts to use in our own writing. Then we repeat the procedure the next week. It’s a four-week program, but I’m at work to renew it (both for new attendees and alumni) from March 2025.
This post is about an element that ends up being repeatedly illustrated, and talked about, in the classes: the management of that thing called backstory. It is, at the smallest level, a question about exposition: how do I deliver information nugget i to the reader without simply telling it? But if one thinks of voluminous information and entire narratives, the question changes its shape and size, too. In the classes, I have argued that the short story form avoids large blocks of pure telling, which means that the form’s impulse is keep the backstory question limited to a question about minor expositions. But contrary examples abound. Propositions that carry the semblance of a writing-rule are better off starting with an exception, which is what I have tried to do here.
Novels often begin with action, with a certain implied immediacy or a definite forward thrust. But readers aren’t surprised to then see the thrust belied, and to have the narrative go backwards in time—as immediately as in the following section or chapter. This backward movement is utilitarian: it details the relevant a priori conditions and context for the persons involved (typically, the relevant history of one person, the protagonist). This may happen in short stories, too. In Yiyun Li’s The Particles of Order, for example, after an action-and-interiority-led first section that ends in a dialogic scene between the two main characters, Ursula and Lilian, the second section is a simple narration of Ursula’s life. Ursula is, for nearly all of the story, the point-of-view person. It is her perspective that the third-person narrator clings to; it is her interiority that is made available to us. For the second section, though, to detail Ursula’s a priori conditions and context—the word backstory is a good approximation for these here—, Li distances the narrator from Ursula for a brief while. This distancing is essential, for such a summarisation of life could not possibly be sourced from Ursula’s interiority: she has no occasion to narrate her life to herself; definitely not in a linear, biographical manner. Even if the backstory block is argued to be reading like Ursula’s innerly articulated version of her own life-story (her short version of her personal history, so to speak), the distancing of the narrator from Ursula in narrative-time remains outside argument.
But the Li story is a bit of an exception. Short stories don’t usually generate that much latitude for delivering backstory, not in the way of being able to dedicate an entire section to it, a section that may also temporarily alter—as it happened in the Li story—the position of the narrator vis a vis the protagonist. That Li was able to do it deftly enough speaks to her mastery at the handling of the aforementioned distancing. William Trevor, fond of deferring a priori conditions and context in the first section (he seems to always start with an action scene), and therefore of delivering these in the second or third sections of his stories, was a master at this1. The other reason for mentioning Trevor here is the fact that Li’s story uses the Irish writer as a shadow-character of sorts in her story. Those who read The Particles of Order will surmise that Li is trying to write a Trevor-like story. And, to my mind, the backstory plunge in the second section of Li’s story is a kind of imitation. Where Li’s backstory plunge differs from that in many of Trevor’s story is in its volume: it’s just longer than what it might have been in a Trevor.
But I have digressed, and so I must try to state again the point I mean to emphasise: compared to novels, short stories can’t afford a significant volume for that thing called backstory, definitely not in a I-shall-lump-all-this-in-a-separate-section way.
Consequently, a short story has to be smarter at managing backstory. I claim, in fact, that much of what is understood as the form’s understatedness is a product of the economy with which it manages (or skimps on) backstory.
What then? If one can’t deliver information in a separate section, how does one find ways to deliver that information.
Suppose A is the pov-person, the character whom the third-person narrator favours and sticks close to. A gets into a conversation with B. This dialogic scene (the simplest possible dialogic scene, really) has five things happening:
A says something to B
B says something to A
B’s facial expression or tone or action, as perceived by A
A’s thoughtstream, as triggered by pt. 2 or pt. 3 or pt. 5
A’s action, independent of or triggered by pt. 2, or 3, or 4
Point 4 here, A’s thoughtstream, is a potential vehicle for information about A. Through an association triggered by something B has said or done, A’s mind can take itself to places in their past (memory), or go into plain hypothesising (fantasy). Both are revealing of A’s character, but if we are concerned here with backstory, then a dip into the past satisfies the search.
Interiority itself can, thus, be a tool for delivering information—and delivering, by extension, backstory. In the Yiyun Li story, apart from the section in which we are told details of Ursula’s life, the three dialogic scenes between Ursula and Lilian also deliver a lot of information about Ursula. The method is straightforward: Lilian responds to something Ursula has said, and on occasion Ursula gives things a little think after Lilian’s response (or even the lack of one), and it is in this little burst of thought that some important detail about Ursula is passed to us (there are a couple of instances of slightly extended flashbacks too). In volume terms, this ‘little think’ usually means three to four sentences.
A dialogic scene can, thus, afford streaks of interiority of the pov-person (as triggered in response to the outside element, ie, the other person), and the interiority of the pov-person can, consequently (and perhaps even inevitably), afford streaks of their backstory. One key thing to understand here is that the time that it takes for the pov-person to do the little think can safely be assumed to be exempted (within limits) from real time, or the narrative-time in which the conversation is happening. In The Particles of Order, Li was definitely quite relaxed about the following question: does Ursula really have the time to do X amount of thinking while being in a conversation? If X isn’t too grand, it didn’t matter for Li. It shouldn’t matter to you either.
This tareeka in itself it is no brahmastra. It can, of course, be done badly too: it can, for example, be done too programmatically, where every dialogue or expression by B leads to a little think by A and a tied nugget of A’s past; it can be done hoppingly, wherein the linkage or association between the stimuli offered by character B and the thoughtstream undergone by character A isn’t convincing, and requires some kind of quantum jump from the reader; and it can be done wastefully, wherein the backstory nugget revealed doesn’t seem of a piece with other such nuggets over the length of the story (this is tantamount to a failure of characterisation), or seems so outlandish that the reader suspects that the only person it was supposed to satisfy was the writer.
That said, for short stories, housing snippets of backstory in a dialogic scene is often the more favoured way of handling information (compared to the lumpy backstory section). Such parceling of information isn’t an exclusive domain of the short story, of course. Novels use it too, and the argument here is only that it is more useful for the short story.
I shall end this, in fact, with an illustration from a novel:
James Joyce’s Ulysses, which I have started reading thanks to a readalong, begins with a two-person dialogic scene. Two young men, Buck Mulligan and Stephen Daedalus, are talking at the top of a tower looking out to the sea (they live in an accommodation under the tower). Their talk veers towards something that Buck had said to Stephen after the latter’s mother’s death—something offensive. Buck tries to scuttle the suggestion that he was offensive, and then he tries to be aggressive with Stephen, blaming him for something he refused to do for his mother (pray for her when she asked him to). There is a moment of silence in the conversation then, charged, it seems, by Stephen’s guilt. Buck, who is shaving, continues to shave. But Stephen gives the matter a couple of ‘little thinks’:
He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.
Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.
Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade.
The emphases are mine. Buck’s earlier comments have pained Stephen enough to remember his mother’s death (or the dream/perception of the death), but it is the way this remembering happens in two sentence-length bursts—interrupted by Buck speaking (‘the sea hailed as a great sweet mother’) and Stephen looking at the bay (‘The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid’)—and the linkage of green sea to green bile that is worth noting here. By the end of the paragraph, we know acute details about Stephen’s mother’s death—we know, in other words, some of Stephen’s a priori conditions and context more acutely.
Do it like Joyce.
Though his narrators tend to be more flexible from the get-go, and do not overly commit to any single character’s perspective (definitely not to free indirect streams for length) as Li’s did in The Particles of Order