Every story has a past, a present, and hopefully, a future. The past shapes what we know as the here and now. The past also gives history to our characters, so when they first step onto the page, they are formed in the author’s mind and ready to begin their journey.

Every writer knows the backstory is what tells us who the characters are as people and why they’re the way they are. At the beginning of our career, it seems logical to inform the reader of that history upfront. “Before you can understand that, you need to know this.”

As we progress, we learn not to drop the history of the intended conflict in the first five pages of a novel or to waste the first three paragraphs of a short story on it.

We understand that those are the pages and paragraphs editors look at first…