Not What- How?

[thecollector]

Hello, all. Due to various complications, I haven't been on much lately, but I was wondering how to go about writing my tribute project. For those of you who remember, I was talking about writing a tribute novel, written in a ficticious sense, to my cousin Frank. However, seeing as the novel covers a span of, perhaps, a good thirty years, I was wondering how would I go about starting. For instance, I don't want to make it a case of the novel It by Stephen King, where the book is over a thousand pages in paperback. I would like to know how I can incorporate all the background material necessary without starting the story from birth; I would like to start this story from the character's last day of 7th Grade. So, if anyone has an idea to help with the problem of incorporating background story without making it obscenely long and drawn out, please let me know.

Thank you to anyone who at least reads this message.

[miss_smiley]

Well, to put it simply, just be concise - don't worry about listing every single day, or hell, every single year. Pick out the big highlights of the life-span of the book - they're the really important bits anyways - then pick out what background stories you're putting in and make sure you can weave them in between the big, big events.

Pick and choose, basically, which actual parts of the life you want to include. "Where Rainbows End" by Cecilia Ahern is a good example of this - the book's actual life span is about 50 years, but it takes about 30 chapters and roughly 500 pages, covering a huge amount of plot and backstory.

[thecollector]

Thanks for that, Smiley. See, I have the events, but I was unsure of how to weave them in. Though, that sounds like a good idea- building them up and sort of flying through the years. For instance, I take you're saying like I could have an event in October and then skip ahead to (let's say) November of next year. It would just be a method of describing a minor overview of the rest of that year, in a paragraph rather than a chapter.

Thanks again, Smiley. xD

[Shaun]

Probably your best bet is to play a very clever game of info-dumping. Drop little bits about the character here or there, but within the context of whatever is going on. If your character has stage fright because of a bad thing that happened when he or she was 6, you can bring that in, have a scene where that information springs up (maybe in dialogue), and then move on. This way you build the background/backstory. That's my two cents.