Backstory Part 2: Why Your Reader Doesn’t Need to Know What You Know

An Agent's Perspective on Narrative Momemtum

Mar 08, 2026

In September, I wrote about backstory in opening pages, using examples of the things I see most often: the Wikipedia profile, the résumé, the therapy session, the historical timeline. It’s usually the main character arriving on page one with their entire biography attached like a carry-on bag. If you missed it I’ll link it below.

In this article I’m going to highlight a single story - and the fact these weren’t just the opening pages, but in scenes throughout. This is usually why agents will stop at the opening pages, because if you do something in the first pages, it’s assumed it’s throughout. And in this case, it was.

I understand the impulse to provide all the info. You’ve done the work. You know your character’s childhood, their wounds, the specific Tuesday afternoon in 1987 that broke something in them. That knowledge lives in you and it feels irresponsible to withhold it from the reader.

However, whether opening pages or mid book, the most important thing about backstory isn’t just about knowing it — it’s knowing if/when the reader needs to know it.

Ignoring that distinction is one of the most common reasons momentum stalls, readers disengage, and agents stop reading.

The Impulse Isn’t Wrong. The Timing Is.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t provide backstory. The past shapes your characters. Revealing that past at the right moment, can make a huge difference. A well-placed piece of backstory, delivered when the reader most needs to know it, has way more impact than front loading their love for backgammon and their intolerance to gluten.

I can’t tell you how many submissions I see with characters “remembering the time they…” with no inciting reason, or thinly veiled excuses for an info dump where the character is on their way to work and suddenly a red car passes and we get ten pages about their ex girlfriend who drove a red car and all the horrible things she did. None of which relates to anything happening right now.

Let’s put this into real world experience: Imagine you’re at a party and someone introduces you to a stranger. Before you’ve exchanged names, they launch into a detailed explanation of where they grew up, their favorite toy, trauma they’ve suffered, how their parents’ divorce affected them, TMI about the last time they ate broccoli, and any other vast array of formative experiences. You’d be backing toward the door within thirty seconds.

But if you spend an evening with that same person and something happens, and then later they tell you about a related childhood experience, you lean in. You want every detail. The information hasn’t changed. Your relationship to it has.

That’s the key to backstory. The reader needs a relationship with your character and what you’re telling the reader matters now, before they can care about your character’s past.

What It Looks Like on the Page

Let me show you what this looks like in practice, using pages from a thriller manuscript I recently read. I’ve changed the details to protect the innocent, but the craft issues are entirely intact.

Scene: In this scene Tom is shot in the head. In the split second it takes him to die, we’re given a flood of information about his past — regrets, missed chances, things he wishes he had done better. None of it matters in the big picture because he’s dead and wishes and regrets mean nothing.

Unless he regrets something that appears later in the story later—a clue for the reader. That isn’t the case here—so it’s just superfluous information.

Scene: In the next scene we meet our protagonist, Sally. Sally is in an emergency meeting at work. We now have intrigue.

However, every person who walks in gets introduced and we’re told what they do at the job or what their home life is like. They don’t matter in the story at all. They just happen to be in the room.

The point of the scene is Sally will learn her co-worker, friend and confidant, Lisa, was found dead. But before that can happen we read this:

Sally’s boss, Mike Smith sat at the head of the table, looking like he smelled something bad. He was a plump, mid-forties man with a thinning ponytail that he refused to let go of. His brown suit matched his hair. He was a good manager, though. That’s why they brought him over from the Cleveland office.
Before that, Smith had played hockey. He had played right wing for the Whales the minor team for The NY Rangers. Sally thought if he had made it beyond his first year he might have ended up as an NHL assistant coach.

So far someone has been shot in the head. Leading to the emergency meeting to learn of a second death. Great momentum and forward movement.

But then we get the low down on Mike Smith’s failed hockey career. To what end?

On one hand the hockey career may not be irrelevant information in absolute terms — maybe it matters later – maybe we’ll find out Sally’s friend was beaten to death with a hockey stick (spoiler alert, we don’t). But delivered here, at this precise moment, with this much detail, it’s an act of narrative sabotage.

Not only did Tom and Lisa die, but the momentum is dead too. The reader was leaning forward. Now they’re leaning back, waiting to be allowed back into the story.

Back to the Scene: During the meeting Mike finally delivers the bad news, which drops like a bomb. Sally is devastated. Now she rushes back to her own division to tell her staff what happened to their co-worker.

This scene should once again kick start momentum and get the story back on track. The reader imagines how upset they’ll all be. But first:

“Hey Sally! So great to see you. You’re lookin hot in those slacks and sensible shoes” Jane Smith, the company’s inappropriate CFO, glides into the room. Jane is always quite effusive and says inappropriate things that they’d all been warned not to by the company mandated videos. Oddly, nothing ever happens to her when she does it. Jane was a CPA for many years until she won a math award in 1988, getting her plucked out of obscurity to helm the San Francisco office….

All momentum regained about news of the death is once again stalled while we learn useless information about Jane.

This is the writer’s need, not the reader’s. The writer needs us to understand why Jane is Jane. The reader, however, is looking to Sally to see what happens next.

When Backstory Works

Now here’s where backstory works. When Sally goes to Jane’s funeral and she remembers the last time she saw her – giving the reader context not only about Sally and Jane’s relationship, but also a look into Sally’s life.

Inside this moment of genuine loss, we follow Sally into a memory of who the deceased was to her. Here the backstory is doing emotional work. We don’t only learn about their relationship, but we learn new things about Sally, which feeds into the narrative in the present. This is how we learn “why Sally is the way she is”.

The reader has spent enough time with Sally to care about what she’s losing. That care is what makes the backstory land.

Further, this backstory not only explains the past — it’s deepening the present.

A Few Practical Guides

The main question to ask yourself: is this backstory serving the reader’s emotional experience right now? Or is it serving my need to explain?

The other thing to consider is if you remove certain backstory about your character—say the trauma that made them afraid of cats (and there are no cats in the story) will the reader be lost or cheated out of something important by not having known it? In this example, I’d say no.

If you’re not sure whether a piece of backstory is earning its place, consider these:

Has the reader spent enough time with this character to care about their past? If we’re on page two and you’re explaining your protagonist’s childhood, the answer is almost certainly no. The reader hasn’t invested yet. Give them a reason to invest first.

Is the backstory doing work in this scene, or is it pausing it? Backstory that illuminates a present moment — that makes us feel what a character is feeling right now — is active. Backstory that exists in a bubble, disconnected from the scene’s emotional current, is a pause. Pauses stall pacing.

Could this information land harder later? When in doubt, hold it. Find the moment in your manuscript where the reader will benefit most from the information and deliver it then.

The Bottom Line

All of this comes back to how readers engage with fiction: we understand people by watching them act under pressure, not by being told about them.

Backstory is telling. Action is showing. Your reader will learn who your character is by watching what they do. The past — the wound, the history, the formative experience — becomes meaningful only after the reader has watched your character carry it without knowing what it is. By the time you reveal it, the reader should feel as if something they suspected has finally been confirmed.

Your job is not to explain your characters to the reader. Your job is to make the reader understand them. Once the reader is invested, then show them why.

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