Activate the Past

Robert Frost’s “Home Burial,” in North of Boston (1914), opens at the foot of a staircase. A husband sees his wife, partway down, look back “at some fear,” take a step, undo it, and look again. He asks what she sees “From up there always.” She gives him no help, “sure that he wouldn’t see,” and he climbs until he does. Through the window is the little graveyard “where my people are,” small enough that “the window frames the whole of it,” and then he understands: “it is not the stones, / But the child’s mound.” Frost does not say how the child died or what it was called.

Late in the poem he protests that a man can’t speak of his own child, and his wife, Amy, answers that he can’t because he doesn’t know how. She tells him what she saw “from that very window”: him digging the grave, the gravel leaping “like that, like that,” and then coming indoors with the earth still on his shoes to talk about his “everyday concerns.” She quotes him: “Three foggy mornings and one rainy day / Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.” One afternoon and one remark are nearly all the backstory the poem gives. His calm remark that the graveyard is “Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?” now sounds like the man who talked about the birch fence.

A piece of the past belongs on the page when it changes what a character perceives, what she chooses, or what is at risk. Amy’s afternoon does all three. It explains why she watches the window, it changes how his calm remarks sound, and it puts the marriage at risk. A paragraph of past that changes none of these is information about the character. Backstory isn’t banned, and you may know a great deal the reader never sees.

Delivered before the reader has a question for it, backstory seems to sit inert; delivered by a character with a reason, it changes how the next lines read. Frost plants the question in the opening lines, answers it with a window, and holds the deeper answer until Amy needs it for her case against him. Imagine, by contrast, a manuscript that opens with eleven competent pages of its heroine’s childhood. The past arrives as a credential, and on page twelve she walks into a hospital waiting room like a woman with no history.

If you write backstory as a way of finding the character, keep the pages and use the test in revision, moving into the draft only what passes. If you build a full history before drafting, the temptation is to spend all of it.

Some works are all past, and memoir is one (40): there the past is the subject, and the question is which self is looking at it. The test belongs to work where the present is the story and the past is cargo.

Practice. Take the longest stretch of backstory in your draft, whether a flashback, a biographical paragraph or the history section of an essay, and work through it in forty minutes. For each paragraph, write one sentence beginning “In the present, this changes ___,” and fill the blank with a perception, a choice or a risk. Paragraphs you cannot finish go, undeleted, into a file called “known, not told.” For each survivor, ask who in the story has a reason to reveal it, when, and how much she actually knows, and move it there. Then read the present scene with and without the paragraph. If it reads the same, the past was not working.