How to Use Backstory When Writing Memoir

I SPEND A LOT of time speaking to writers about how to use backstory when writing memoir. How much of the background needs to be written into a tale? When should it be told? And what is the difference between flashbacks and background? And is understory the same thing, and how does it support the action of the piece? These and other questions plague memoir writers as they make their best efforts to write what they know. Let’s see if we can clear up some of this, shall we?

What is Backstory or Understory?

I first heard the phrase “b-matter” when working at The New York Times, and I remember a distinct calm settling over me when I did. The phrase stands for “background information” and, at the time, the idea that there is much that does not get written into a story – the story behind the story – was deeply reassuring. As a young writer, I had yet to master what to do with all the material that travels with every tale.

And it does travel with every tale.

Don’t believe me? Pick any item you own. Go on. Pick it up and have a look. Maybe you chose something utilitarian from your desk. A pen, perhaps. Oh, look: You pocketed it from that hotel room in the Caribbean. You remember that weekend, that one you took to save your relationship with your now ex-partner. You remember that relationship, the one you began after that other relationship you swore you’d never get over which, of course, you could not get over because it so perfectly mirrored your parents’ own unsteady marriage. In fact, you remember the exact moment you first grabbed that pen and how, if you had not been holding onto something, you might have said that one thing no one should ever say in a relationship and how, even then, the whole thing fell apart.

See what I mean? Did you notice how that tale instantly telescoped back, giving intersecting layer after layer of story to something that to anyone else is merely a pen? Imagine if you had chosen something as clearly loaded as your deceased mother-in-law’s recipe files, your parents’ wedding photos or that little pocket address book you once kept of all your old lovers. Imagine what comes attached to one of those items.

I was taught to use the terms “understory,” “backstory” and “b-matter,” interchangeably. All of them refer to what is standing behind every story. In many ways, it is a support system. In others, it’s a trap. And knowing just how much you need to support your story is your assignment. Being able to discern the exact proportions of past and present can make or break a tale. Backstory, b-matter or understory — no matter what you call it — is background material, pure and simple. What you do with that material is writing.

How to Choose Good Background Material

I recently read the remarkable, recently-published novel, Overstory. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, it was written by Richard Powers. It makes the ever-so-important argument that we are alive by the generous grace of the trees. Without them, none of us would be here. Since we cannot live without them, trees can be viewed as the overstory of our lives.  And yet, of course, we mess with them every single day by polluting the air, clearcutting the forests and more.

Seen as overstory, they now loom large in my own story as I walk around in my life. Trees nourish and provide for us. They house and shelter and oxygenate. They give life, and while I am changed for having read the book, I do not go around talking about trees, or that book, all the time. Instead, it is there, informing me and my version of life on this planet.

It is with a similar sense of importance that you need to consider your understory.

It is everywhere. It is all-nourishing. It directs your behavior. It is immense but, like your own genealogy, it is only of real interest to you.

Quite an assignment to use it well, isn’t it? No wonder you washed your kitchen floor today instead of writing. After all, with that amount of material, how in the world can you possibly choose what to tell us?

The answer is simple and, if you know me and my work at all, you know it is going to go right back to your argument.

How to Plan for Backstory?

Never forget that all memoir is an argument. Memoir is not about you. It is about something, and you are an illustration of that something, and as soon as you remember that you will feel your b-matter getting shoved off center stage. In short, I only need to read the understory material that supports the argument of the one piece you are writing. (If this is new material to you, please read my post about what goes into every piece of memoir).

Are you making some argument about class in America? Are you using your own family’s conflicts? Perhaps your father came from some old-moneyed clan and your mother did not, and maybe that tension is acted out at holidays by your paternal grandmother who still treats your mother like temporary help. What have you got to include to show us that?

Not much, really. A little silver, some crystal on the table; a comment, a response. Keep it simple, and you keep it close to the bone. There’s more backstory in a snub uttered over an inherited crystal punchbowl than in reams of copy that desperately tries to affix one class to one side of the family and another to the rest.

So, go to your argument and remember your purpose. Then choose from the seeming endless backstory. And choose well.

What is the Difference Between Flashbacks and Backstory?

I define memoir as what you know after something you’ve been through. Most of memoir is set in the past and reveals your history, as you evolve from one state to another, all along the way showing us what you learn. Your backstory, therefore, is deeply important. But, as stated above, we don’t want all of it.

Flashbacks are a specific device utilized to jump back in time. As the name suggests, flashbacks flash back to a previous scene, allowing readers to witness something we need to know. And whenever the topic is flashbacks, whether it gets raised in one of my online memoir classes or working one-on-one with a writer, I always start with the same warning: Do not give your reader whiplash.

I mean it.

Do not require your reader to jump back and forth for any of the following three reasons:

1. Because you do not know what else to do
2. Because you decided early on in the writing that you would
3. Because you just read a book where somebody else did it

How to Use Flashbacks Well When Writing Memoir

Here is the single reason to use flashbacks: Because they heighten your argument.

We’ve all seen flashbacks work brilliantly. These days, I read lot of them in work coming out of the #MeToo movement, specifically when a conversation in the safe harbor of therapy finally gives language to the sexually abusive experiences someone had as a child. Stepping back into the abuse, and ascribing to the moment the language it so rightly deserves, allows those who were abused to substitute new words for what really happened. Instead of perpetuating the language in the voice of the abuser — be quiet; don’t tell — we witness the scene for the horror that it was.

Moments like that change us all.

What is Good Backstory Content?

Any screenwriter will tell you that they know their characters inside out. For instance, they know where a protagonist went to school, what kind of student she was and what disappointments she had. None of that may be explicitly stated in the screenplay dialogue. Instead, it might rest in the deep background of who this person is, so that when the topic of college comes up, for instance, the character’s chagrin about her lack of education is heard in a sound; perhaps her pride of where she went to school is smartly displayed. How to use backstory in this case requires knowing not to belabor it. The viewer hears it in an audible wince or sees it in the wearing of a Harvard sweatshirt. Little else is needed when the delivery is good.

A good flashback delivers what we need to know on time and to space. You give it to us when – and only when – we need it and then with great efficiency. And while it might take many pages to give us the full meaning of your family’s southern gentility, but it should not take many chapters.

Understory is In the Show, Not the Tell

How can you show me southern gentility, or northern pride? How do you illustrate the kind of abuse that left you without a voice until you got into your thirties and had the courage to go into therapy? How do you illustrate what you went through so that we can appreciate the who you are now? How to use backstory correctly?

With scenes.

One of the devices I teach my clients and students is to make an emotional timeline of their “here to there.” Specifically, make a list of the evolution of the aha! moments you had to undergo to get from where you were to where you are now.

How? Again, start with your argument.

Let’s say your memoir argues that closure is a myth. To do so, your book depicts your motion from someone who believes in closure to someone who comes to believe that closure is a myth. First, list all your emotional stops along the way. Maybe your list would look something like this:

• Plunked down as a child in front of the Disney versions of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, I believe every sweet message
• Someday my prince will come
• Closure is real
• I watched these movies with my dad, so love and comfort and closure combine into one treasured message
• When my dad died, all that vanished
• Looking for it in others does not bring it back
• Believing in closure is hard
• Desperate grief makes us grab onto others
• Giving romantic love to others does not assure connection
• Making really bad decisions about love, and who to love, seems to be part of grief
• Maybe people don’t come back and save you from your own decisions
• Maybe I’m on my own
• I am on my own in this life
• I’m really on my own
• I am on my own and that’s not going to change
• I’m on my own and that’s really okay
• Since I’m on my own, I wonder if I’m enough
• Look at that: I am enough
• And I’m good
• Now I can love
• Loving someone else without the expectation of forever and being saved is real love
• Closure is a myth

Next, make another list in which you assign the best scene you’ve got to illustrate each of these emotional mileposts to believing that closure is a myth.

And look at that. There’s a book outline, of sorts. Wow.

How to Time Your Flashbacks

Now, look more closely and see if you can identify how to use a flashback in the book outlined above. Maybe you would open the book with one short scene of you, right here and now, independent and able to love, and then jump back to a little you watching the Disney Cinderella with your father and metabolizing the myth of closure. Then you’d run the rest of the book in straight chronological order, meaning there would be only that one, opening, abrupt jump back in time instead of the twenty or so you had originally planned to whiplash your reader through. Then, using your emotional history as a timeline, we meet you, in full, again at the end of the book and see how you got here. With this book structure, you create instant interest in the reader in how you got from there to here, but utilize only one leap in time.

This is not to stay I don’t love flashbacks. I do. For the master of them, read Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan novels and watch her move her characters seamlessly back and forth over sixty years of their shared lives. Study her method. Then read the number-one national bestseller, Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson and watch someone control flashbacks with the precision of a clockmaker. Study others. Be amazed. And learn. Leave your favorite time-defying, time-controlling books in the comments below, if you like, and share with others where you learned what you know what you learned in your reading life.

And while you do, try this at home: Write out your argument. Plot the emotional timeline. Add the physical timeline. Clearly identify when and where any flashbacks need to be deployed.

How to use backstory when writing memoir? Judiciously. Carefully. But always on argument.

Why to Love Understory

I love understory. It’s the emotional support system of all of us. It’s our history. It’s our families’ histories. But using it properly in any length piece of memoir takes the kind of discernment that good writing requires.

So use some discernment. And write well.

Want more help? Join me in a live, online class

Memoirama: Live, 90 minutes. Everything you need to write what you know.

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And keep in mind that I am now taking names for the January-June, 2020 Master Class, the prerequisites for which are Memoirama and Memoirama 2. Live, once a month. Limited to seven writers. Get a first draft of your memoir finished in six months.