If you’re creating fiction in a novel or short story, at some point you’re gonna start showing us who your main character is. People are what we enjoy observing, and their conflicts and troubles entertain and captivate us. We want them to solve their problems, but not too quickly or easily.
It isn’t your primary job to get all up in the business of your book’s plot right away—except that because you’re creating the early writing, what readers look for is a way to size up and get a measure of the heroine they need to care about for the next 300 or more pages.
Show little wins in character history. Your character may seem to have given up hope, although she hasn’t really, but her win in an early scene might read like a small reward—so readers would be encouraged to see her have some success in the past, even if it came to naught when resolving the real problem.
If she can see her real problem at the beginning of the story, but feels like she’s unmatched to solve it at that point, at least readers know that she’s got insight on what her real problem is. The other option: She can’t see her real problem, and someone helps her see it. A character helping your heroine see her problem doesn’t take too much agency away from a main character. Insight doesn’t necessarily mean they’re handing her a solution.
Avoid the easy outs: When you create something a dilemma in a story where the reader says, “Yeah, but you could just do [one simple thing] and get out of it,” you want to buffer against that easy bailout. Eliminating the simplest solution is a great way to dive into the depth of a character’s dilemma, too.
You avoid the urge to explain the complexity of the dilemma in detail, even as you start to set up conditions for why we would not believe that. You will feel like your need to go into detail, and that’s what you resist. Backstory about the chief problem is still backstory, and it halts the energy of main story.
Picking up the pace
You can move backstory along at a faster pace if it lives inside what you might call the micro-flashback. Think of it like a smash-cut in a movie. It’s rich in sensory detail and vivid metaphor. For example, her dog leads her into traffic off a curb on a walk, and that’s like her spouse leading her into a bad house purchase. You give us reason for the bad situation, but it’s a simple one — so at least the readers make a little sense of it and stop wondering something like why a marriage created that faith that has betrayed her.
If the answer that you give readers is simple to begin with, and you come back later to give us details, that choice gives you another path into solving the character’s primary dilemma. You’ll at least get readers to stop thinking about that easy-out solution.
Make readers curious, but ease up on the mystery. You don’t want readers to use the word confusing. You want them to say, “That makes me very curious.” With curious, they keep reading for a solution because they get invested in your heroine and her problems — because we like them in some way, or they seem to relate to something that we know in our own lives. Confusion is, “What in the world is that about?” The why, though, can be mysterious.
