Finally realized character backstories work better as onion layers than info dumps

I was workshopping a story at the coffee shop on Main Street last Tuesday and a guy named Dave read my first chapter. He said my protagonist's whole tragic past was dumped in paragraph two and he didn't care yet. So I rewrote it so she only reveals one small thing about her mom in scene one, then a bigger thing in chapter three. Has anyone else found that spacing out reveals keeps readers hooked way more than telling everything upfront?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_joseph3d ago

Read a post from some editor who said "mystery is the engine of narrative" and it clicked for me. Spacing out reveals makes the reader do the work of connecting dots, which gets them invested way more than just handing them the whole picture. Did you find it hard to resist dumping everything at first?

miles_roberts3d ago

Yeah, actually that totally flipped my old thinking. Used to be a "more is more" guy with details, figured readers needed all the info to follow along. But then I tried holding back on a few things in a story I was working on and saw people start guessing and asking questions in comments. It was night and day compared to when I'd just lay it all out there. Made me realize that leaving gaps makes the reader a partner instead of just someone watching from the sidelines.

claire_gibson2d ago

Three chapters in I'm still holding back the protagonist's name and it's working great, just like you found @miles_roberts.