How to weave backstory into your narrative
BY Cynan Jones
29th Oct 2025
In this advice blog, Cynan Jones, author of the short story collection Pulse, shares his advice for embedding a backstory into your short stories.
In (well-written) short form fiction, often, there isn’t much room for information that doesn’t contribute directly to the moment at hand. But! That doesn’t mean you can parachute your character into whatever incident you are writing about. You have to get them there from somewhere. And that is backstory.
Further to that, as well as knowing where your character has come from (psychologically as well as historically), you also need to know where they are physically. This is their setting.
In the short form, if you simply load detail onto the page to explain things, you risk burying the reader in wordcount. Here's a ‘trick’ that will help you deliver information beyond the immediate moment of the story in an integrated, economic way.
1. BACKSTORY
- Develop a rich life of the person you are writing about from which to draw information.
You need to know the person you are writing about. It goes without saying you should have knowledge of their past, their fears, their ambitions, their relationships. But even asking what might seem mundane questions of your character can help build a more dimensional understanding of them.
Were they a whiney child? What colour are they most drawn to? Are they the sort of person who has favourites? Do they butter their toast to the edges or not?
It’s more likely you’ll be manipulating the ‘big details’ to suit your own ends, making sure your character is fit for the purpose of your story. But the answers you get to smaller questions might lead you to some surprise finds!
2. SETTING
- Garner as much detail as you can about the place your person is.
A person is in a place at any given time. For you to put your character there properly, you need to spend time inhabiting that place yourself.
Use all of your senses and make a list of everything you can see, hear, feel, smell and taste. Be forensic. Look more closely, listen harder, sit and watch things. You can’t have too much detail.
Again, it’s likely you’ll be designing the broader setting yourself, to suit your story; but the tiny (let’s call them) ‘sensed details’ you might find could help deliver a more authentic sense of place.
3. ASSOCIATION
- Give meaning to some of the sensed details you have collected.
We all carry a gigantic bank of memories and knowledges with us, thus some things we see, taste, feel and so on have relevance beyond that thing itself. If I say the cry of seagulls (heard) and the tang of vinegar (tasted/smelled), the chances are you’ll think of fish and chips at the seaside.
The association in your mind shortcuts me having to write it out longhand. This example – if you grew up in the same culture as I did – is pretty universal. But we all also carry entirely personal associations. You will have your own seaside fish and chips. But so would the person you are writing about. And this is where the trick really happens.
Go to your character’s backstory, and cross reference it with the close-up details you now have of your setting. Do any of the backstory details and sensed details connect? Can something you’ve noticed give you a bridge to something from your character’s backstory? Do you need to look harder at the setting to find something that might? Or does a sensed detail suggest something you could bring into the backstory you hadn’t thought of before?
Rather than get all tangled up trying to explain that better, I’ll explain how this technique helped me with a piece I was working on. Let’s use that tang of vinegar above for something far more specific . . .
A woman approaching middle-age goes on her first ever holiday abroad, to a Mediterranean island. To afford the trip, the woman has used the money her recently deceased grandmother has left her. We meet the woman sitting at a table at a café just off the beach.
- BACKSTORY – The woman’s grandparents lived on a farm. Every autumn, the woman (as a little girl) helped her grandmother make pickled onions ready for Christmas.
- SETTING – There are marinated anchovies on the table.
- ASSOCIATION – The tang of the vinegar transports the woman from the heat of the sun and the bright sky to the cosy farm kitchen, windows misted with steam. She remembers the drops of condensation forming on the outside of the saucepan as they boiled the vinegar.
- SETTING – Beads of condensation have formed on the copper-coloured metal carafe of wine the woman has ordered with her lunch.
. . . And we are brought back to the present of the story.
Having given the reader the mini scene in the farm kitchen, of a process in action, the care and love between the woman and her grandmother are evident, the reader’s compassion is triggered, and there is no need to spend words writing down blunt explanations of how much the old lady is missed. Instead, backstory arrives via a detail in the main story, and is given as a mini story in itself, rather than through reported detail.
Cynan Jones is the author of five short novels – The Long Dry, Everything I Found on the Beach, Bird, Blood, Snow, The Dig, and Cove – and Stillicide, a collection of twelve stories commissioned by BBC Radio 4. Cynan is also the tutor of our six-week Writing Short Stories course.
Pulse, his latest short story collection, is out on 6 Nov with Granta.
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