In each of the those chapters, Perry introduces a different character, and he uses little bits of backstory (similarly to THE WALK-IN excerpt) to make the characters strong and believable very, VERY quickly.

So every time in a story you introduce a new character who is more than a spear carrier, you have to decide how much backstory is needed? Anne Perry was good at that. I'll go dig around in her novels looking for some more examples.

We'll have to be careful, though. There is backstory -- how and why the character is being introduced with a relevant past as opposed to just a description of their appearance?

I suspect that all this is editing tools rather than tools to help with composing first drafts. Although a familiarity with them may aid first drafts.

From EYES OF PREY by John Sandford page 44 [past before the present story]
….
“Feel better in the morning?”
“My body would.”
“The Crows beat you up pretty bad,” Elle said. The Crows were Indians, either terrorists or patriots. Lucas had helped kill them. Television had tried to make a hero out of him, but the case had cost him his relationship with his woman friend and their daughter. “You finally found out that there’s a price for living the way you do. And you found out that you can die. And so can your kid.”
“I always knew that,” Lucas said.
“You didn’t feel it. And if you don’t feel it, you don’t believe it,” Elle rapped back.
….

Hmm…although this bit of backstory comes in the middle of Elle’s dialogue, it seems to really be Lucas’s backstory/recollection rather than Elle’s…since she’s not the pov character. Either it’s Lucas’s or it’s some hidden narrator’s.

Also from EYES OF PREY page 350 to 351 [past within the present story]

….
”Messed up,” Lucas said. “I’d only known Cassie for a few days, and I don’t think we would have lasted.,,but ****. She was pulling me up. I was feeling almost human.” “Are you going back over the edge?” Daniel’s face was questioning, concerned.
“Christ, I hope not, Lucas said, rubbing his face with his open hands. He was exhausted. After the arrest, he’d gone home and crashed, slept the night and the day through, until he was shaken out of bed by Daniel’s call. “Anything but that.”
“hmm.” Daniel picked up a dead cigar, rolled between his fingers. “You’ve heard about the answering machine.”
“No, I’ve been out of it.”
….

From ENTOMBED by Linda Fairstein pages 2 to 3

….
“Sorry, Ms Cooper. I mean the girl is fortunate to be alive. You know she went DOA when they pulled up to the docking bay at the emergency room?”
Mercer had told me that. Annika Jelt had stopped breathing on the short ride to New York Hospital. The cops dispatched to a neightbor’s 911 call reporting screams in the stairwell knew there was no time to wait for an ambulance. The young officer who carried the victim down to the patrol car had served in the army reserves as a medic during the war in Iraq. Annika owed her life to the fact that he revived her in the back seat of the RMP, on the way to the ER, before she was rushed into surgery to inflate her lung and stanch the bleeding.
Mercer led the way down the staircase. The traces of ....

And on page 5 –

….
“There are buildings with doormen on both corners of the block. This is a fully occupied brownstone on a well-lighted street. He’s a cool case, this guy. He got her at the front door on top of the stoop, as she was unlocking it –“
“She told you that?”
Mercer had been waiting at the hospital when the young woman emerged from the anesthetic late last evening. “Too many tubes coming out of the kid to speak, and the docs only gave me fifteen minutes with her. I asked some basics until she ran out of steam. She squeezed my hand like I told her for some yes-and-no kind of questions.”
We were driving to the hospital, just a few blocks away on York Avenue at Sixty-eighth Street. Mercer stopped in to check on his victim on the way to his office this morning, and ....

And on pages 9 to 10 –

….
Mercer’s cell phone vibrated and he unhitched it from his belt to flip it open as he pulled out of the driveway onto York Avenue. “Sure. Bob. I’ll take a preliminary,” he said, looking over at me.
It was Bob Thaler, the chief serologist at the medical examiner’s office, who had worked up a quick analysis, less than twenty-four hours after getting the evidence found at the scene of Annika’s assault. These tentative findings would later be validated with further testing. This first run wouldn’t hold up in court, but it would give us an immediate idea if there was evidence of value.
“Yeah, we picked up those four cigarette butts from the stoop in front of the building. You find something?”

And page 33 –

….
“Who’s coming?” I asked.
Mike shrugged. “I asked for Dorfman. Andy Dorfman.”
The office had only one forensic anthropologist. The overwhelming number of old bones that people came across in an urban setting belonged to animals that had once roamed the place more freely, and sometimes to humans who had died of natural causes. Every now and then, the remains could be linked to a homicidal death.”
“That’s why you stopped the digging?”
“You got it. Andy doesn’t like…

And pages 51 to 53 – [here are several that come close together. The pov is having dinner with her friend and partner. We see them order and the a lot of backstory interspersed with details of their conversation. We readers might not understand the full conversation as they are discussing stuff in their pasts and present. We get the summaries to shorten the dinner.]

….
“A veal chop for me. Biggest one you’ve got back there. String beans, potatoes, throw everything in the kitchen on the side, okay? And tell Giuliano to come back and join us.”
The owner was as tall as Mercer – six feet six – with an expansive personality, at once charming and tough. He had come to the States from a small town in northerern Italy and worked his way up from a position as a waiter in a well-known restaurant to running his own chic eatery.
Adolfo poured the wine for us and went off to place the order. I told Mike about the new case with my old silk stocking nemesis and explained how Mercer and I had convinced Battaglia ....
And also on page 53 –

….
“I actually feel kind of relieved,” I said, as Adolfo replaced the empty soup bowl with our entrees. My relationship with television newsman Jake Tyler had ended abruptly last October, after a long period during which I could feel our emotions unraveling and tangling both of us in their debris.
“First-class jerk if you ask me. ****, I would have married you just for the on the Vineyard.”
….

I spent quite a while going through PUSHING ICE by Alastair Reynolds looking for instances of possible backstory like these. Strangely enough, I didn’t find them. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough, but is this something different in sf? The lack of characters revealing their past? In as much detail as in mysteries?

From CON ED by Mathew Klein pages 13 to 14 –

…
When she sits down she says, “So are you a cop?”
I laugh.
“Why are you laughing?”
“Because I’m the furthest thing from a cop you can be.”
“What does that mean? Are you a criminal?”
“I was,” I say. I’ve learned to get this part of the conversation out of the way as early as possible. The longer you wait, the more cheated the other person feels. You spring the fact that you’re an ex-con on someone more than a day after meeting them, and they feel violated. It’s better to set the expectations low and then exceed them. “I was in prison for a little while. I’ve been out for a year.”
“What’d you do? To go to prison?”

From page 36 –

….
“Nothing. I haven’t seen you in a while. I thought you might miss me.”
“Of course I miss you.”
I last saw Toby six months before my release from Lompoc, the one and only time he visited me in prison. Five minutes into the visiting hour, he asked to borrow money so he could open a coffee shop in Seattle. When I explained that my incarceration and bankruptcy made it difficult to fund new business ventures, he got that mopey look I was so familiar with. After a few minutes further pleasantries he left. He has called me a few times since I got out, either when he’s mad at Celia – his mother – or when he needs cash. I try my best to help him when ever I can, no questions asked. Last think I heard, he was living in Aspen, working as a ski instructor.
“I say, “Are you still in Aspen?
“Not really.”
….

From page 38 –

…
“Now you’re being patronizing.”
“No, I’m not. I love you.” Which is true. Who doesn’t love his son? No matter what the son does? And, it Toby is a bit lost in his life, whose fault is ti but mine? When he was fourteen years old, I divorced his mother after she caught me cheating with her best friend, Lana Cantrell. Five years later, I was sent to the slammer for mail and securities fraud. Toby’s father is an unfaithful, womanizing, corrupt criminal. What kind of kid can he expect?
I say, “I’m just glad to see you, Toby.” I walk over to him, give him a hug. He sits stiffly in the chair. As I hug him, I look down at his scalp. He’s balding. Even more than me. Now, in addition to feeling hurt and unloved, I feel halfway dead.

# # #

I think I cut out all the too long examples or cut them down enough.

What do you guys out there take away from these examples of possible backstory? How many are legitimate for our purposes?

Look at these two examples from CON ED (Matthew Klein, pages 41 to 43)in your emails –

Backstory, right?

Celia is convinced that I have sequestered a fortune in Swiss bank accounts, that I have secret real estate if Florida, phantom yachts on the Riviera. I wish I were half the crime lord she thinks I am. Maybe if she entered my apartment and stepped into my bathroom, with the crap-encrusted toilet bowl; or if she saw that my TV remote is missing the Lower Volume button, forcing me to listen to everything at the same deafening loudness; of if she spent a few tedious hours with me at the dry cleaners, shrink wrapping shirts and slacks, then she would know that I have nothing, that I am nothing except what I appear: an honest man, trying to get by. And not succeeding.
I wish she would stop telling Toby otherwise. The poor kid is doing cartwheels across a high wire, counting on a safety net that doesn’t exist.

And this one.

After La Casa Nostra was decimated by RICO and federal prosecutions, the Russians from Brighton Beach moved into California. Now they run the state’s prostitution and loan-sharking business. They are smarter and more ambitious than the Italians – and a thousand times crueler. Italy, after all, was the heart of the Roman Empire. Some of that civilization rubbed off, even on the crooks. Sure, the Italians are tough, but at least they have rules. The Russians are from the cold and brutal steppes, land where civilization never alighted, where evil is a long dark season, where you can be killed simply for looking at the wrong person at the wrong moment, where your son, and his son, and his son after that can be sentenced to death for an intemperate remark, or a thoughtless gesture.

This second is not the pov’s own backstory. It’s general historical information he knows. We read it because the writer wants to make certain the readers understand fully the danger the pov’s son has gotten himself into. But IS the text backstory for our purposes? Or do we put it in with explanations of how to generate uranium yellowcake and what is a hagfish in other novels? All the examples I mentioned do fit the requirement of revealing obstacles or raising the stakes -- ???

Backstory of the setting which is told by a character within the story, or the unseen narrator in 3rd or omni pov????
Told in narration

From CON ED From page 38 –

…
“Now you’re being patronizing.”
“No, I’m not. I love you.” Which is true. Who doesn’t love his son? No matter what the son does? And, if Toby is a bit lost in his life, whose fault is it but mine? When he was fourteen years old, I divorced his mother after she caught me cheating with her best friend, Lana Cantrell. Five years later, I was sent to the slammer for mail and securities fraud. Toby’s father is an unfaithful, womanizing, corrupt criminal. What kind of kid can he expect?
I say, “I’m just glad to see you, Toby.” I walk over to him, give him a hug. He sits stiffly in the chair. As I hug him, I look down at his scalp. He’s balding. Even more than me. Now, in addition to feeling hurt and unloved, I feel halfway dead.

# # #
Here we have a 1st person pov giving us an internalization with a dollop of his own backstory. Not a lot. Just sufficient for the reader to understand the rest of the internalization – why the pov believes he’s responsible for how his son turned out.

Now watch – we can remove the backstory and does the passage make sense?

“No, I’m not. I love you.” Which is true. Who doesn’t love his son? No matter what the son does? And, if Toby is a bit lost in his life, whose fault is it but mine? Toby’s father is an unfaithful, womanizing, corrupt criminal. What kind of kid can he expect?

Yes, the passage does make sense. Without the bit of backstory we have to take the pov’s word that his father is an unfaithful, womanizing, corrupt criminal. With the backstory, we can nod our heads in agreement. It makes the story feel more solid. More real. More ________ (insert your own word).

When to add this touch – that’s an artistic decision we all have to make. But can you see the tool a little more clearly now?

Here’s another example also from CON ED page 36 –

….
“Nothing. I haven’t seen you in a while. I thought you might miss me.”
“Of course I miss you.”
I last saw Toby six months before my release from Lompoc, the one and only time he visited me in prison. Five minutes into the visiting hour, he asked to borrow money so he could open a coffee shop in Seattle. When I explained that my incarceration and bankruptcy made it difficult to fund new business ventures, he got that mopey look I was so familiar with. After a few minutes further pleasantries he left. He has called me a few times since I got out, either when he’s mad at Celia – his mother – or when he needs cash. I try my best to help him when ever I can, no questions asked. Last thing I heard, he was living in Aspen, working as a ski instructor.
“I say, “Are you still in Aspen?
“Not really.”
….

What’s interesting here is how the author slides the reader so neatly from the reflection/internalization/backstory back into the story with his question about the last item he was thinking/remembering.

Let’s look at 3rd person pov with unseen narrator.

From THE WALK-IN by Gary Berntsen and Ralph Pezzullo page 157

….
“Now I need to ask you a favor.”
“We can balance the ledger.”
Eight years ago Matt had rescued Guillermo from a Serbian arms dealer who wanted him dead.
“I’m looking for a kid named Javed Mohammed. I believe his last name is Kourani. Eighteen; lives in France with his mother; his grandfather was a Shia mullah.”
Guillermo was a useful guy. He’d escaped from Argentina in the ‘70s during the Dirty War and used his skills as a political operative to create alliances and make deals. You wanted a woman who had slept with Fidel Castro, he could find her. You needed a Chinese minisub, he could get that for you, too.
“How soon do you need him?”
“Today, if possible.”

The first bit of backstory explains why the one character speaks of “balancing” the ledger. We know why. It seems that this sort of explanation usually (always?) comes after – immediately after – the comment that needs explaining.

The second, longer, bit explains about who Guillermo is. Now we know why the pov contacted him. The backstory itself has been made entertaining with the two examples of Guillermo’s abilities.

These are both narrative paragraphs inserted into an ongoing conversation. Once again, when and where to do this is an artistic decision. Be careful when trying it.

We’ve seen small backstory bits inserted into the middle of paragraphs and as independent paragraphs in the middle of on going story.

Look, guys, lurkers. I know you are busy, but I opened this to have a dialogue. Monologue I can do on my own. Am I being too technical for you? Or, too simplistic? Or just boring?

A character’s backstory

Told in dialogue
by the character
about the character by another character in 1st or 3rd pov

Told in narration (within an internalization or as a separate paragraph)
by the character
about the character by another character in 1st or 3rd pov

Backstory of the setting

Told in dialogue
by the character

Told in narration (within a paragraph of other narrative information or as a separate paragraph, or as a flashback scene)
by a character within the story
by the unseen narrator in 3rd or omni pov