Don't Make These Common Author Mistakes

In my free time I masquerade as a book designer and graphic artist for no other reason except that it pays the bills. It's a good job. A fun job. I've been doing it for about seven years. The number one problem I routinely come across when working with first time authors is the sometimes insurmountable pile of front matter that they want to include in their books.

Currently I'm working on laying out two novels suffering from the same exact problem. One of the authors has spent years of her life crafting this immense fantasy world. She's got mermaids and sea dragons and talking fairies and this entire mystical world that is deeply rooted in her invented culture. The front of her book is packed with maps and histories and character biographies that take up a good twenty pages before the story even starts.

The second author has written a massive six-hundred pager that is fronted with an epic backstory explaining the rivalry between the wizard and his nemesis, the land they come from, and the mythology surrounding their world. It's literally over one hundred pages before we even meet the main character of the story—the character whose name is the title of the book!

Both of these writers are insistent that all of this material be shoved in the faces of their readers right off the bat. Doing this could not possibly be more detrimental to their books. I understand, and can certainly appreciate, all the effort that these authors took with crafting their worlds, but here are two reasons why it's absolutely NOT essential to include this information in their books.

1. Most of the time no one cares. The backstory is for the author. The reams and reams of notes detailing the world and the mythology is to help the author craft the story, not to help the reader understand it. The backstory needs to unfold naturally throughout the narrative. This is what dramatic storytelling is all about—revealing certain pieces of information at just the right time. People who pick up a fiction novel looking for a good story don't care about your history lesson. Put it in the narrative or don't put it in at all.


2. It's not necessary to spoon-feed your readers. Which is more interesting: to be told right up front that Harry is a horcrux or to find out near the end, at the peak of suspense, that—ohmygosh!—Harry is a horcrux! J.R.R Tolkien's The Silmarillion, published posthumously, details many backstory elements to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but none of it is relevant to comprehending either of those books. Tolkien wisely included in his two masterful works what information was necessary for readers to comprehend the story, and it was beautifully and dramatically done within the natural course of the narrative.

It's admirable the degree of detail writers are able to bring to their worlds. In fact, no writer should even begin writing a book without first having a strong grasp of who and what they're writing about, but your readers don't need to know it all. If your story doesn't start on page one, you know you've got a problem.