Young Writers Society

I'll give you a little scenario of what I'm doing, just because I have no idea if this is a good thing to do, the proper thing to do, etc.

Essentially, I have a novella series planned out. The first installment of it, I've planned to introduce characters separately (their back-story, why they're here, etc.) within 1-2 chapters. The reason I wanted to do this was because the series itself I have planned at 4 novellas (and I'm still developing the story further), and a lot of it is character driven, and since there's a huge cast of characters, I thought having the reader get to know them a bit better would be nice.

Is this bad practice? I asked this on another writing forum and the few people that posted didn't seem too thrilled.

To get your ideas on paper, starting like that is okay. I had a chapter of about ten pages dedicated to my cast of characters. Long chunks of exposition detailed each character's relationship with each other and the current world situation. (My novel is character-driven fantasy) When I posted the story on YWS I got a couple comments back that there wasn't any action and all those introductions were too slow. In the end, I rewrote the beginning, giving a ton of action along with the information. But, I'm very glad the draft had all the information it did. By getting all my ideas out on paper first and using that as my jumping off point for the story, I was able to rewrite the beginning much more effectively.

You're just in the planning stages. Do whatever it takes to get your story out on paper, and worry about what other people think of the beginning later.

Agree with Rosey. Just write it and stop worrying, then when you're editing come back to it.

Overall, I'm not so keen on the idea of just telling us all the backstory first. Quite frankly, it's boring. Backstory can be shoved in anywhere. But you do need to develop your characters for yourself, so writing it is fine. Just don't expect to be keeping it

Okay, here's what I do:

Write a bunch of things down on a piece-or in my case a lot of pieces- of paper. Don't think! Only write. Just let your ideas flow from your pencil onto the paper. Then, when you're done, read everything that you've written and from there you can start writing your story.
With introducing the characters seperatly, is it going to be a multiple POV book? If not, doing that wouldn't be the best idea. If it's going to be one of those 'he said shesaid' books, then giving each character a one or two chapter introduction would be lovely! But, if you do that you must remember to have the characters tie together in some way. There's a book called "Pretty Things" that would be a excellent example of what I'm talking about. Also-though this isn't as good an example as Pretty Things-, I did post something like that on this site in the Romance thread-A Modern Romance? is the title-. Well, hope I helped a bit! Bye-bye!

Big kiss, review dismissed!
Snufalupaumpkins! x)

The reader doesn't neccesarily have to know all of the backstory. It's mainly there so you know the character better, so you can write them more realistically. I write backstories for all my characters, but only the really important bits make it into the actual draft, when they seem relevant or are absolutly neccesary.