Picture this: The setting is a writers’ conference. Three literary agents are sitting on a stage. A moderator is reading the first page of a manuscript submitted by an anonymous writer. The agents are instructed to raise their hand at the point they’ve lost interest and plan to send a rejection to the writer.
Wait! A rejection after barely reading the first page of an 80,000+-word manuscript?
Yes.
That hardly seems fair after all the time, not to mention the emotional angst, you’ve invested in your writing. Yet apparently, that’s the reality of traditional publishing these days.
In my role as a traditionally published author, writing coach, manuscript editor, and writing teacher, I attend several writers’ conferences a year. Many of those conferences feature literary agents looking for (and often finding) new clients.
So, let’s return to that agent panel to see how the agents react to those manuscripts’ first pages.
The moderator reads several submissions. I immediately see a trend: Two agents (one is a man, the other a woman) raise their hands almost simultaneously, while the third agent is a bit more indulgent and waits until later to raise her hand—if at all.
After each reading, the agents explain their reactions.
Quickly, I notice another trend: More often than not, the agents who raised their hands say they did so because the story’s forward momentum suddenly deviated to backstory.
But wait, you might protest. Isn’t backstory necessary—even critical—to give the reader the important context for the characters and the story?
Apparently not.
So, what’s a writer to do?
The short answer is to intrigue and entice the reader to want to know more about the characters rather than front-loading your story with a backstory data dump.
This makes sense because that’s also how we live life. When we first meet someone, we don’t know their entire life history. We only learn about their past as our relationship with them progresses.
The takeaway, then, is to show the story rather than tell the story. Get your characters talking with each other so that the actual story unspools the way real life does.
Agents tell me they receive as many as 150 queries and submissions a day, so they have to decide quickly if your story hooks them.
Does this mean you should never provide the reader with backstory and flashbacks?
Not at all. Just not at the very beginning of your story. My two cents.
John DeDakis is a former editor on CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.” DeDakis, a former White House correspondent, is the author of six novels in the Lark Chadwick mystery-suspense-thriller series. He is also a manuscript editor, writing coach, and podcaster. www.johndedakis.com
, 
