Do you have to tell the narrator's story?

I am writing a short story (longish short story) from first person. This is a science fiction story. Using first person was my way of not having to fill in all the details or know all the answers since what's going on is being filtered through the MC/narrator. So, I have my character telling this story. It's working. It's working better than I thought. But what I don't have is the MC telling his own story. And I'm wondering if I need that... Do I? Probably, and I'm not opposed to adding another storyline, but I also don't want to over complicate things. Science fiction is something I dabble in at times, but I am far from a master of any sorts when it comes to this genre. The premise of my story is pretty complex. I don't really want to get into it because the story isn't done and I don't want to really try to explain it before I have it all figured out. But this is probably my best attempt at genre to date. It's not like there are no details about the MC. He seems pretty fleshed out on the page for this given story occasion, but I haven't really given him a back story. I haven't really given him much of a story of his own, but I did give him a good story to tell. He's at work when the whole world is turned upside down. He is an active player in this story. It's just he witnesses more than directly happens to him. What do you think of a narrator without a backstory? A narrator who is just kind of caught up in the mix? Man, I want this one to work. I'm totally willing to make big changes. Do all MC's need to have a backstory or a personal story in addition to the main plot? I want my narrator to be more than a spokesperson for what's going on. It's just that I fear I could easily turn this into a very complicated and confusing mess. This one's a tough one for me.

 

By definition 1st POV is the narrator, so they tell the reader whatever they feel like telling them.
Make it as simple or complex as you want, you don't have to include their history if you don't
want to. It is not a mandatory requirement to fill in the past of a character to get the story to
move forward. I think you will be fine, not filling in those details, and will not be confusing to
the reader for that bit not being in there.

Or the short, short answer to do they need backstory: No.

 

If it were pertinent, maybe, but obligatory, no.

I've given myself permission to break away from my frustratingly obstinate WIP and I've been writing some fan fiction. It started with a conversation with @CoyoteKing that had to do with worldbuilding, and this conversation here kinda' brings it full circle.

One thing fan fiction permits is that it relieves the writer of the neurotic obligation to create this creature we call "world" before or while writing the story. Since you're writing in an understood world, you're given license to just get on with the story. The conversation with Coyote had to do with concerns about ability and aptness in worldbuilding, but I'm finding that it goes both ways. Sometimes the writer feels a need to tell the reader a lot of extraneous, pointless data - in your case, possibly, maybe, depending on the circumstance of your story, the POV character's backstory. Maybe your story wants it, maybe it doesn't, but it's certainly not obligatory in an absolute sense.

 

It is not an absolute requirement that the narrator be the main character. I do think he or she would need a certain amount of characterization, though, as you would need to keep in mind what personal biases the narrator brings to the story that's being told.

 

My stories always start out extremely plot-driven, with my characters as largely the kind of set pieces that it sounds like you're talking about, but also always become more and more character-driven as I experiment with different motivations and internal conflicts and see which ones work best.

Could that process work for you too? Starting with a plot and a character, and then using them until you come up with ways of intertwining them more strongly?

(Also, when I saw the title "Do you have to tell the narrator's story?" I thought you were asking "Does the story have to star the narrator as the MC?" and I was going to answer "No, I'm actually writing a First-Person Peripheral Narrator myself, and the dynamic has worked for such greats as Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, Atticus and Scout Finch, Captain Ahab and Ishmael, Mowgli and Bagheera, Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway..." )

 

What I want is to tell the best story ever. LOL. (But a little serious.) It's just hard to know what's needed. And, like I said, science fiction isn't my normal thing. I think that makes it harder to know how to address these sort of things. Maybe?

 

Interesting... Perhaps, I'm struggling with the balance between world building and character development. I'm not sure which one should take point on this.

 

I think I'm somewhat like you. I can think I'm writing a story with a big plot, then, by the time it's done, it can be a very character-driven and intimate story. It's just with genre, I'm not sure I should be doing that. This world I created is totally crazy. But maybe it does need a character-driven approach to bring it home. Or is that going to just look like I have no business writing science fiction?

 

Why not? My longest completed story is a now-character-driven SciFi, and my WIP is a now-character-driven Urban Fantasy

Google "character driven sci fi." It could make you very happy

 

I don't think backstory is always necessary--only if it's relevant to what's actually happening in the plot. Especially in a short story, and especially if you're already not sure if you need it, backstory could end up just being clutter. You'd have to determine when to pause the story and reveal it, how much to reveal, how to keep momentum going through such a digression, how to keep it interesting so the reader doesn't start to glaze over, etc. If things are moving quickly, the character won't have time or frame-of-mind to exposit backstory.

To me, the "narrator's story" is what's happening to him/her now, not what happened in the past.

But then again, I'm very much a minimalist when it comes to worldbuilding and backstory, and have a very admitted bias against them in a lot of cases. So, grains of salt and all that. But no, I definitely don't think we need to know everything about the narrator, especially in a short.

 

Same here, unless somehow it's actually key to the present events. For example, in Herbert's Destination Void, we are given a trickle here, a trickle there of each of the character's backstory because it speaks to the reason (the pre-planned reason) each of these clones is aboard the ship. Each is an archetype, both for the reader and also within the context of the story itself, there to play a role in the hoped-for outcome. In that case it was intrinsic. Whereas, the recent attempts to give backstory to the xenomorph, especially in the last film, is like a clumsy little brother stepping all over my awesome toy and I'm like, stop it! STOP IT!! MOM!!!!!!

 

Approach is like research so you can get it out of your system without messing up the rhythm of what you have going. Pretend you're a journalist and learn all about the narrator's backstory. Go as deep as you want, then file it into your notes to pull into the story as needed. Good research is always far more in depth than you actually need in the piece, but you have it in your back pocket for safety. ETA: Write your notes as long passages, as if you let the recorder run and he's telling your his story. Then pull that into your WIP as you need it.

 

You only need to include the information which is important for the story. In a story about a zombie apocalypse you could have a character appear and start doing brain surgery to heal a zombie. Naturally, a question will arise in the reader's head - how does this person know brain surgery? Is this person a doctor, or is he a mad scientist? Any other character present in the scene might have the same question. So you'll need to provide some sort of explanation. How much explanation you decide to provide is up to you. You can have the surgeon guy just say that "It's a long story." and that might do. Because the situation in this scene might be really urgent, so there's really no time to talk right now. You can just let your descriptions show that the surgeon works professionally and it would become obvious that he's a real doctor. Or you can have them go bezerk and it would be clear that he's a mad scientist. And that's all the knowledge needed at this point. Or, if you decide your scene needs the full backstory of this character (maybe he has his own sob story to tell, to show us how bad the zombies are), you can have him sit down and tell the others how he learned brain surgery. But if your characters back story has nothing to do with the plot, then why do we need to know how in third grade he went to Lapland and met Santa, or how his first girlfriend's name was Kate?

 

I'm trying to remember how important Nick Carraway was in The Great Gatsby. I seem to remember that he just had some ties to the characters, and an excuse to be in the setting, and he was likable. But I don't feel as if he had any real plot arc of his own.

 

Yep, Nick was mainly just an observer. There was a short bit in the beginning about why he was in West Egg for the summer (East Egg? Can't remember which side he was on), a quick statement about Daisy being his cousin, and tiny bits that indicated his stress level at observing all this. Really, only just as much as the reader needed to know for clarity. In his narration his stress at (eta: the prospect of ) being drawn into the story by Gatsby is palpable. Nick did not want to be part of the story.

 

I've actually heard an interpretation – which my father, who has read the book, told me that he'd heard too and that he thought was valid – that Nick Carraway was technically one of the villains by spending the story predicting that all of his acquaintances' plans were doomed to failure, yet never lifting a finger to save them from themselves no matter how many times they proved him right

 

That's an interesting interpretation...One of the things I like about The GG is that there are so many possible interpretations of it, depending on the reader's life experience at the time of reading it. I suppose that's true about many books, but I notice the various possibilities most with the GG, so I go back and re-read it every couple of years. The first time I read it, as a Freshman in college for a class, I hated it. But it haunted me anyway. Now I love it.