The danger of oversharing

One of the challenges of writing a series character is knowing how much to reveal of that character’s background in the first book.

In the book I’m writing now I’m in a very unusual position.  The character whose backstory I’ve been revealing this week has his whole backstory plotted out.  When I read Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit I fell in love with the form of the novel.  It’s told in alternating chapters, one in the past, one in the present, both featuring the same character.

It inspired me to write a complete chapter plan in that form, alternating past and present for my character Brett.  Writing that chapter plan was an inteeesting challenge, because the end of the past timeline had to match up with the start of the present timeline.  I didn’t pull it off at the first attempt, and had to go back and re-plan about ten chapters to get the storylines to mesh. 

But I did that, and now I have Brett’s whole life mapped out.  Which means that in the first novel I’m able to refer to that chapter outline and reveal some of the history in it.  And here’s where the danger of oversharing comes.  It would be very easy for me to add in the details I know because I have them in that chapter plan, but I need to carefully ration that information.

After all, I do want to write Brett’s story later in the series.  I want to give him a whole novel, and I don’t want my readers feeling that they’ve been short-changed because they already know large chunks of his story.

So in the first book I’m having to ration the information I parcel out about it.  He was discharged as unfit for duty from Landforce after an incident with an experimental aircraft.  I’ve kept details of that vague in the current story.  In the novel I’ll write about Brett I want to show that incident in all its detail.  What happens there forces him to make a key - and shocking - decision which has haunted him ever since.

In the first novel I’ve mentioned that he’s a cyborg, with a prosthetic arm and leg, but here too I have to be careful with how much information I dole out.  It too is tied up with his time in Landforce, and again I  want to show him getting his prosthesis in his own novel.  So in the first book I’ve put in very little detail about the incident in which he got injured.

I’ve never been in the position of knowing a character’s whole life story before.  Working out what the reveal and what the withhold has been an interesting challenge.