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THE VALUE OF MINIMIZING BACKSTORY

THE VALUE OF MINIMIZING BACKSTORY

“Backstory” is the term for any narrative that occurs in the past within the world of the script, chronologically occurring before the action of the A-story. In cinematic writing, backstory typically takes one of two forms: exposition, and flashback. With exposition, we’re telling the backstory; characters talk about what happened, or perhaps we’re “telling” via stuff like on-screen crawls, photos/images, etc. In flashback, we’re showing backstory; we’re cutting back in time to play out a scene. Backstory is like any other form of exposition: It should be treated like a necessary evil. We give the audience only so much as...

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