Welcome back to another Open Book Blog Hop!

Today’s topic is: How do you avoid giving readers TMI (too much information) about a character? How do you decide what to share about a story’s characters?

And remember to pay a visit to my fellow writers to see what they have come up with. You can find their works here!

I think this is an interesting one. Different characters warrant different levels of info. With Edison Crow and Selah, I wanted them to be mysterious and yet, known. Seems contradictory, but I’ll explain. I didn’t want the reader to know who they really are from the word go. I felt it necessary to express who they are and how they became the people they are. But it felt wrong to just do a mass drop of this information.

I toyed with the first half or so of the book being about their past and building their backstories. This felt too heavy. A lot of information to drop up front. The solution I came up with was to drip-feed it throughout Chasing Shadows. Chapter one deals with their childhood and first meeting. Then, as certain events crop up throughout the narrative, I introduce further chapters reflecting back on their past. In some instances, they loosely show how Crow and Selah developed in ways that impact the present. Drip feeding felt the best way.

Where less important characters were concerned, I added relevant info throughout. Personally, I enjoyed the drip feed approach. It was an excellent way to build out the backstory and flesh out key characters without giving everything away up front.