Backstory: My Best Day

by Julie Tollefson

My best day ever was the day my son was born.

Ho-hum. Not much of a story, is it? Unimaginative. Derivative. Pedestrian. And true.

It’s the backstory, though, the months and years leading up to that one event, that makes the day story-worthy. It’s the history of miscarriage and years of infertility. It’s the innumerable, invasive—and ultimately inconclusive—tests. It’s the questions and soul-searching: What if we never have a child of our own? It’s the surprise twist, after years of anguish and after losing hope that it will ever happen.

I was a happy pregnant woman. Morning sickness? Great! Weight gain? Bring it on. Baby kicking the you-know-what out of my bladder? How awesome is that!

I was also cautious and guarded and apprehensive. With our baby-making history a litany of setbacks and failures and disappointments, I couldn’t let myself be too happy, too optimistic, too accepting. That would be tempting fate.

We scheduled an early sonogram to be sure the baby was developing. I read mountains of books about pregnancy and childbirth (most of them scary). We scheduled several more sonograms. I dreaded every test result, and then celebrated when they were normal.

And then one of the test results wasn’t normal. I had borderline gestational diabetes. Suddenly, I was monitoring blood sugar several times a day and watching every bit of food that went into my body. I had weekly and then twice-a-week “non-stress tests” (what a misnomer!) at the end of the pregnancy to keep an eye on my health and the baby’s development. My doctor watched me and the baby closely.

In the full spectrum of things that can go wrong in pregnancies, this was minor. But given our history, the results of that test scared me enough to give up chocolate until the baby was born. Chocolate!

And then came my best day, that wonderful day 18 years ago this week, when my son was born. And he was perfect. A beautiful, happy, healthy baby boy.

Without the backstory, my best day is a birth announcement: wonderful and exciting, but lacking depth.

What makes the story more compelling is the backstory, the six-year history of trauma, heartache, and hope leading up to the moment the boyo was born. 

The same is true of fiction: What makes the story a story is not just the words on the page, but the words that don’t make it onto the page. All of my characters have their own mini-stories. Sometimes, their backstories are huge, important parts of the main story I’m trying to tell. For others, their backstories are private—just between me and them—but they help me understand how a character will act and react to unfolding events. 

All of my character backstories are important, even the ones readers never see. Through them, I know the pain and joy my characters have experienced. They make the character real, something more than a name on a page. They help me take a birth announcement and transform it into a story worth telling and—my ultimate goal—worth reading.