Two tools for delivering backstory in Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore

In my last scene breakdown, on Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author, I contrasted two kinds of worldbuilding: a top-down, expository approach using telling components and a bottom-up, immersive approach using showing components. One approach isn’t better than another; they are different tools, each with its correct use. In this analysis of chapter four of Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore, I’m going to show you how these two tools can be used to deliver backstory, in addition to worldbuilding.

In the opening chapter of the novel, which I analyzed in detail in my post on the opening, Rowan washes ashore on a remote island far off the coast of Australia, near Antarctica. She is rescued and cared for by the family who live in the lighthouse on the island and serve as its caretakers. Chapter four—in the POV of Dominic, the father of the family and the man we glimpsed in chapter one—is where McConaghy pauses to fill in some backstory after the dramatic, high-tension opening, and she does so using telling.

Let’s walk through the first paragraph of the chapter (A in the figure below), which is a perfect example of expository telling rather than showing:

Notice that we don’t have any kind of action here. The chapter title tells us we are in Dominic’s POV, so we know who the “I” delivering this information is. The matter-of-fact first sentence delivers a crucial piece of backstory that then shades into setting details about the lingering traces of the violent history of Shearwater Island.

Setting can, in fact, be a showing tool when it is part of a live scene, mixed in with action and dialogue, or a telling tool, as it is here, used to deliver background information about a location.

But look at what McConaghy does next with this background information: The ghosts in the setting become literal rather than metaphorical. Dominic’s young son Orly can hear them, and Dominic speaks to “my ghost,” who we can infer from the passage is his late wife. More story questions flicker to life for the reader: What happened to Dominic’s wife? Why does Orly need comfort? Is it psychologically healthy for Dominic or Orly to process their grief by way of these ghosts? And how might the new presence of the mysterious woman affect this fraught emotional ecosystem? McConaghy is telling us some of the backstory, but she’s holding our interest in part by not giving us all of the story; we’re going to have to keep reading to put all of the pieces together.

Next, McConaghy provides a long paragraph full of summary that encapsulates the family’s day-to-day life on the island (B). It’s more telling, but elevated and enlivened by vivid details delivered with the bell-like rhythm of repeated phrases. Here’s a taste (my ellipses): “A life of simple tasks, of day-to-day routines, of grass and hills and sea and sky. A life of wind and rain and fog . . . Of hands clasping a hot cup of chocolate . . . Of the gurgling roar of an elephant seal . . . Of seeds. Of parenting. Of grappling constantly with what to tell them about the world we left behind.” This technique is called “anaphora”—the use of a repeated word or phrase to create a kind of refrain. When you are choosing to tell rather than show, you can use figurative language or rhetorical effects to hold the reader’s interest.

At the end of this scene (C), McConaghy delivers more setting details about this remote and hostile island. Once again, she makes sure to activate those details by attaching them to a story question we are already interested in: How did Rowan wash ashore in such a remote place? Was it accidental or was she trying to get to the island? If so, for what purpose? In this case, McConaghy interweaves the setting details with interiority from Dominic to make the connection for readers: “I am having trouble making sense of how she’s alive—the ocean around us is perilous and so cold, and there is no land for many thousands of kilometers.”

When a stretch of backstory or setting relies heavily on telling tools, tie the details to story questions readers already care about or use them to suggest brand-new ones that will pull readers further into the novel.

It isn’t until the beginning of the second scene that we get some action (D). It is the morning after the storm now, and Dominic and his older son, Raff, go out to survey the damage. Here, McConaghy switches to showing rather than telling. We learn more about their way of life on this island and more about the setting as the two men assess the damage to their power sources. In other words, the setting details arise naturally out of the actions, from the bottom up.

Like Ankara traveling through far-future Lagos in Death of the Author (see my post on worldbuilding), Dominic and Raff teach us about specific details (the downed gutters, the scratched solar cells, the broken wind turbines) as they encounter them. As the comparison suggests, these are setting details rather than backstory; having the characters notice what is different or new tells us a lot about what was usual in this story world before the storm—and before the dramatic events that are part of the novel’s backstory mysteries.

McConaghy drops in a few new sources of tension here: Their comms equipment is down, they will need to drastically reduce their energy consumption to make their dwindling diesel supply last, and the now-empty research station has been inundated by the high tide. A single line of interiority (E) following this last detail immediately elevates the tension of the scene: “I am shaken but I’m not about to let him [Raff] know that.” We understand now that the setting—the wild, dark ocean and the storms that sail across it—is also an antagonist in this novel. Notice, too, that McConaghy is using the tool of dramatic irony to immediately raise tension. Readers now know something that Raff does not.

Next comes another brief bit of action and dialogue (F) as Dominic talks to Orly, who is watching over the still-unconscious Rowan. Dominic then sets off on a solo hike to check the power supply at the seed vault, which triggers a return to telling tools. First, a brief passage of summary (G) tells us what the vault is and why it matters: a store “built to withstand anything the world could throw at it . . . meant to outlast humanity.” McConaghy uses this chunk of summary to establish the stakes. The survival of these seeds is a last hedge against a global catastrophe, and their survival is now at risk due to the slow-moving crisis of climate change.

Then McConaghy delivers the single largest stretch of backstory in the chapter (H), which explains why this family came to Shearwater in the first place and how Dominic’s feelings about it have changed over the years they’ve lived there. He tells us, “I needed a job, and I needed it to be far away,” which we can infer has something to do with the death of his wife. It’s only later, after years on the island, that Dominic begins to feel purpose in the work as he sees the seeds and plants through the eyes of Orly. The meaning of this extended backstory gets crystallized in a plaintive sentence of interiority (I)—“I never loved a place before we came here”—that becomes all the more moving when the subsequent beats of summary (J) tell us that the seed vault must close. Because of the increasingly violent storms and rising sea levels, Dominic and his family will leave the island, along with “all the lucky little specks important enough to be chosen for relocation,” in less than two months.

You can learn two lessons from what McConaghy does in this section of the scene: First, she waits to reveal all of this information at exactly the moment when readers need to know it, rather than trying to cram it in sooner. Second, she delivers it as Dominic is hiking across the island. When the next scene opens with him at the tunnel to the vault, we can imagine that we’ve been following his thoughts during the hike, giving the impression of movement even during a scene with no action beats.

At the end of the chapter, McConaghy switches back to showing tools to deliver two crucial punches of action that send the external tension sky-high again. First, Dominic discovers that the vault has not only lost power but is also beginning to flood (K). There is a real possibility he will be forced to choose between keeping the seeds alive and keeping his family alive. This is another example of the best-bad-choice technique we saw in my post on King of Ashes. The novel’s isolated setting lends itself particularly well to this tool, and McConaghy uses it frequently, especially at the climax of the novel.

Second, when Dominic leaves the vault and goes to the empty field huts where he’ll spend the night, we learn that he had another motive in coming to this part of the island (L). There is something in the blue hut that Rowan can’t see, if she ever wakes up. Here are the last three sentences of the chapter:

By ending the chapter right here, McConaghy not only gets a cliff-hanger, but also removes readers from the POV character who could give us the answers if he chose. (See my post on The Favorites for much more on cliff-hangers.) This is a crucial strategy to remember when there is backstory information you don’t yet want to reveal to readers: In places where we’d expect the POV character to be thinking about that backstory, and thus revealing it, you either need to cut away or give them something else in the scene more pressing and immediate to focus on.

If you are struggling with how and when to weave backstory and summary into the opening of a novel, study McConaghy’s toolkit in chapter four of Wild Dark Shore. Try expository telling, layered with enticing story questions or interesting prose techniques. Or choose scene-based showing that emerges from character action. Whichever you choose, balance a scene heavy on backstory with a punch of action or tension, even if it is brief.

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