There are numerous approaches of incorporating backstory into your main tale. Here are a few pointers and strategies to get you started: To provide context, use diaries, journals, or other secondary materials. In her Booker Prize-winning novel, The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood does this (2000). She tells the stories of three women who lived in early 20th-century Canada - one a famous painter, one a working-class girl from Ontario, and one a rich heiress from Quebec - through letters they wrote as young women. Background information can also come from external sources - books, movies, plays, etc. - and incorporated into your story by way of exposition or background characters. For example, when Jack Nicholson's character learns that his wife has died, it is explained to him via a newspaper article that was pulled out of a trash can at the funeral home. Finally, backstory can be revealed during the course of the story. This is known as "the shadow story" and can be used to great effect by showing flashbacks or visions of past events. For example, in The Stand, Stephen King uses this technique to show us how the world came to be infected with a virus that causes people to turn into zombies. These are just some of the many ways in which you can incorporate backstory into your story.