Another very productive day, 1300+ words. I wrote a new scene, a knife fight, which--now that I think about it--is backstory. That led to another new scene, also backstory, which I loved writing and found very touching.

The reader's going to need both these backstory scenes, either as discrete flashbacks, as memories related by the MC in detail, as paraphrases, or as cut-up snippets scattered around. I have no idea which. All I know is, both scenes really happened, and the reader needs them in order to fully understand the story.

Since so much of the world-building and internal story of this ms relies on the characters' backstories, I'm wondering if I'm simply going to have to cut away every once in a while for a set-apart in-scene flashback. If I do, it's going to be very, very tricky. Extremely tricky. Potentially tension-killing.

It occurs to me that the swordfighting ms has the same problem. However, with this dystopian ms I understand what the deeper story is and how it plays out and rises to an end. So it should easier (relatively!) to figure out how to structure the dystopian. And if I can, that should help me with the other ms.

What do you do when the story begins in the right place, but a ton of stuff happened before the beginning that the reader needs to know?

Much to think about. Hmm.