I'm reading time and again that backstory/flashbacks should be kept to a minimum, but what if it's necessary at the beginning of a book to explain how the characters arrived at their present point?

Sometimes it's necessary, so that the reader knows how two characters got together, or how they started running their joint business etc.

Grrr don't you just hate all these rules. I've probably broken almost all of them!

Kat x

Don't think of them as rules, think of them as good advice, which you choose either to take, or not.

Re backstory, the real question is: does the reader need to know this, for the story to come alive? It's amazing what they don't need to know, even though you do. Does it matter how they came to be running the business together? As in, does it make a difference to what happens next and how the reader understands the story? If it doesn't, we don't need to know. If it does, do we need to know it at the beginning, or can you drip it in, a bit before (not just before, it's too creaky) we need to know it.

Think about what happens in real life: we all refer to our own backstory all the time, when talking to friends or whatever, but we do it in bits.

You say to a friend, 'It was when I was with Michael,' and they just nod. It's only later that they say, 'So, did Michael teach you to cook so well?' and you say, 'Yes - being diabetic, he'd really had to think about his diet. He was really good, by the time...' Stick some tears in your eyes, and we know that something bad happened. What kind of bad slides in a bit later. And so on.

In other words, trust the reader to put it together from the bits that you scatter, all natural-like, and not necessarily in order - through the story.

Emma

The thing is, for the reader it's often not necessary to know the background. It's enough to know that they are a group of friends who run their business together. You start at the point where their ordinary lives start to become extra-ordinary/out of the ordinary. In most cases background is part of the 'ordinary' for that set of characters which is why most of it is not necessary. If, however, it is part of the extra-ordinary, then find a place for it, but preferably much later on in the novel when the reader invested in the characters and more interested to know what happened in the past to make them what they are now.

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There is a strong temptation for many writers to shoehorn in much of the background and biographical detail they have concocted for each of their characters. The 'rules' are there to discourage these writers from putting it all in, especially from putting it all in the opening chapters which delays the main plot thread.

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...There is also the temptation to put it in in omniscient pov, which ruins the 'voice' in the prose.
However, since plot may only comprise 10% of the opening chapters, there is a lot of room for putting in some reminiscences in the characters' own 'voice'.

Possibly the best advice I've read about backstory is to focus less on telling your reader what you think they 'need' to know (which, as Emma says, usually isn't actually very much), and more on getting your reader to the point of wanting to know about a character's history. This way, you invest your backstory with its own energy; its own special quality of intrigue, suspense, or surprise. I don't think it's necessarily particularly important to know how two characters got together, for instance, unless this offers a useful insight or contrast to their relationship as it is now. And so often, what's not said is actually much more compelling...

What everyone else said. To give an example: I read <i>Netherland</i> recently and loved the way O'Neill handled the backstory of his New York narrator Hans, where watching a game of cricket suddenly shimmers into glorious memories of his English childhood. Or, most impressively, idly surfing Google Earth results in a rememberance of places past.