Actually, it seems to me that unless the character is dwelling on whatever issue she is thinking about, it's not at all unreasonable for her to only think about the pieces that are relative to her present situation. After all, she (presumably) already knows the full backstory — why would she go over it if one element comes to mind?
For example, if her backstory involves sessions with a psychiatrist, then I could see something like this happening as the first mention of her having seen a psychiatrist:
There were two buttons in front of her, one red, one green, neither labelled. For a moment she hesitated, hand half-raised. But there wasn't time for hesitation, wasn't time to search for instructions or documents that might have told her which to push. She scowled, and her lip twisted. She thought Ugh, it's just like the pyschiatrist's office all over again!, then closed her eyes and jabbed blindly towards the button. Her finger connected with one of them, pressed. There was a click, a whirr, a hum — then everything went white.
(Okay, it's perhaps not wonderful prose or subtly handled, but you get the idea, hopefully. ^^; )
My Games & Writing
Well, like I said, there isn't exactly much to it, to the point where giving even one piece would be like giving away approximately a third of the whole thing.
Fact of the matter is, I've written myself into a bit of a corner that I'm trying to escape from. I have a rather Genre Savvy character who already knows her story ask her if she wants to talk about it to make sure it doesn't affect her work.
I've thought of a few ways around this. The first is that the relevant part in question makes her mad so she doesn't like to talk about it, but that still kinda comes off as "blatantly withholding info". The other is that she wasn't there for the event in question and hardly remembers what happened anyway since it happened over a decade prior, so she only knows the basic details. The problem with this is that the basic details are all that's important anyway, and as soon as you know them, it's easy enough to connect the dots and make the rest of her character exceedingly transparent given all the other details the reader knows by this point.
Fortunately, the story is more about who she becomes rather than who she starts off as (because let's face it, if the backstory I'm giving makes my protagonist transparent, then it's not a very good one), but I kinda want to wait until then to reveal the backstory so I can use it to make the appropriate contrast.
Ah, so the problem is less that the conversation reveals the backstory than that it occurs earlier than you'd like, is that correct?
If so, could you perhaps skip over the scene, or describe it only briefly, and then return to it later (perhaps in the character thinking back to it)?
My Games & Writing
Well, it'd be a bit difficult to do that given that it's in first person and occurs immediately before one of the most significant parts of the story. I am trying to gloss over it. The hard part is trying to introduce or foreshadow what I want to reveal without giving it away or making it seem like the protagonist is deliberately stringing the reader along.
I already have a backstory for my character in mind that I'm fine with using. The problem is finding out where it needs to go and how to get it there with a reasonable amount of foreshadowing.
The thing is that my story is told from first person perspective. I take a fiction writing class, and we had a lesson recently on a short story written in third person that gave subtle hints towards the protagonist's backstory that isn't revealed until it's appropriate and relative to the story. Since I'm writing from first person, however, I can't think of a good way to do that since the narrative is so integrated with the protagonist's thoughts, unlike with the third person story. If someone even brings up a small piece of her story, I don't know how to stop her from thinking about the whole thing without making it look like I'm blatantly withholding information. And the backstory itself isn't hugely complex, so it's not something I can give in pieces either.
Now don't get me wrong, I do want to reveal it at some point, I just think I'm a little early in the story for me to break out the protagonist's backstory, not to mention that the point I'm at is hardly an appropriate place to reveal it.