Just realized I was killing my stories with backstory dumps

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Wait, is that why my first draft had like five pages of the main character's childhood before anything actually happened? Because I definitely did that and then wondered why my beta readers kept saying they wanted to skip ahead. I remember I wrote this whole backstory about how my character learned to fish with her grandpa and it was cute but it had nothing to do with the actual plot about a haunted lighthouse. It took me way too long to realize that I could just sprinkle in one tiny memory when she actually needed to catch a fish to survive, and that worked way better. Now I have a rule for myself where if a backstory detail doesn't matter in the next two scenes, I just cut it and save it in a separate file. That way I still feel like I'm not losing the ideas, but the reader gets to actually experience the story instead of reading my character's whole life story first.