Unless you’re starting from the beginning of time, or at least the beginning of your world’s time, there will always be events that happened before your story begins. Some of these might influence the way the story develops, some might just be a passing reference in conversation. Some you might have come up with just because it sounded interesting and you’ve yet to do anything more with it.
I can think of a few specific books where, in addition to the stories themselves, there is an introduction and a little bit of a background about the stories. How they came to be written, what inspired them, and the like.
Since we have some of the same interests, I often find myself talking sci-fi/fantasy with one of my co-workers. This is the same one that gave me the Star Wars notebook at Christmas, so you see what I mean. However, we do sometimes have differences of opinion.
I mentioned in my 2017 goals one of the things on my mind lately has been to find ways of improving this here blog site. Another thing I’ve thought about doing is redoing the site a bit.