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Tag Archives: Backstory
February Thinky Links!
Over the month of January, I collected the stories I found on Twitter and in my feeds that were just too good to miss and put them together for you! Welcome to “Thinky Links“!
Author Janice Hardy offers some good advice on how to cut a scene without hurting your story
Kristen Lamb gives a really good example of how to start in medias res.
The Editors’ Blog looks at the use of coincidence in fiction, why it’s bad—and how to fix it.
I’ve been working hard on revising my Nano novel, so I’m really far behind on my feeds, but I did happen to see two good posts on EditTorrent recently, the kind that make me want to run around telling people “I’ve been vindicated” in an imaginary battle I was having with no one. The first covers showing versus telling in an interesting way (i.e. not writing 101), including that was is not always bad and is not the same thing as passive voice, and the role of telling in exposition.
The second is how to avoid that obnoxious “As you know, Bob” (or Alphonse) dialogue by slipping in backstory, characterization and other information through subtle cues. I LOVE working on this, and Alicia gives great examples!
Although I’m now with a traditional, regional publisher, I still find self-publishing very interesting. So for two different perspectives on that this month, Daniel J. Friedman takes a hard look at the numbers behind self publishing: what they make, what they’re worth, and what they’re selling. On the other hand, Joanna Penn interviewed Adam Croft on How To Sell 130,000 Books Without A Publisher. And for some perspective on both sides, Future Book looks at Why Amanda Hocking Switched, with some interesting notes on how her publishers are working for her.
And to close, here are a few of my favorite posts on this blog from Januaries past:
- A perennial favorite of mine, how to spot and avoid the most common (empty) gestures in writing
- Another one I still use extensively, creating and editing with a scene chart
- And a few from the series on tension, suspense and surprise:
- Choosing whether plot elements should be set up strongly to create suspense, or should remain a surprise
- One I should probably study a little more: creating suspense in Act I
- What creates tension and suspense?
What’s the best writing/marketing/publishing advice you‘ve read lately?
Photo by Karola Riegler
Three questions to ask your characters (MC blogfest)
Keep collecting your favorite posts on writing for Writing Wednesday next week!
When I saw Jeannie’s guest post on author Elizabeth Mueller’s blog (another friend!), I knew I had to play along. Normally I’m reluctant to post much about my works (aside from excerpts that have done well in contests), but I’m making an exception today. It’s just three questions, right? And since I’m still working on falling back in love with my story, this seems like a fun opportunity. Plus it’s just three questions.
The character I’m playing with today is Frank Walters. He served in the Office of Strategic Services in World War II and when the story takes place, just after the war, he’s with the Central Intelligence Group (predecessor of the CIA). Physically, he’s based loosely on my husband’s grandfather Walter, who was in the Navy in WWII, pictured here. (Somehow we ended up with his WWII scrapbook. He traveled the whole world during the war, with pictures and postcards from Hawaii, Scotland, Iceland, Morocco, the South Pacific, and I know he served in Japan, too.)
And over to Frank:
What is your greatest fear?
Losing myself to the job. The peace might not be as assured as the general public would like to believe, but I’m here to keep things from falling apart again. At the same time, I need to prove something to myself—that we’ll prevail. That I’m on the right side. That we’re the right side because of our principles, and we don’t have to undermine those principles to do it.
What is your biggest accomplishment?
I don’t know. Standing up for someone who’s weak. Doing the right thing when it’s hard. It takes a lot of those little things like that to make it worth it—and just one failure to wipe it all out.
What is your biggest regret?
After the war, we had custody of a bunch of the Nazis’ POWs, including some Soviets. Some secret deal at one of the Big Three conferences included one little stipulation that we must’ve bowed to: all Soviets would be returned to the USSR.
Some of these men said they’d never even been to the Soviet Union. Some of them had come from there, and they couldn’t bear the thought of going back to the constant terror. After surviving a Nazi concentration camp, they’d be labeled as traitors and German spies. Maybe sent to Soviet labor camps. Maybe executed.
They begged us not to return them, to shoot them instead. Some of them even killed themselves before we handed them over.
But I followed orders. I sent grown men—and boys—begging, screaming and crying for mercy . . . to the slaughter.
Aaand back to me. Of these, question #3 was the only one I’d really worked on in depth before. #1 was there but this helped me refine and crystallize it a little. #2 was by far the most challenging. Isn’t that odd? Shouldn’t it be easier to think of something we’re proud of?
What do you think? What would your characters say? Which question would be hardest for you?
Posted in Technique, Works
Tagged Backstory, blogfest, character therapist, characterization, characters, mc blogfest
14 Comments
The right way to do backstory
Right now, I’m dragging myself through a book. It’s supposed to be really good, but personally, I despise the main characters. They’re too perfect. Their lives aren’t perfect, but the bad stuff that’s happened to them is presented in a way that makes them victims instead of strugglers with strength.
Ugh. Just thinking about it gets me all het up again. Let me just give you a bulleted list as to why this wrong, immoral and bad.
- All this bad stuff happened to them years ago, but their struggles . . . well, in hindsight, maybe they weren’t so bad. Now life is practically perfect in every way. (You want to hear about those characters now, don’t you?)
- There’s nothing going on in the present as we spend pages twelve through sixteen recounting the last ten years of the characters’ lives (characters we met on page eleven).
- Five pages of telling. In the first 20 pages.
- It’s backstory where we need to get some story.
- The antagonists’ storyline is more interesting. I want to read more about them. Something is happening over there other than people sitting and thinking about their lives. The so-called heroes? Not so much.
In a romance, we don’t have to hear about every person the main characters have ever dated, and every bad date they’ve ever been on. In a mystery, we don’t have to have the hero’s case-solving track record presented in full color. In any genre, we don’t need a character’s life story the first time we meet them (this drives me nuts!). We just need to know what’s pertinent to the story. There is a better way to deliver backstory!
In fact, Livia Blackburne did an in-depth analysis of some comparable titles to her work to see how they handle backstory in the first chapters. Surprisingly, both Graceling and The Hunger Games deliver big chunks of backstory that early in the novel.
However, I think the key is how they do it, and what they choose to include. Livia catalogues each line of backstory from those chapters, including flashbacks. The backstory:
- Informs character relationships. Often just a line or paragraph about how they met or a nickname, but these seem to highlight their power dynamic now. (Katniss & Gayle, Katniss & Peeta.)
- Builds the world—focusing on conflict. (Katniss learns to hold her tongue about the government.)
- Shows history that relates to this moment in the story—especially as it helps us understand the conflict. (Livia notes that there was one section of backstory which she found less than compelling, which dealt with the history of the civilization.)
Agent Rachelle Gardner has a great post about choosing and using backstory:
When you’re bringing your reader into the world of your novel, you’re trying to engage their senses and their emotions right away to get them involved in the story. You need to make an emotional connection with the reader as quickly as possible. The way to do that is in the here and now, the action and dialogue taking place in the present time. It’s highly unlikely you’ll make an emotional connection through backstory. . . .
There are ways to bring the backstory into the book, and the key is to do it slowly. Think about giving just enough information to illuminate one tiny aspect of your character at a time. Place your characters in situations, let them react, and let your reader wonder how they got there and why they reacted that way. You want to be strategic, almost cunning, in the way that you let little bits of information from the past appear on the page. Use those pieces of backstory to slowly and carefully flesh out that character, never giving away too much, always leaving the reader guessing a little.
I worry that in the past I’ve come down too hard on backstory. It’s useful—really!—but in many cases it’s more useful to writers than to readers. You know that lady that corners you and makes you look at photos of all seventeen grandchildren? Don’t be that lady when it comes to backstory!
What do you think? How have you seen backstory done well?
Image credits: history—Kristian Bjornard, applause—Jonathan McPherskesen
Posted in Technique
Tagged Backstory, backstory delivery, bad backstory, good backstory, integrating backstory
5 Comments
W is for wacky words
I love my kids, and I love words, so it probably goes without saying that I love my kids’ words. My favorite is when my small children suddenly use large words. Among other favorite phrases, my two-year-old daughter has started saying “Acksee . . .” (actually). But I think the most surprising recent words were this:
Last night at dinner, we were talking about our visit with Nana (my mom). I asked my son Hayden what his favorite part of the visit was. He decided his favorite part was getting new blocks from Nana.
“Here’s the backstory,” he said. And he proceeded to explain in great detail the shopping trip a week ago when we bought the new blocks.
Even a five-year-old can understand backstory! (And we’ve talked about backstory before—for a whole series.)
What do you think? How often do you use backstory?
Backstory in perspective
If you’ve been here a little while, you know that I’m a big fan of Alicia Rasley (and her co-blogger, Theresa Stevens, of course). I’m knee deep in revisions for the rest of the month, and Alicia goes and posts a great article on backstory. How can I not “reblog”?
A preview (emphasis and image added):
We know we need [backstory], so make it work. Part of the problem is that "layered-o
n" backstory (that which is meant to make the reader feel sorry for the character or understand some motivation) often ends up just being contrived– the rivets are showing, and the reader can feel the extraneousness of it. "Right, right, she was orphaned and we’re supposed to feel sorry for her. Got it." . . .
This makes the character and backstory work together for coherence. But the coherence requires us as writers taking the backstory we invent seriously, and imagining what it would REALLY cause in this particular person. That is, stop thinking of it as "backstory" and start thinking of it as "her/his past".
Read the rest: edittorrent: Coherence in backstory
What do you think? How can we take backstory more seriously and use it better?
Photo by Todd J
Figuring out the backstory
Ha ha, we’re back! I came across a handout from a class on backstory at last year’s National Romance Writers of America Conference.
Author Winnie Griggs says on her handout: “Whether you are a plotter or a pantser, the more time you spend 
figuring out what makes your character tick, the easier your story will be to write and the more depth it will have.”
For significant events in the characters’ lives, she includes how that event impacts her character’s life-view. The handout also outlines several ways to reveal the backstory (obviously, the full content was covered in the class, and I didn’t attend the conference, so I can’t help you fill in all the blanks).
This handout also features a chart for tracking your backstory against the backdrop of the historical events before and during your novel—an important aspect that we haven’t really discussed. Especially if you’re writing a historical novel, mapping out the events in the years before your novel may help you find some events that could have an impact on your characters.
Using a chart may or may not help you figure out your character’s history and personal motivations. But as I looked over the chart, I wondered how other people come up with backstory details. When it comes to backstory, are you more of a planner, a fixer/grafter or a happy coincidencer? Are you more likely to allow the story to grow out of something that happened before your story starts, or to fill in the blanks in your characters’ pasts as you write them?
How do you craft what came before?
Photo by Earl
Posted in Technique
Tagged Backstory, good backstory, story ideas, winnie griggs, worksheet
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Backstory: the end (for now?)
Once again, we’re at the “end” of the series on backstory. In this first iteration of the series, we focused on the standard uses of backstory (character motivation and trying to make characters look sympathetic) and the standard delivery of backstory (“shards” designed to clarify the story).
This “201″ take focused more on the special category of stories where the present story is all about discovering “truth” through discovering the past story. This backstory is more than just information that makes a scene make sense; it changes the entire way the character views the world (maybe we could say that it makes their whole world make more sense).
The example I keep using is in The Secret Life of Bees, where Lily is trying to find out the truth about her mother’s death (and her life). It’s been a while since I read it, but if I remember correctly, there are very few instances where backstory’s sole purpose is to justify a character’s action in the present. The backstory revelations aren’t incidental to the scene and the characters; when they come, they’re the purpose of the scene and have a big impact on the character and her journey.
It’s a special use of backstory, definitely, and not the “usual” use. But no matter how we use backstory, it can enrich our characters and our story—as long as it’s not like this:
What do you think? Have you ever seen this use of backstory (the good example or the bad one)? What all would you say is “bad” about the cartoon example?
Backstory delivery 201
Even good backstory can kill a story if it’s not delivered well. We’ve looked extensively at how to weave in backstory, but I think in this “201-level” look, we can go beyond the basic mechanics on a scene level (which we’ve covered before) and look at how backstory revelations should function in a story—and how to keep their delivery smooth.
As we said last time, this has to be the right kind of backstory—something worth waiting for. Hinting at the backstory, “insinuating” it as Chris Roerden puts it (Don’t Murder Your Mystery), can be a driving force for the novel if the “right” backstory is big enough (such as the identity of the murderer).
Hinting at the backstory throughout the story creates suspense by promising some big, important revelation. We’re writing the reader a promissory note, and if the revelation isn’t as big and important as we set it up to be, we can’t give our readers the pay off we promised.
But as long as our backstory is a big enough deal, suspense is often the main function of backstory. When you keep in mind that you’re trying to raise more questions than you answer (but answer enough questions not to frustrate your reader!), it might be easier to see why (and how) to slip backstory in a “shard” at a time.
One important thing to remember is that there has to be some “action” in the present to balance the action set in the past. Not fight scenes per se, but some character doing something. If the plot is going to revolve around searching for some truth or story or facts, that search has to be compelling in and of itself. An entire book about a girl sitting down to read her late father’s journal—which she does, successfully, in one sitting, and she counts herself lucky to have known him—isn’t as compelling or interesting as just depicting the backstory (the father’s life) as the “live action” of the story.
There has to be conflict in the present as well as in the backstory we’re revealing—and possibly between the two, as well. Maybe the daughter is going through troubles in her marriage and she reads about her father’s doubts in his marriage. But before she can come to his final choice whether to remain faithful to her mother, the daughter’s husband interrupts her. They have a fight. He takes the journal and burns it. The daughter must set off to find the “other woman” to see what her father chose. She only knows her first name, and so on. Discovering the story isn’t easy—and the character has a compelling reason to want to know the (very important) truth.
And of course, that revelatory truth will most likely come at or around the climax of the story—another reason why this has to be a big promise, and something worth revealing.
What do you think? When a story centers around backstory, how does the delivery differ than in other stories?
Photo by Michael Lehet
