#7. BS is for ‘Back Story’
June 24th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed
All your main characters have a back story that you should probably know inside out. However, your readers don’t need to be exposed to all the excruciating detail. A sure fire way to let your narrative pace slip away forever is to foist a chunky back story on them in the first chapter.
Back story, or everything of relevance that happened before the opening of the story, tends to loom large in the work of new short story writers. There are two reasons for this, both based on the fear that the reader:
1. might fail to identify with the character from the beginning.
2. won’t understand how we reached the start of the story and will lose the narrative thread.
The result is long passages of back story unloaded into the narrative of so many first chapters. We’ve all fallen foul to this in our early stories, but it wasn’t until I had started working as an editor that I discovered how prevalent and destructive the back story dump really is to new writing. In fact, it’s one of the clearest signs of someone starting out. I could give you plenty of examples from my own early attempts at fiction, but on balance I think it would be too painful for both of us.
Far from tempting the reader to identify with the characters and orientate themselves in the story from the beginning, you can end up losing opportunities to build conflict and suspense into your story as it unfolds. You can answer too many questions before the reader has time to think of them.
Let’s take a look at three typical examples of ill-conceived back story:
“Alice Goode stepped through the doorway to her childhood home and stood in the large marble-floored entrance hall. As she gazed up at the domed ceiling 20 metres above her, she felt dizzy as memories came swarming back to her… One in particular: of her mother’s body hanging from a homemade noose tied to the chandelier. She had left nothing more than a note containing the name of her husband John, Alice’s ne’er-do-well father, repeated again and again so it filled the paper from the top left corner to the bottom right. Alice had spent the last fifteen years fleeing this memory, but now she was returning home at last to claim her inheritance. She realized, as she stood there, that she would have to sell this house. She would not be strong enough to endure living with her memories.”
“David Robinson had been born thirty years earlier in a wide valley in West Yorkshire, the son of a farm labourer and his puritanical wife. At school he discovered a facility for drawing, and his art teacher helped him focus his talent. He wasn’t much of a student at Ketterby Dale High School, but his artistic achievements earned him a scholarship to York University. There he met and later married Joanne Jones, a pretty brunette reading economics from an upper middle-class home counties family. Their marriage was beset by conflicts of class, and after five turbulent years they got divorced… “
“Anna convinced herself, subconsciously, that she shared her family’s promiscuity gene that had blossomed so early and so virulently in her sister. That’s why she steered clear of attractive men. She had tricked herself into accepting that her long-term affair with George, a dull store manager, was enough to fulfill her need for love.”
On the face of it, you might not see anything wrong with the excerpts above - at least they are mercifully short. You could argue that they let the reader know what’s going on, what’s motivating the central character and driving the story.
So why all this fuss about dropping in back story at the beginning of a story? Let’s delve a bit deeper.
To begin with, the best way to curtail the momentum you are building is to dump some back story into the narrative. If you have carefully chosen the start of your story to maximize the drama, the last thing you want to do is to kill it by back-tracking to another time and another situation. You will be providing an answer to the question, “How did the protagonist end up in this situation?” before the reader has a chance to ask it.
In the Alice example above, a major revelation - that she had discovered her mother’s suicide - is just dropped into a static description of the entrance hall. Major revelations of portent and weight are nearly always set up with a bit of foreshadowing to milk them for suspense and drama. This is a literary convention, so much so that you risk leaving your readers wondering just how important the suicide is if you just toss it into the middle of a quick description. Furthermore, its effect on Alice is spelled out in undramatic terms. We’re told about her flight from the past rather than shown it.
Here’s the ’show’ version. Alice unlocks the door of her childhood home, steels herself, walks in, glances around the entrance, sees the chandelier, stops short, and then, resolutely, goes into the dining room, past the table, into the kitchen, and pulling a cell phone from her purse, calls an estate agent and says, “I want to sell a house. Immediately. I don’t care how much I get for it.” The readers will be asking, “Hang on a minute. It’s a beautiful house. It’s her childhood home. Why does she want to sell it? And why doesn’t she care about getting a good price?” On the heels of those questions will come the canny conclusion, “I bet it has something to do with that chandelier. I wonder what.”
You’ve got your readers where you want them. Once you have them speculating about the situation you’ve set up, they have to keep reading to get more clues to see if their guesses are correct.
If you tell them everything up front, you’ve blown a big opportunity to build some suspense, epitomized in this case by the question, “Why does Alice want to unload her beautiful childhood home?”
Moving on to the ‘David Robinson’ example above, the ‘capsule biography’ is a real narrative killer. Here, the action isn’t taking place anywhere. David’s whole existence is summarized in a dry and distant description. The voice isn’t even David’s. He isn’t trying to make a point or build up to anything. The capsule falls from the sky and lands in the paragraph.
How is the reader to know that this capsule contains anything essential or even related to the opening scene? It reads like a list. How are the readers expected to discriminate between the life elements that matter and the incidental detail? Is it the puritanical mother? The art teacher? Or his scholarship? The result: you are inviting your reader to skim. I’m sure they’d take you up on it. Wouldn’t you? And you’re still in chapter one. Instead, let these details emerge through the action as and when they’re needed. Readers are always up for the challenge of piecing together the puzzle of who this man is, what matters to him, and how he is going to handle the events thrown up by the story.
For example, let’s say the puritanical mother is important. Maybe David would picture, in the midst of a critical clash with his rich parents-in-law, his mother praying and trying to force him to join her until he fled the room. This makes for a more character-driven read: readers learn what is important from the characters’ thoughts and actions, rather than from an omniscient and distant author summary. They learn much more about who David is from what he remembers of his past (e.g. his mother’s prayers) and how he currently interprets it (e.g. he refuses to pray himself) than from an arbitrary list of biographical details.
Finally, dropping the back story into the beginning of the narrative doesn’t leave enough for either the characters or the readers to do. Writers set every main character a journey - the story runs from embarkation to destination. The protagonist doesn’t always get to choose the destination, especially if it involves psychological change, but the interesting part of the journey is recognizing limitations and managing to overcome them.
Your readers are invited to take part in this journey by identifying with the protagonist. This identification will be keener if you can avoid telling your readers ahead of time what the protagonist needs to overcome. Showing each dilemma as it unfolds is incredibly effective. Your readers can discover, along with the protagonist, the destination by experiencing the journey for themselves.
In the third extract, if Anna’s response to her sister’s promiscuity is still subconscious, part of her journey will be toward bringing it to the surface and dealing with it consciously. You don’t have to tell the reader what Anna doesn’t understand herself - this is a story not a psychologist’s case study - but you can show her reacting to her sister’s past. Maybe she meets an attractive man, and is thinking about deepening the acquaintance when he says casually, “You know, I went out a few times with your sister.” Anna might freeze up and immediately, without further consideration, decide to have nothing more to do with him. Maybe he will have to pursue her, even charm her against her will, force her to confront her fear that if she gives into attraction, she will be like her sister - out of control. All you are doing is dramatizing her conflict.
Ultimately, it comes back to the old adage ’show, don’t tell.’ If your story really does require back story, it should be knitted into the fabric of the story. Making an authorial comment on top of the opening scene just doesn’t work. Get the reader to do some of the work, to piece the puzzle together, to get involved. If you can create this kind of suspense, even in books that have nothing to do with mysteries, the reader will not be able to put the book down. Tell them everything too early, and they won’t be able to pick the book up again.
Sometimes it is quicker to show back story. There is, however, a rule of thmb: hold it back until the moment your reader cannot go on with out it. Even then give them the bare minimum and knit it into the scene using the thoughts, actions, memories or conversations of the characters. Let the readers take part in the ‘making of meaning’ process. You are providing them the context to provoke their questions (”What’s up with that chandelier?”) and puzzle out the answers. All good books are open to interpretation; that’s half the fun of reading.
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#6 (Dull) Beginning, (Sagging round the) Middle and (Lame at the) End.
July 23rd, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed
Dull, sagging and lame. Who would want a life like that? Who would want to be like that? Yet, it’s amazing how many stories sitting in slush piles around the world seem to have been modelled, at least partially, on this the ‘Dull beginning, sagging middle and lame ending.’
Beginning
When you sit down to read a new story, you expect to be drawn in from the first page or so. You expect to be entertained. The last thing a writer wants to do is give off ‘hold-on-a-moment-I’ll-be-right-with-you’ signals. If your reader loses patience, you lose your reader. To hook your reader from the first page, it’s a good idea to start your story where the main character’s problem/dilemma/conflict starts, or just before. You can make your back story wait until later, but you can’t do the same to your reader.
Editors going through slush piles get tired of two types of beginning:
1. the protagonist is on a journey contemplating the journey’s end and what is in store there. Editors often cite this as an example of a dull opening. If what’s in store is so interesting, start your story there. Even if it isn’t so interesting at least you’ll only have to write about it once.
2. a one-liner, often ending in an exclamation mark, that is uttered by the main character. This is not so bad in itself aside from the facts that we have no context, no idea how the voice is supposed to sound and it can make the author’s desire to make an early impact a little too transparent. No, the real problem is that 80% of the rest of the stories in the editor’s slush pile will use the same device. In light of this, it’s a good idea to wait until you are an established writer whose stories soar high over slush piles directly to the editor’s desk before you kick off with this one.
As a rule, it is a good idea to come up with a couple of principle questions that your story is going to answer, then pose them, or encourage the reader to pose them, early on.
Middle
The middle is crucial. You are going to send your protagonist down a path that will test her strengths and exploit her weaknesses to provoke a meaningful change. The story should reach a crisis point within the framework you’ve set up and lead to some form of closure. This ‘closure’ is an important plot device. It is one of the reasons novel reading is such a popular pastime. There is little or no closure in real life. Processes rarely end and results are rarely final. The kind of closure you can find in a storyl can provide a very welcome relief from reality - so much so that it has become ingrained into the structure of the novel and is often the key to evaluating how satisfactory a story is.
Again, the trick is to pose the right questions. How are you going to challenge your main character? What elements of the external plot are going to have a direct bearing on the protagonist? How central to the story is the resolution of the main character’s internal conflicts (tip: it should be pretty damn central)? How are the protagonist’s weaknesses going to hinder her attempts to resolve the crises of the external plot, and how interesting can you make these attempts?
In short, the middle is about putting the main character on the rack. As the Guardian wrote about McEwan’s recent novel ‘Saturday,’
‘Since his debut collection of stories, First Love, Last Rites, McEwan’s fiction has always dwelt at the heart of places we hope never to find ourselves in: the vacancies left in lives by the kidnapped child or the lost lover; the mined no-man’s-land that follows extreme violence or sexual obsession. His subject has always been damage and the way the darkest events in a life will drain the rest of love. For McEwan, happiness has rarely gone unpunished.
‘Thus, when Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, wakes from his bed before dawn, feeling ‘alert and empty-headed and inexplicably elated’ and sees a plane coming down over the Post Office Tower, trailing a fireball from its wing, it seems a portent every bit as doom-laden as the sighting of comets in Shakespeare. Worse, Perowne’s world is, on this Saturday morning, entirely sure on its axis. McEwan quickly establishes him as a man of profound competence and one who never stops counting the blessings of a loving marriage and a pair of beautiful and talented children. You can hardly bear to watch.’
‘Saturday’ is a great example of a novel with a feisty middle, where the man on the rack is extremely likable and the rack is given a few extra twists. Of course, the ‘rack’ is just an analogy - you don’t have to torture your main character, but you do have to put them through something that is important and life-changing. Raymond Carver once said something like, if you’re going to write about a moment in a person’s life, you’d better make damn sure it’s one that matters. Far from sagging, your middle should soar.
End
Consider a faith-challenged priest. In the climax he solves the murder of the bishop and gets the cardinal hauled off to jail. But if the book ended there, we’d only have the answer to the external story question (who killed the bishop?). The internal story question (will the priest regain his faith?) has been left hanging.
The end scene should show, in an actual or symbolic way, what has changed because of the events of the story - specifically, how the protagonist has changed. Our priest will have regained his faith, or become convinced the loss is permanent, or in one way or another found his own answer to that internal story question. The more this scene is focused on providing the answer to that question, the more closure the readers will experience, and as we’ve already seen, closure = satisfaction.
The final scene, however short, should restore the world of your story to some semblance of equilibrium. For instance, the priest might attend the investiture of the new bishop, a humble and holy man, and experience in the ancient ritual his own return to faith. The priest’s world has not been thrown permanently off-kilter by the crisis and the protagonist’s courage in facing the conflicts has prevented a cataclysm.
You need to illuminate the changes, or the story will seem meaningless. A story is a dynamic sequence of events. It goes somewhere, often goal-directed, and leaves many ripples in its wake. It is not a static picture, and it should never be an inconsequential series of events.
What is the theme of your book? The ending ought to reinforce that theme, especially if the climax did not. For example, say the theme is, ‘We must create our faith anew if we lose the faith that was given to us.’ The climax, reached as the priest solves the murder inquiry, is external to that theme. We need further resolution - an additional scene to shed light on how the process of solving the murder (external conflict) has changed the protagonist’s understanding of faith (internal conflict). Maybe after the investiture, the priest, fighting his doubts, walks to the baptismal font and re-baptizes himself, showing that he is trying to create his new faith.
If, on the other hand, the internal issue was one of guilt and not lost faith, the priest could go to the confessional instead of the baptismal font. If the worldview is a cynical one, presenting the proposition that all those in power are likely to be corrupt, then the new bishop could be greedy and hypocritical instead of humble and honest, and the cycle of deceit, murder and revenge would begin again.
A great ending will show a tangible gesture or action that illustrates how the internal conflict has been resolved and what significance it carries beyond the story’s end. It is often a small event, one that closes the story rather than opening another one - you wouldn’t want your priest to walk out of the church, meet a woman on the steps and think, “Hey, all this celibacy just isn’t right for me after all…” Your final event should have emotional resonance, leaving your readers feeling what you have crafted your story to get them to feel - peace, empowerment, sadness or outrage.
The ending is the last experience your readers will have of your book, so make it a memorable one. Resolve the conflicts, restore the world’s balance, reinforce the theme, reflect the protagonist’s growth, and give the readers the final emotion they need to look up from your story feeling satiated. Make sure you can type ‘THE END’ in good conscience, knowing that you’ve provided an ending that is much more than an anti-climactic afterthought.
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#5 Pace: Cracking or Grinding?
July 25th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed
Your reader is into the third paragraph of your story and although she has already developed a connection to your main character, nothing seems to be happening. She’s beginning to feel the tug of the outside world. The main character doesn’t seem to be doing anything. The shopping list for this evening’s dinner pops uninvited into her head. Maybe she skips a couple of paragraphs to find out if anything interesting is going to happen. Mmm, not much change. Images of the local supermarket’s special offers she noticed in this morning’s local paper get harder and harder to repress. She averts her eyes from the page and notices it’s stopped raining. The book, your story, goes limp in her hand. She rises. Oh dear. She’s gone.
What was the problem? The story never picked up enough momentum to hold the distractions of the real world at bay. It lacked pace.
Pace is dictated by the structure of your story. You want your story to a lean, mean machine for hooking your readers and reeling them into the world you’ve created for them. You don’t need to set off at a break-neck speed right from the start, but you do need to build momentum and be in control of your story’s pace.
At the beginning of your story you place your main character(s) on stage. Then your readers have to learn what it is your main character wants and what is stopping her from getting it. The drama gathers momentum as your protagonist begins to overcome the obstacles in her path (either internal or external) and move closer to getting what it is she wants. The pace of your story will be dictated by how much action you pack into each scene and how much description and backstory you insert.
We’ve already seen how trimming backstory to a minimum will improve the flow of your story. This is because a narrative is based on a sequence of events: break the sequence of events and you break the flow of the story. Each event must be essential to your story. If you find yourself inserting long sections of flashbacks, you’ve probably started your story in the wrong place.
So what is an essential event? The answer to this lies in the way you structure your story - the way you divide your story into individual scenes.
Write in Scenes
A scene is a section of story with, as Philip Larkin once put it, its own ‘beginning, muddle and end.’ Each scene can be viewed as a mini-story in its own right - the simplest stories are made up of a single scene.
There are many approaches you can take to writing scenes, but here are the three principle ones:
- Action scenes - although we’re using the word ‘action,’ we don’t mean your main character has to roll around on the floor under a hail of bullets or charge through exploding office buildings. We’re talking about the actions or measures your main character has to take to overcome the obstacles in her way and resolve her dilemma. For example, in Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis,’ the main character wakes up as a giant beetle. That’s quite a dilemma. Each scene shows how his life changes as a result of the actions he takes to deal with his new and problematic situation, and as each action he takes makes his situation worse, the stakes get higher and higher. As a result, the story moves along at a cracking pace even though you wouldn’t describe it as an action story - far from it.
- Descriptive scenes - as the name suggests, these provide your story with description, explanation, background information, or character reflection. As you might expect, this kind of scene will slow down your story’s pace. You are more likely to find descriptive scenes in literary fiction, especially if it was written before 1950. Again, your character has to be at the centre of the scene, and it must give us some information that is essential to your story.
- Transitional scenes - these are scenes which are intended to tie two scenes together, often involving a switch in place, time or viewpoint. They are useful to maintain the flow in longer stories or novels, and often take the form of a brief summary.
Which scenes you choose, and the order they appear in the structure of your story, will determine the pace. A chain of action scenes will pump up the pace of your story to a sprint. By interspersing action scenes with slower, descriptive scenes you will allow readers to catch their breath while your story still moves forward. The more descriptive scenes you employ, the more your story will assume a leisurely or contemplative feel. It is your ability to control the changes of pace that will make your stories a pleasure to read.
The most important factor to bear in mind is that your readers will be interested in how your character deals with the dilemma your story poses. If your characters are believable, interesting and involved in a struggle, and you are writing in scenes that show this, you will never have to worry about the pace of your story flagging. Your reader’s shopping list will just have to wait.
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