Backstory is Story

by Deren Hansen

Rebecca Talley recently offered helpful advice on creating backstory for your characters in a pair of posts at ldspublisher's blog. (See part 1 and part 2.) While character questionnaires might be a good place to start, Rebecca encouraged us to dig deeper.

She suggested we consider:

• Narratives about major events in your character's life.
• Interviews with your character.
• Lists of events that affected your characters.
• A web or mind-map connecting your character with events, people, feelings, etc.
• A collage of representative images with notes about their significance to your character.

As I thought about her suggestions, I had an epiphany: backstory is story.

Think about how you understand yourself. When you're getting acquainted with someone (and they with you), do you give them a resume that lists your accomplishments? Resumes may be useful in a job interview but that's not how we interact with people and, more importantly, that's not how we think about ourselves. Once we get past the small talk, we start trading stories about ourselves.

Ask yourself:

• What stories do your characters tell about themselves when they meet people?
• How do they tell those stories?
• What stories do your characters choose not to tell about themselves when they meet people?
• Are there situations in which they would tell the stories they usually avoid?
• What stories do your characters tell themselves about themselves?

Action reveals character. The stories they choose to tell and the way in which they tell them speaks volumes. If you haven't nailed the voice, ask your character to introduce themselves to you. More generally, don't ask how your character would react, ask how they did react.


Deren blogs at The Laws of Making.

Balancing Action and Information

by Deren Hansen

Balancing action and information is a challenge in any story.

If you start with action--explosions! riots! mortal combat!--your readers won't have any reason to root for the hero (aside from the fact that he or she is the hero) and will likely be confused.

If you start with an exposition about each character and why they matter, readers will likely lose interest before they get to the exciting bits.

With stories set in the real world, you have the luxury of relying on common knowledge and convention. In a political thriller, for example, it is sufficient to say that the conspirators are working to topple the government and proceed on the assumption that the reader agrees such an outcome would be a bad thing.

With fantasy, you have the additional problem of introducing a reader to a world that contradicts or extends their common experience. In order to care, the reader needs to know what's at stake (otherwise the action is meaningless). But in order to know what's at stake the reader needs to understand the fantasy world (which interferes with the action). The problem of finding the right mix of action and information isn't unique to fantasy, but it seems that a fantasy author walks a finer line because of the additional burden of revealing information about a new world.

The best practice I know is to weave action and information together: start with a small action that, in addition to its intrinsic interest, provides a way to share some information with the reader. Of course, both action and information are most interesting when we experience them in a way that tells us something about the characters.


Deren blogs daily at The Laws of Making.

Readers and Learning Curves

by Deren Hansen

I once heard an author of epic fantasy say, during a panel, that writers should give their readers "a gentle learning curve." Of course, the point he was trying to make was that being able to ease your reader into the world of the book is a key skill.

Many people, not just writers, misunderstand the concept of a learning curve. In a graph that shows learning (on the vertical axis) over time (on the horizontal axis), a gentle curve actually means that it takes the subject a long time to learn. A steep curve, by contrast, means that the subject quickly acquires the knowledge and information that constitute learning.

As with many things, however, when we examine the notion of learning curves more carefully, we find that for both different kinds of stories and different aspects of stories we want different kinds of learning curves.

For example, the best otherworld stories have fairly steep learning curves. Paranormal stories, on the other hand, only need gentle learning curves because they're not too different from the world with which the reader is presumably already familiar.

Within a particular novel, the backstory should have a gentle learning curve. That is, a reader should be given a little at a time instead of a big info-dump. On the other hand, the basic information about setting, character, and plot should have a steep learning curve so that the reader is grounded and oriented in the story as quickly as possible.


Deren blogs daily at The Laws of Making.