Why Backstory is The Bomb

You hear it from agents, you hear it from editors: Cut the backstory. Cut, cut, cut! And okay, that might be true for the first fifty pages of your manuscript, or most certainly for the first twenty-five, and here’s why: We want to bring the readers into the midst of our stories and get them immediately involved. We don’t want them watching from the sidelines as we meander around looking for what our stories actually are.

But here’s the thing. Just because we don’t want that backstory up front, doesn’t mean we don’t need it at all. It doesn’t mean that we can vaguely imagine a few scenarios of what could have been the history of our characters. We have to know. And for that, in most cases, we have to write it. We really have to nail it down, and for each character, not just our main ones.

I’m finding more and more when I read a great book, this is what I love about it. I can feel each character’s history, even if it isn’t spelled out before me. I’m still learning on how to make this happen, but now I think that the less screen time you want a character to have, the more you need to know their backstory. Why? Because they have very few words and scenes to convey their worldview. And it’s not that we need to know their entire worldview, but we at least have to sense what kind of person they are. We need to *get* every single character, otherwise, why have them in the book at all?

There’s an ongoing discussion about parents in YA. Many editors don’t want a lot of scene time with the parents because teens may not be as drawn to reading about them. Some people suggest that killing the parents off, or removing them completely from the picture somehow can be lazy writing. I don’t have a fixed opinion on those things either way, but I will say this: if you have a good handle on the parents’ backstory—if you know exactly how they’ve spent their lives, what their high school existence was like, why they have the ticks they do—that can come across and be meaningful to your plot without actually seeing these things play out in scenes.

My biggest problem lately in my NaNoWriMo manuscript has been with the parents. I kept feeling the need to bring them into the story more and more, because their story really does affect the plot. But what I’m beginning to see is that I’m really just bumbling around with them and still trying to find out their story for myself. The more background I can find out about them, the less I actually have to show in the foreground. But it has to be done really well and exactly to keep them concise. And at this stage it can take a lot of bumbling to get to the stuff I need!

So this is the lesson I’ve been learning this last week: don’t hate the backstory. Enjoy exploring it. Write plenty of it down, and then convey weeks or months or years of a character’s experience in one simple sentence of dialogue. It really is an art, but an art that I’m excited to keep learning!

Thursday Stuff

You know I'm getting burnt out when I can't come up with a better blog title than that!

1. Today is Remembrance Day in Canada. Veteran's Day in the U.S., I believe. This is also the day after my son's birthday, which usually means Party Day at our house, while kids are out of school. It's easy to forget the significance of the day with everything going on, but I'm taking a few minutes right now (or right after I finish this blog post) to be thankful for the freedom I enjoy in Canada.

2. I'm off to Penticton and Kelowna this weekend. I'll be signing books at Hooked on Books in Penticton this Saturday from 1-3, and then I'll be driving an hour or so to hang out with some good friends I don't get a chance to see very often, including my critique partner and long time friend, Elle Strauss. I'm very excited!

3. I have been making steady progress with my NaNoWriMo novel and hit the halfway mark of 25,000 words yesterday. Then I had lots of chocolate birthday cake to celebrate. I know this novel will need a lot of work, but I'm really excited about a scene I just wrote the other day. One of my favorite scenes ever. And it involves kissing. That's all I can tell you ;)

4. Oh, and if I haven't been doing enough this month, between NaNo and birthday parties, and homeschool end of term reports...I decided to learn how to write a screenplay this month too. I've been wanting to do this for a long time, and one evening when I had a sudden unexpected block of free time, I just started reading up on it and attempting to convert one of my novels to screenplay. I'm having a lot of fun with this, but who knows when my next block of free time will be.

That's about it for me for this week. I'm off to stuff goody-bags for a party full of seven-year-olds and pack for Penticton! Happy weekend, everyone!

In Vancouver? A Celebration of New Works!

It seems I never remember to mention things until they're right upon me. Tomorrow I will be at this:

 

I'm really looking forward to it! KidsBooks will have copies of Losing Faith for sale and I'll be there happily signing copies for whoever wishes. I'll also have bookmarks, discussion guides, and other goodies. Plus Sarah Ellis will be speaking! And...I didn't miss the word delectables in there, did you? 

Hope to see you there!

#Nanowrimo Update: Beginnings, Middles, and Endings

One thing I'm finding while writing through Nanowrimo is that all the major structural flaws are suddenly very obvious.

Beginnings: I know through my first six chapters that I have not nailed the beginning. I've heard one suggestion before: to flip the first and second chapter, or at least to put the second chapter first and build chapter one in as backstory later. And this would probably help. But that will be a problem to solve during revisions. I think my "right" beginning is in those first six chapters somewhere, so that is good news. But I'm amazed at how obvious it is when you write quickly that what you have probably is not quite "right". But you do it anyway.

Middles: Have you ever heard the term "The Sagging Middle"? I'd like to find one Nanowrimo writer who does not know what I'm talking about. Just one. But writing through that sagging middle, pushing ourselves to keep going even when it feels like it's one monotonous, never-ending death sentence for our books...and eventually finding the excitement again: that's what makes us real champions.

Endings: Do you ever feel like ALL you can think about is the damn ending? When will I get there? It's going to be great, right? It HAS to be great after all this.

Yes, I'm not even 20k into my story and all I can think about is the ending. Pretty sad, isn't it? But that's just today. Tomorrow will be better. How's Nano going for everyone else?

#NaNoWriMo Update: Expletives Galore!

First of all, I have to apologize to friends and family. One thing I did not get around to before midnight on October 31st was emailing all of you and warning you that I would be pretty much falling off the face of the earth for a month. Again. But I'm hoping most of you know me well enough to expect this yearly snub and forgive me for it. I hope. Pretty please.

As for NaNo, things are going swimmingly. They didn't start out that way however. On the 31st, just before bed I went online to quickly check my email, and what did I find? My email program wasn't working! Not only that, but apparently ALL of my office programs were due to expire at midnight.

Um...WHAT!?

So I spent a few hours into the night trying to figure things out, to no avail. In the morning, I woke up early, pretty much sleepless, and very, very frustrated. I started to work on my brand new novel anyway...in Notepad. Ugh. Have you ever tried to use Notepad for more than a paragraph? I say it again. Ugh.

So you won't blame me, I'm sure, for starting my manuscript with a word starting with "F". (I'm serious). But the funny thing is, aside from my anger, frustration, and generally just plain pissy attitude, soon I was sailing into my new manuscript and actually having fun with it. Because the character whose point of view I'm writing in this time is very different from all the others I've written (Tessa from Losing Faith, in case you're interested) I've found that using an expletive or two (or eight or nine) helps break my pattern and get me into the voice of Tessa right away. I don't talk like this in real life. I mean, I"m not Hannah Moskowitz (LOL, kidding, Hannah!), so it breaks me away from what feels like my default writing voice.  I think (or hope) many of these will be removed in later drafts. But who knows!

For now, I'm starting each day's writing with a &%$#* or a #&@*! and it seems to be working well! But Tessa is more that just a head full of swear words and I'm slowly finding more and more about her.

Any interesting tricks you've learned to get your head into your character?

FYI - I did get my Office programs up and running again (Thanks, Duane) and I'm feeling much less like I need to use that vocabulary - now it's purely Tessa! Oh, and check out my fancy new NaNoWriMo widget on the right sidebar of my Blogger blog! I'm very excited to pass the 10k mark, hopefully today!!!

GCC Presents Daisy Whitney and The Mockingbirds!

Some schools have honor codes.

Others have handbooks.

Themis Academy has the Mockingbirds.

Themis Academy is a quiet boarding school with an exceptional student body that the administration trusts to always behave the honorable way--the Themis Way. So when Alex is date raped during her junior year, she has two options: stay silent and hope someone helps her, or enlist the Mockingbirds--a secret society of students dedicated to righting the wrongs of their fellow peers.

In this honest, page-turning account of a teen girl's struggle to stand up for herself, debut author Daisy Whitney reminds readers that if you love something or someone--especially yourself--you fight for it.

Author Daisy Whitney is touring the Girlfriends Cyber Circuit this week, and I'm thrilled to have her here to answer a few questions. The Mockingbirds comes out in stores this month!

Welcome, Daisy! Can you tell me about your book in seven words or less.

THE MOCKINGBIRDS — underground, student-run justice system.

Other than your main character, who's a favorite character of yours in your novel and why?

I love Martin! He’s one of the Mockingbirds and a love interest in the story. I love him because I think he is everything a guy could be - funny, honest, brave, strong.

What's one piece of writing advice you would give to aspiring authors?

Write every day and don’t let anyone tell you you can’t do it because with hard work and talent dreams have a funny way of coming true.

What did you write when you were a teen? Did you journal? Write poetry? Write overly literary or emotional stories? Or avoid writing altogether?

I wrote very bad journals all of which I have destroyed!

What's the last book you read that you really loved?

I just read WHERE SHE WENT by Gayle Forman (April 2011) and it’s amazing. I am also crazy about ANNA AND THE FRENCH KISS by Steph Perkins (December 2).

Great! Thanks for stopping by, Daisy!

If you'd like to find out more about The Mockingbirds, coming from Little Brown in November, 2010, check out these links:

http://www.amazon.com/Mockingbirds-Daisy-Whitney/dp/0316090530
http://www.Facebook.com/MockingbirdsBook
http://www.DaisyWhitneyBooks.com


Some schools have honor codes. Others have handbooks. Themis Academy has THE MOCKINGBIRDS.

THE MOCKINGBIRDS | A young adult novel by Daisy Whitney | November 2010 | Little, Brown

Monday!

I got my sorry butt out of bed early today to start on NaNo. One day down, twenty-nine to go!

I don't want to forget to mention that my book is touring again. I didn't mean to have the GCC tours so close together, but that's just the way it worked out. So I really hope you're not getting sick of me! Here's some more tour stops where you can find out more about me and Losing Faith:

Monday, November 1: Angela at Reading Angel (Review)
Tuesday, November 2: Angela at Reading Angel (Playlist)

Wednesday, November 3: Corrine at Lost for Words (Review)
Thursday, November 4: Corrine at Lost for Words (Interview)

Friday, November 5: Sam at Read Sam Read (Review)
Saturday, November 6: Sam at Read Sam Read
(Guest Post)

Sunday, November 7: Anne at Potter, Percy and I (Review)
Monday, November 8: Anne at Potter, Percy and I (Guest Post)

Tuesday, November 9: Kelsey at The Book Scout (Review)
Wednesday, November 10: Kelsey at The Book Scout (Interview & Giveaway)

Thanks so much for the Teen Book Scene for hosting me!