Backstory, We Got Backstory

July 24, 2012July 24, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

Every story has a backstory. It’s the crucial information that you-the-reader need to know if you’re going to understand what’s happening now, in the story’s present day. Or it’s the buried secret that shapes the character of your protagonist, or the skeleton in the family cupboard, or the Dreadful Thing that happened at college in senior year that nobody ever speaks of and nobody ever forgets.

Sometimes a plot only needs a bit of light-weight backstory work, somewhat in the nature of a trellis to support the ornamental vines of the action, the better to reassure you-the-reader that what you’re seeing has something underneath it to keep it fixed in position and to hold it up. Other times, the backstory isn’t just there for support; it’s the heavy-duty engine that drives the entire narrative.

But no matter the relative importance of the backstory, there is one thing that the writer needs to remember: What went on in the past of the narrative cannot be more entertaining than what’s going on in the present. Because if it is, then the writer might as well give up on the present-day portion of the narrative entirely and concentrate on writing about all the past-era stuff that’s actually interesting.

Things to Avoid, Antagonist Division

July 20, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

One of the things you don’t want to do, when you’re creating your antagonist and putting him through his protagonist-thwarting paces, is to end up with yet another instance of the amazing mind-reading teleporting menace.

You know how that one works: your protagonist is running across country to escape from the monster, or running from room to room in the big old mansion to escape from the serial killer, or dodging about the streets of the big city to evade the hired-gun assassin-spy. No matter which way he turns or where he goes, however, the bad guy is always right behind him — or, often, is already there waiting for him.

And a lot of the time, if you stand still long enough to think about it, you realize that there’s no way the antagonist could have gotten to that point from where he was standing before, or that he could have known which way the protagonist was going to turn for help, without being able to read minds and teleport. Which most serial killers and assassin-spies are not, in fact, able to do. (The jury is still out on monsters.)

There are two main ways to avoid this problem. One way is to keep your story moving so fast, and so entertainingly, that the reader never has the time or the inclination to stop dead in his or her tracks and ask, “How the hell was he able to do that?” The other way is by means of careful plotting and meticulous attention to continuity, which may in fact actually involve tricks like drawing charts and making timelines in order to keep track of what your antagonist is doing during those parts of the story when he isn’t on stage.

When you’re done, if you’ve done it right, your reward will be to have the reader never notice all the hard work that you put in.

Music to Write By

July 13, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Some writers need absolute silence in which to write. This post is not about them.

Other writers like to have some background sound. Usually, these days, that means music.

Writers who love their background music have a variety of different tastes and requirements. Some writers prefer orchestral music, finding the intrusion of human voices distracting, while other writers can’t do without their vocalists. Different time periods appeal to different writers as well. One writer will have a preference for Baroque concertos, another for heavy metal, a third for show tunes.

I like writing to vocal music with a steady beat — not surprisingly, there’s a lot of classic rock in my playlists.

What about you?

Sentence Structure Peeve of the Day

July 6, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

(Because I’m the sort of person who gets peevish over sentence structure.)

It’s a common fault in the work of beginning writers, or in the early drafts of texts by experienced writers (but what makes the writers experienced is that they know how to spot their faults and remove them in the second draft): They will write sentences where the important idea, or one of the important ideas, is relegated to a subordinate clause — or, worse, a modifying phrase — like this:

Fred’s brief attempt at independence subsided, his desire to act on his own still surging through him, but in the end he had no choice except to obey.

That’s a bad sentence for a lot of reasons (and deliberately writing a bad sentence is work, let me tell you), but structurally it’s a bad sentence because there’s an important idea buried in it that should be given space to stand on its own. Important ideas deserve their own independent clauses. Like this:

Fred’s brief attempt at independence subsided. His desire to act on his own still surged through him, but in the end he had no choice except to obey.

It’s still a bad sentence (or set of sentences.) But at least it’s not a structurally bad sentence.

A Second Set of Suspenders Wouldn’t be Too Much

July 3, 2012July 4, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Or, Let’s Talk about Backups. Continue reading “A Second Set of Suspenders Wouldn’t be Too Much” →

Rules? In a Knife Fight?

July 2, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

The rules of grammar are not rules in the same sense that the rules of baseball, or chess, or tiddlywinks are rules. The latter are prescriptive: if you want to play those games, they describe how you must play them. (Note, however, that even rules of this sort allow for locally recognized variants.) Rules of grammar, however, are descriptive: they exist to set forth the range of utterances which can be made and understood by native speakers of a language. In that sense, “It’s me” is in fact grammatical — no native speaker of English is going to misunderstand what is meant by it.

Grammar, however, is not the same thing as usage, or as idiom, even though prescriptivist grammarians try to conflate the three. “It’s me” is colloquial usage, or casual written usage; “It is I” is formal written usage, in that a contemporary native speaker is highly unlikely to utter it in normal conversation. Similarly, “ain’t” is grammatical — a native speaker of English will understand what is meant by it — but in terms of usage it is at best colloquial, in addition to being strongly marked for region and class. A good teacher of English will make sure that his/her students are able to recognize and employ standard usage; a really good teacher of English will do so without stigmatizing his/her students’ own speech habits. There are not as many really good teachers of English as there should be.

“It’s me” is also an English idiom — idioms being those bits and bobs of a language that don’t fit into any of the standard tables at the back of the textbook, the ones where the instructor informs the class, grimly, that they’re just going to have to memorize those bits because they don’t make any regular sense. Every language has them: the fossilized snippets of extinct grammar, the vocabulary items borrowed whole from other sources and only halfway bashed into regularity, the words and phrases whose sound or meaning or function has shifted so far from the original that the logical connection has been severed.

Most of the time, when native speakers of a language complain about the grammar of other native speakers of a language, it’s actually their usage that’s being complained about — and thus, indirectly, their social or economic status.

Thought for the Day

July 2, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

(For yesterday, actually, by now. Oh, well.)

When writing extraordinary characters: follow the default normal person in the story.

We meet Dr. Watson, the former army surgeon with the budget and housing problems, before we meet Sherlock Holmes the eccentric genius, even though meeting Holmes is the point of the exercise.

Things I Know (Because I Learned Them the Hard Way) about Research

June 30, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Research is fractal. The more you do of it, the more you know you have to do.

Research is essential. Unless you’re drawing all of your fiction from your own lived experience, you’re going to have to look things up, try things out, go to places in person to see. And even if you are drawing all of your fiction from your own lived experience, you’ll still need to double-check and make certain that your memories and recorded reality match up. (The near past is possibly the trickiest of all eras to write in. Just keeping track of things like when cell phones went from being expensive, bulky, and rare to being cheap, small, and ubiquitous can be a writer’s nightmare.)

Research is impossible. No matter how thoroughly you research your material, there’s always going to be something that you miss, because the world is very large and you are only one writer trying to finish your book some time before the heat death of the universe. And no matter how small the thing is that you get wrong, some of the people who read your book are going to care very deeply about it, and at least one of them will write you an angry letter, or flame you in their blog, or give you a bad review on Amazon. Pretty much the only thing you can do about it is resign yourself to the inevitable, and be gracious when it comes around.

That being said, there are a couple of things you want to try exceedingly hard to get right, because the people who care about them are even more passionate than the other people who will find errors in your stuff. One of those things is guns, and the other is horses. Horse people and gun people (who are usually two different sets) are on beyond passionate about their subjects — “fanatical” might be a good word. Your best bet, if you find yourself committed to a project that’s going to involve a lot of guns or horses or both, is to get yourself a gun expert or a horse expert, as needed, and consult with them frequently during writing and revision. The good thing about horse people and gun people is that they like to talk about their passion, and are usually happy to play instructor. (Don’t forget to thank them profusely in your acknowledgements. That way other horse and gun people will know that at least you tried. The same goes for any other people who may have been sources of professional expertise.)

And finally, research is distracting. At some point, no matter how fascinating the trail of breadcrumbs you’ve followed in search of some telling detail, you have to put the books back on the bookshelf and write.,