We have learned how to avoid backstory plot holes and discussed how to layer backstory to create conflict. This week, we look at other ways to manipulate backstory. 1. It is tempting to cheat by inserting letters, news articles, and pages from a book or diary to impart information. There may be instances where it works, but rarely. These shortcuts are generally boring in nature. Even worse, they are often placed in italics. If you insist on this, keep it short and simple. Pages of italics strain the eyes. Backstory in the form of letters or journal entries tests a reader's patience. They draw the reader out of real time. A few readers adore them. Most don't. I scan read them. If they are too long, I skip over them. They rarely contain conflict and are a lazy way of delivering information. If the contents can be summarized quickly through internal dialogue or dialogue, do that instead. We don't need to see a long news article about a body being found. Dick can...

Last time , we discussed how to avoid backstory plot holes. This week, we offer ideas for layering backstory into your plot to create conflict. 1. You can reveal your protagonist's critical flaw by explaining something that happened in the past. The critical flaw is revealed near the beginning to explain why Dick is drawn into the story problem and trips him up along the way. The flaw, his kryptonite, can stem from a traumatic episode from the past. 2. The secret weapon is revealed early on to explain why Dick, and only Dick, can solve the overall story problem. It can be a talent, strength of character, belief, or an actual object. You can show him using his secret weapon, or refusing to use it, in the past before he is called upon to use it in the present. 3. Whatever skills or failings Dick has, don't whip them out at the last minute by saying, "Oh, yeah, back in school I used to (fill in the blank)." That is backfilling and it is a no-no. 4. Backstory ca...

Backstory, when used properly, enriches a plot. Used poorly, backstory creates a plot hole that your reader is forced to skip over or sludge through. Most readers skip past the boring bits. The problem with backstory is often two-fold: too much too soon, or way too much information. Backstory can be related through dialogue, flashback, internal dialogue, thoughts, and narrative. Over the next few posts, we'll explore the finer points of using backstory with mastery. 1. Don't begin your novel with backstory. Invest your readers in the current situation before trying to explain the character's history. Otherwise, why should they care? If the action has already passed, we know the characters lived to tell about it. It may have bearing on what is happening now, but the characters survived and have moved onto what is happening now. The reader may feel there is no need to read a long passage detailing what happened in the past if the characters are clearly functionin...

On my own blog on Monday , I started talking about pacing. As I mentioned then, although you can find entire books devoted to various aspects of the writing craft, an entire book on pacing is hard to find. The only one I discovered was about writing fast-paced action, and since pacing doesn't necessarily mean "high action," the topic is something one has to dig around for. As I touched upon on Monday, the pace of your novel has to be 'right' for the genre, and the pace shouldn't be the same throughout. Each scene has its own pacing requirements. Today, I'll talk about ways to control pace. Much of this information comes from workshops I've taken from Deb Courtney and Kelley Anderson. Courtney suggests paying attention to your own physiological reactions when you're writing a high-tension scene. What is your heart rate doing? Your breathing? Your writing should mimic these responses with short sentences, be they narrative or dialogue. In an ac...

Pacing is important to writing. And no, I don’t mean walking back and forth, trying to figure out ways not to sit down at the computer and write! Pacing is used to control the speed of the plot. Pacing is manipulating time. Most writing gurus these days advise to “arrive late and leave early.” By this, they mean, start in the middle of the action or with an element of suspense that will help prompt the reader to keep reading. You don’t need to set up the scene with lots of description and backstory. We don’t necessarily need to know what this person’s history is and how he/she got there, just to know that he/she is in some kind of problem or crisis and needs to solve it. A crisis moment has to be in what I call “real time”—written as if it is happening right now (even if you are using past tense). Summarizing or including it as a flashback does not create the same amount of tension. Summarizing is simply “telling” us what happened, rather than showing our character in trouble. Ba...

In an earlier post about charting the novel story arc, I advised the writer to watch out for sections where the story's tension level drops and stays low across several pages or, even worse, several chapters. How do you identify passages that slow down the story and perhaps cause an agent or editor to toss your manuscript aside? When viewing the novel as a whole, I use these visual clues to identify scenes or chapters that might need work: 1. Very little white space (not counting the margins) – This indicates that your paragraphs might be too long, or you have an opportunity to break up the narrative with dialogue, if appropriate for the scene. 2. Backstory or flashbacks that last more than one page – If you set these insertions apart from the rest of the book by putting text in italics, or using asterisks or hash marks as separators, they’re easy to spot. Without these clues, however, you’ll need to read carefully and mark the beginning and end of such passages. If too lo...