backstory

Correspondence from the NaNo fields – Dumb conversations!

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Hello to all you writers and especially to all the NaNo’ers out there! How are you doing? Has your plot run out of steam? Or are your fingers flying off the keyboard?

I am actually caught up on my daily numbers and am trying to push ahead as I have two very important birthdays this month and I am responsible for Thanksgiving plus other family obligations. Of course, don’t forget work!

I am still world building but that is actually going much better now that I gave myself permission to write my thoughts out loud. Makes for some weird writing but it works.

Last year I spent my NaNo time focusing on dialogue. I still spend a lot of time reading how other people write good dialogue and will re-read how authors handle the talking bits.  When I was growing up, we were pushed in school to write a lot of adverbs and do the “Tom Swifty” type of writing. Which is horribly dated now and just silly.

But as my fingers are flying on the keyboard and in my quest to get my daily numbers and not overthink it, well I find myself making very bad puns in very inane dialogue.  Let’s face it, right now I am writing the backstory. Which is important to help me  know my characters a lot better, but it is nothing that I would ever put in the final story.

You see, I have been competing at NaNoWriMo for over ten years now and I know how quickly plot and story can run dry. So maybe I am a little PTSD and am padding the story in the beginning with really dumb conversations. Or maybe I am growing and learning that a solid backstory can add depth to a character that continues to show through in the main story.  “Just ignore me when I start giggling”, she said funnily.

Have a great day!

Paula

P.S. what is your favorite Tom Swifty?

 

Quick Links: Veronica Scott presents: Where Does Your Story Actually Begin?

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

It’s all about the backstory. Do you have too much? This hits home for me because right now my NaNoWriMo effort is all backstory. To be fair I am world & character building and if this story every makes it to publishing I plan on massive rewrites that won’t include all the extra information. is completely right in her article on Romance University, it is important to know when your story really starts.

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Veronica Scott presents: Where Does Your Story Actually Begin?

July 13, 2016 by Veronica Scott

db-316-winter-121-4447A story starts on page one, right? This post by author Veronica Scott will make you think about where your story really starts…

Welcome back, Veronica!

Where does your story actually begin? “Once upon a time” is a nice intro but maybe even fairy tales include too much backstory.

I’ve been judging various contests for unpublished authors recently and while of course I won’t mention any specifics, the main problem I see is that the author begins with one, two, sometimes even three chapters of material which they feel is necessary to the book. Unfortunately, all too often these chapters are solid info dump backstory or history. If I weren’t judging a contest entry for them, I’d be closing the manuscript and moving on. I’d never even get to the actual story! I see this same comment often in my social media feed from agents and editors, regarding submissions they receive.

(All examples are made up for this post!)

The author runs several risks here. First, while they certainly need to understand the history and events shaping their own world building, the reader is going to become bored fast with the events of the 200 Year War, told year by year, with no immediate connection to a hero or heroine they care about. This technique is even more likely to turn people off early if the author throws in a lot of terms and made-up language details. I’ve had a number of published authors tell me they do write this sort of material, often in early drafts of the novel, because it helps them think through their world building details, but they then delete the material from the final drafts. (I tend to keep scribbly notes on various purple legal pads scattered around the house, rather than write it all out, but that’s me.)

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

S.A. Hunt: The Fine Art of Building People

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This post by S.A. Hunt originally appeared as a guest post on Chuck Wendig’s terribleminds on 8/6/15.

And now, a guest post by a fella named S.A. Hunt, who is a cracking author you probably aren’t reading. His newest is Malus Domestica — I just opened this book up the other day thinking I’d just take a peek, and next thing I knew, I was like, 30 pages in. Amazing prose. Reminds me of some of the most classic horror writers. Hunt has a storyteller’s ear, as you’ll see below.

Some people collect action figures.

I collect people.

I don’t know how you feel about that first point. Action figures. Some of you will probably think it’s childish, or a waste of money, or both of those.

Some of you might throw down a dollar for that janky old Optimus Prime or loose-hipped Skeletor that you used to have twenty-five years ago, lurking in a thrift shop’s toy aisle. Some of you will drop a paycheck on a superdeluxe polyresin Batman from Korea with a cloth cape and thirty-six articulation points and four interchangeable faces so realistic you’d swear the figure contained an actual miniaturized human soul.

I still live where I grew up, a stone’s throw from the real river featured in Deliverance, but I wasn’t that quintessential uphill-both-ways kid that had to play with sticks and bugs, although I did own an impressive armory of gnarled branches. One of them was a three-foot stick as straight as a pool cue with a top end that hooked like a dragon’s talon. I hung a soapstone pendant inside the crescent, burned sigils into the shaft with a magnifying glass, and called it my wizard staff.

No, I had a whole entourage of action figures. He-Man and M.A.S.K. and Dino-Riders; Thundercats, Silverhawks, Ghostbusters, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; X-Men, Ronin Warriors, and Batman, and finally, the ultimate bauble, LEGO. I loved them all, usually to the exclusion of the world around me. Whenever I had a tiny plastic Leonardo (the original Playmates line, of course, bow-legged and wielding brown swords) or Wolverine (yellow and blue spandex, with retractable claws) in my hands, that was the only thing that existed for me.

(Speaking of Leonardo’s swords, in middle school my Harley-riding father, who could pass for a Sons of Anarchy extra and whose only hobbies were turning rattlesnakes into belts and keeping Anheuser-Busch in business, would buy me an honest-to-God samurai sword at a swap meet. As schoolboys are wont to do, I accidentally stuck it in my thigh in eighth grade—the first of many self-inflicted war wounds—and ruined a pair of pants. But that’s another story for another day.)

Some of the best parts of getting a new action figure was reading the story on the back. You might say it was their BACKSTORY, hahaaaaa.

  • This blue guy is the team’s mechanic, trained in the art of Ninjitsu from the age of four
  • This girl was raised by howler monkeys and was taught how to melt steel with nothing but her voice
  • This one can fly and talk to birds because he is the son of the bird god
  • This dude with permanent goggles rides Tyrannosaurs in his spare time and his favorite food is eggplant casserole
  • This man is made of snakes because fuck you

And then I’d ogle the pictures of the other toys in that crowd of heroes and villains and wonder what their backstories were. Sometimes I would make them up. Moss Man spent too much time swimming in the moat and now he’s covered in moss. Slithe is six years divorced. The only thing that can beat this giant glow-eyed skeleton demon full of naked viscera is a quick wit. Lion-O prefers to bathe himself.

 

Read the full post on terribleminds.