Writers in the Storm

Jessica Strawser

Mumble-mumble-cough years ago, back in my high school days, I was what you might have called a hopeless romantic—in the doe-eyed, day-dreamy way of those who have yet to actually experience romance, let alone real hopelessness. At my bedside was a faux wood clock radio, and every night after my lights were out, I’d curl up in the glow of its red neon time display and tune the dial to “Delilah After Dark.”

I don’t suppose I’ll regain any of the street cred that admission might have just lost me by going on to tell you that even then, the show was far sappier than I was. Still, I liked hearing bits and pieces of other people’s stories as they called in with their requests and dedications. The writer in me liked to supply missing backstory and imagine potential outcomes as the ballads would play in between the calls.

There was a lot of Celine Dion on “Delilah” in those days. Whitney Houston. Boyz II Men. Sometimes I took issue with the song selections, but hey, she was the expert, not me. “Slow down and love someone,” Delilah would remind us over and over, her voice dripping with understanding and hope.

And then one night, a woman called about a troubled relationship, an on-again-off-again sort of thing. I don’t remember the details, but as usual, Delilah empathetically wished her a speedy resolution and told her to stay on the line while she cued up the perfect melody. The opening notes of the song began to play, and the microphone was supposed to shut off then.

But it didn’t. And so the voice that sounded through the darkness of my bedroom was Delilah’s, but it was different. It was the Delilah who existed off the air.

“You know, the real problem,” Delilah told the woman (I’m paraphrasing here, but this was the gist of it), “is that this man is a selfish asshole.”

I bolted up in bed, wide-eyed. A slow smile crept across my face. Holy technical glitch, Batman. The curator of the museum of cheesy love songs just called someone a selfish asshole on the air. I looked around at my stuffed animals, the only other witnesses on the scene. “DID YOU HEAR THAT?” I wanted to say to someone, anyone else. I laughed. I shook my head. I couldn’t wait to find out what was going to happen next. Surely the producers knew what had happened?

Sure enough, after the song, she came back on the air, with a sheepish apology that what we heard was meant to be a private conversation. She tried to move on, business as usual.

But I still want to squeal in delight when I think about it. Because that was the point I stopped being interested in the callers and started being interested in Delilah. Clearly there was more to her than that sugary sweet voice.

I wanted another glimpse.

Calling Character Into Question

In my day job editing Writer’s Digest, I see a lot of craft articles and pitches cross my desk on the subject of character. The vast majority of them advise writers to make sure each character acts and speaks in accordance with his unique persona. Sound enough advice. But I see precious few reminders that as long as you've established who each character is (and that is a pretty important as long as—think of how easily you can conjure Delilah’s comfortable, soft on-air persona), a departure from acting in character can be far more powerful.

My novel Almost Missed You, forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press in March, starts with someone doing something completely out of character. Finn Welsh, by all accounts a devoted husband and father, packs up and leaves his wife, Violet, in the middle of a family vacation—and takes their son with him. Poof: Both are gone without a trace.

Everyone thought this couple had a perfect marriage, the kind of love that’s meant to be. Violet is blindsided, and so is the reader. How could he do such a thing? “This doesn’t sound like Finn,” all their friends and family say. “There must be some mistake.”

Everything is immediately called into question. And it’s not long before the characters and the readers are both asking themselves: Is this out of character, with some bizarre circumstance forcing his hand? Or did no one know his true character after all? Is the boy safe with him? How can Violet get her son back?

The people in his life want to find out. They need to find out. Too much is at stake not to.  

Acting out of character doesn’t have to drive an entire story forward, though it can. It can also add a twist, a turn, a layer of interest at any point in your arc. This can work equally well with protagonists, antagonists and even supporting players.

Consider:

1. A man known for having a lead foot gets a speeding ticket on the interstate. He complains to his friends, who laugh and point out that he’d long had it coming.
2. A relatively sedate woman is caught going 45 in a school zone, during an hour she was supposed to be at work. Whoa, what was her hurry?

A traffic ticket is a relatively run-of-the-mill occurrence, yet even so, our interest is piqued.

1. A known philanderer hits on a coworker at the office Christmas party.
2. A father of three who is so devoted to his wife it's almost a running joke has too much to drink and corners the new hire in the elevator. (Or did he really have that much to drink after all?)

Which do you want to learn more about?

1. A bully pushes your kid down during a fight on the playground and breaks his arm.
2. Your kid's best friend pushes him down during a fight on the playground and breaks his arm.

It's the out-of-character behavior that raises the question, "But why?"

And that's what keeps people reading.

The next time you feel like your story needs some jazz, see if your characters might be acting a little too in character. Send in that caller who will make them slip and show their true colors on the air.

Your readers will find themselves smiling in the dark, delighted and eager to find out what happens next.

What's your favorite "surprise" for your characters or characters in books you've particularly enjoyed?

About Jessica

Jessica Strawser is the editorial director of Writer’s Digest, North America’s leading publication for aspiring and working writers since 1920. Her debut novel, Almost Missed You, is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press in March 2017 and has garnered accolades from Chris Bohjalian, Adriana Trigiani, Garth Stein and others.

She loves connecting with fellow writers (and readers) at Facebook.com/jessicastrawserauthor and on Twitter @jessicastrawser.

Lisa Cron

Backstory is something writers often struggle with, largely because of the writing myths out there that make it seem like something that’s best avoided. Ironic, because by avoiding backstory, writers tend to doom their novels right out of the starting gate.

The surprising truth is that backstory is the most seminal layer of any novel. Without it, your protagonist has amnesia, so she can’t read meaning into anything, nor can she desire or fear anything except, of course, generically. She wants unconditional love, she fears rejection. Ho hum. Don’t we all?

The damage done by the avoid-backstory-myth goes even deeper. Because writers are often discouraged from using backstory, it implies that they therefore don’t need to create backstory, either. So when asked why their protagonist did something, they’re stumped. Like the client I had who, when asked why his protagonist became a hit woman, paused for so long that it was clear he’d never even thought about it. Finally, he blurted, “Um, because she has abandonment issues?” Nice try.

Show me the person who doesn’t have abandonment issues, and I’ll show you the person who hasn’t figured it out yet. We all have abandonment issues. Story specific backstory would have revealed why she has abandonment issues and why that lead her to becoming a hit woman. Hey, I’d read a book that gave me insight into that decision.

In other words, by avoiding backstory you not only lock your reader out of the story, you lock yourself out.

With that in mind, let’s dive into three very astute questions about backstory culled from the comments on my last post:

From Kathryn Craft: I was wondering if at some point you would address when is the best time to introduce backstory in your novel.

The answer, as the old joke about voting goes, is: early and often. Hopefully, beginning on the very first page. Let’s do a little field research, shall we? (Don’t you just love the fact that we can do field research in our PJs thanks to the trusty Interweb?)

Go to Amazon and check out the first pages of novels from all genres. For example:

• Take a peek at the first page of You Before Me by JoJo Moyes, which weaves backstory into the second paragraph, giving us a glimpse of the protagonist’s “normal” life
• Read the opening paragraph of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, which opens with the line: “I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.”
• Check out The Silent Wife by A.S.A. Harrison, who not only weaves backstory into the second paragraph (and then throughout that entire chapter), but lets us know what the entire novel will be about in said paragraph.

Backstory is prevalent in every novel, so why do writers almost always ask when to introduce it? Since writers tend to be voracious readers, why don’t we already know that it appears on every page?

The answer is surprisingly simple: Because when backstory is woven in well, you don’t notice that it is backstory. When the protagonist is sweating bullets, trying to figure out what the hell to do in the present – they don’t leave the present, but their mind does. It rips through the past trying evaluate what’s happening, and what their best move is, given their agenda. The protagonist does this because it’s exactly what humans do, too. In literature as in life, right?

Here’s what we miss as readers: Those memories the protagonist rips through are backstory. But because we, the reader, are actively involved in the story, we don’t make that distinction. It’s like the magician’s classic misdirect.

That’s why it’s so easy to believe the writing world when it advises you to stay the heck away from backstory, especially in the beginning of your novel. In fact, writers are often told to avoid “backstory” altogether, as if it will only bog down the story or worse, stop it cold, not to mention bore readers. This couldn’t be less true.

Backstory is the most fundamental layer of story; it is what drives your novel forward, giving everything that happens in it story-specific meaning. Make no mistake: backstory will be present, in one form or another, on every page you write.

Think of it this way -- when your protagonist steps onto page one, she brings with her the one thing we never do leave home without: her past. Not merely her memory of past events, but – more importantly – what those events taught her about how the world works.

Our subjective past is the decoder ring we all use to make sense of the world around us. As Faulkner said, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

That’s why you, as the author, cannot write a compelling novel without already knowing your protagonist’s relevant backstory before you get to page one.

So why does the writing world warn us to stay away from it? Because backstory can indeed turn deadly when woven in poorly. Yes, we’re talking about the dreaded info dump. I wrote a whole post on this on Writer Unboxed (here is the link), but right now I want to dive into the next question, so we can figure out how to avoid info dumps large and small, and instead deftly weave backstory into a novel so deftly that no one will even know it is backstory.

From Fae Rowen: After the first, second, and, uh, third readings, my partners here at WITS always tell me my female lead is not likable. It’s definitely NOT because she’s perfect, because she isn’t. She’s usually very angry, though, and there hasn’t been time to sprinkle in the backstory so the reader understands why she acts as she does. How can you be true to your character’s actions and reactions early on?

What makes us care about a character (whether we like said character or not) is not what they do, it’s why they do it. And not simply the surface “why” – as in: Jane just shoved an old man crossing the street because she’s in a hurry and he was walking slow.

What we want to know is something deeper: How is Jane justifying what she just did? What, in her life, taught her that shoving that old guy was okay? Which brings us to the key question the writer must answer: What specifically happened to Jane, in her past, that created the moral compass that this story is putting to the test?

Ah yes, backstory! What the reader comes for is insight into why characters do what they do. And that’s revealed in one way: How is Jane making sense of this? If you take us inside your seemingly unlikable protagonist, and give us insight into how she sees the world as she struggles to achieve her overarching agenda, we will be riveted.

So, how do you sprinkle backstory in? Via your protagonist’s internal struggle as she grapples with the tough choice that every single scene forces her to make. Backstory is always woven into the narrative in service of what’s happening in the story present. This is because the protagonist has called it up to try to figure out what the hell to do in the moment.

So, to circle back around to the question: you’re not looking for places to sprinkle in backstory, you’re looking for places to take us into her head, so we can glimpse her inner struggle – that is: why she’s doing it. In your case, for instance, you might look for the places where your protagonist is doing one of those mean, angry things.

In this pursuit it helps to keep in mind what the German playwright Friedrich Hebbel said, “In a good play, everyone is in the right.” What he meant, I think, is that each one of us has our own subjective reality, and based on that, we are all doing what we believe is right. In other words, no one is mean for meanness sake, or “evil” just because. There is always a logic behind our actions – and that logic is created by what our experiences (yep, our backstory) have taught us. Point being, the more you understand the deep internal why driving what your protagonist does, the more you’ll be able to craft a novel that will have readers caring about them from the get go – even when what they’re doing on the surface isn’t particularly “likeable.” Especially then.

And finally: truth is, caring about a character doesn’t necessarily mean liking them at all. It means being curious about them: not simply about what they do, but about why on earth they’re doing it. Which brings us to the last question:

From Alice Fleury: I am a Joe Friday in writing. Just the facts, ma’am. I am amazed when I read all that stuff the writer pries out of the protagonist’s head. So how does one write more than two sentences of interior thoughts?

Great question! The trouble with “just the facts, ma’am” writing is that it tends to focus primarily on the external facts – that is, what happens. So it traps readers on the surface, locking them out of the real story. Here’s the secret: like info dumps, interior thoughts, in and of themselves, can be deadly. Why? Because unless they relate to something the protagonist (or POV character) is actively struggling with in the moment – something that has an immediate consequence -- they will stop the story.

The goal is to avoid taking long trips down memory lane for no real reason. Do not allow a character to muse about things for the sake of musing, and never have characters think about things that don’t impact what they’re going through, but that you – as the author – want the reader to know.

The kind of internal thoughts the reader craves are always in relation to action, that is, to a difficult decision the protagonist is being forced to make in the moment.

Let me suggest an example that highlights everything we’ve been talking about here. Caroline Leavitt’s riveting new novel, Cruel Beautiful World, opens with a 34 page first chapter. The first line of the novel is: “Lucy runs away with her high school teacher, William, on a Friday, the last day of school, a June morning shiny with heat.” The chapter begins that morning, and it’s not till the last page of that chapter that Lucy finally climbs into William’s VW and leaves. The bulk of the chapter is backstory. Over the course of the school day Lucy calls up memories – sometimes in snippets, sometimes in full-fledged flashbacks – as she struggles with the decision she’s making in the story present: to leave home, forever, without telling her sister Charlotte or Iris, the woman who raised them. Both of whom she loves dearly. And yet she leaves, having convinced herself – via her reading of past events – that she’s doing the right thing, and that neither Charlotte or Iris will suffer too much upon discovering she’s gone. You can read an excerpt here, but my advice: read the whole first chapter, it’s a master class in the importance of backstory, and how to seamlessly weave it in.

And now, I’m once again open for questions for my next column – leave them here in the comments, or shoot me an email at: lisa@wiredforstory.

About Lisa

Lisa Cron is the author of Wired for Story and Story Genius. Her video tutorial Writing Fundamentals: The Craft of Story can be found at Lynda.com, and her TEDx talk, Wired for Story, opened Furman University’s 2014 TEDx conference, Stories: The Common Thread of Our Humanity.

Lisa has worked in publishing at W.W. Norton, as an agent at the Angela Rinaldi Literary Agency, as a producer on shows for Showtime and Court TV, and as a story consultant for Warner Brothers and the William Morris Agency. Since 2006, she’s been an instructor in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, and she is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts MFA program in Visual Narrative in New York City. In her work as a story coach, Lisa helps writers, nonprofits, educators, and journalists wrangle the story they’re telling onto the page. She can be reached at wiredforstory.com

Kimberly Brock

What in hell do I blog about today, when the world is turning itself inside out every two seconds over one drama or another? What in hell do I write as a fiction author that could matter to a reader when reality is body slamming her, night and day? We all want to escape reality with a good story, but what happens when reality feels more like fiction? What happens to writers and to readers when there is no stable consciousness to allow for the mind to elegantly slip into the place where it learns and dreams and grows fat on possibilities? What happens when it feels like all the stories have stopped?

Or at least the ones we think worth telling. When we’re traumatized, despondent. When our thoughts are just a nonsensical loop.

Well, we end up on Facebook for one thing. Or Netflix. Because guess what? We crave stories instinctively! We are trying to make sense of the world and of ourselves and the only way our wits can stabilize is to follow a narrative from beginning to end. We’ll start picking up any old breadcrumbs faster than damn ducks, hoping that when we get to the end of the trail, we’ll look up, take a deep satisfied breath, and reach some understanding that gives us…peace of mind. Stories are the metaphorical map to hope. And so, that’s what I’m going to blog about because I need the reminder and maybe some reader out there needs it, too.

Stories will always save us. All stories. Any stories. The worst kind of story will still fill your proverbial belly. The simplest kind will sort you out from the inside. The process of story is like breathing for the brain, the rhythm of the collective human experience reminding us that we are all in this together. When it seems all the stories have stopped, think about that rhythm, the beats, the musical score of a character arc; story is a dance for our imaginations. Think about nursery rhymes and those hand-clapping games we played as girls. Think about fairy tales. Oh, don’t get me started there! My first love!

Think of the first storytellers you’ve known, of standing at your grandmother’s side while her hands worked biscuit dough in a bowl and she told you the story of her own grandmother doing the same; her words connected you, a silver thread through time. Think of your grandfather’s voice as he shelled corn on the back porch and told you the tales of his wasted youth and caused your heart to back up against your spine, lest you should know such loss. Think of your mother, telling how you came into the world, a fit of a miracle. Think of the stories told by cover of dark, with nervous giggles and flashlights late in the night, of ghosts and goblins and girls trapped in mirrors. Think of desperate journeys and battle cries and misty mountains, of lost boys who could fly.

They are still there, the voices of the ages, a timeless narrative telling through us, on us, beyond us- whether we remember to listen or not. We are never abandoned, but built by them. Stories and the human psyche are nonlinear lovers. Infinite. Sometimes we must just remember to do a little listening.

Here’s the truth: When it feels as if all the stories have stopped, that’s the lie every heart should recognize. Remember? This is the place where the wood grows dark, the path twists dangerously and home is lost? What happens next? Ah, now. You know.

Tell me a story.

What stories do you call upon when it feels the stories have all stopped?

About Kimberly

Kimberly Brock is the award winning author of the #1 Amazon bestseller, THE RIVER WITCH (Bell Bridge Books, 2012). A former actor and special needs educator, Kimberly is the recipient of the Georgia Author of the Year 2013 Award. A literary work reminiscent of celebrated southern author Carson McCullers, THE RIVER WITCH has been chosen by two national book clubs.

Kimberly’s writing has appeared in anthologies, blogs and magazines, including Writer Unboxed and Psychology Today. Kimberly served as the Blog Network Coordinator for She Reads, a national online book club from 2012 to 2014, actively spearheading several women’s literacy efforts. She lectures and leads workshops on the inherent power in telling our stories and is founder of Tinderbox Writer’s Workshop. She is also owner of Kimberly Brock Pilates.

She lives in the foothills of north Atlanta with her husband and three children, where she is at work on her next novel. Visit her website at kimberlybrockbooks.com for more information and to find her blog.