Write Real Characters

When it comes to writing the Other (AKA anyone with an identity that doesn’t match my own), I’ll shamefully admit I’m a latecomer to the whole thing. I spent a long time not even thinking about it, having grown up with mostly fantasy stories written by mostly men featuring mostly male heroes, villains, and secondary characters. The few female characters I was reading were often solely love interests and mothers (mostly relegated to mothers and other matronly folk, written only to serve the narrative for a scene or three, with low odds of surviving through the book, or even being seen again). So it should come as no surprise, then, that my own female characters, for quite some time, mirrored those archetypes. You write what you read, after all.

What changed my thinking about writing the Other, then? Simple: good advice from better friends! Aside from generally good recommendations for stories, comics, movies, and games (because, again, you write what you read,) they passed along, both explicitly and by example, two important pieces of advice that I take to heart any time I write any character.

The first, from Murderer in Chief Adrean Messmer, is almost profound in its simplicity: focus on writing someone who is real. The second, from Storyteller, time traveler, and flash fiction dynamo Mac Boyle, was a matter of fact answer he gave when he revealed he had changed a male character in an early draft into a female character in the final ones (with no degradation in their narrative importance or addition as a love interest): there’s no reason a character can’t be the Other.

This advice is echoed in a series of quotes by George R.R. Martin about writing the Other: “I’ve never been an eight year old girl, but I’ve also never been an exiled princess, or a dwarf or bastard. What I have been is human. I just write human characters,” he explained in a 2013 interview with the Telegraph, and in another interview on the Canadian Broadcast Network’s Stroumboulopoulos Tonight, when asked how he writes female characters authentically, he replied, “You know I’ve always considered women to be people.” (That link is to the direct question and answer, but the whole interview is worth a listen!) The message in Messmer’s, Boyle’s, and Martin’s words is clear: write real characters, with all the care that you would take in writing yourself.

CJ Miles IV

CJ Miles IV is a member of Nevermore Edits and the Oklahoma Writer's Federation, Inc. He lives in Tulsa, OK, spreading the unspeakable word of the Old Ones. He does not write or blog nearly enough, but, much like spotting a blurry sasquatch, you can occasionally find him on his website or Twitter.

To writers who say, "But, I don’t know how to write male/female characters"

This post may seem to discuss gender as a binary. It is addressing specifically people who say, “I don’t know how to write male/female characters,” so it specifically addresses male and female traits. However, the overarching theme is that there is significant overlap.

In other words, gender is a social construct that exists on a spectrum and if you say you can’t write a specific gender, you need to learn more about people.

By imagesbywestfall (imagesbywestfall) [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

As a group, men are different from women. As individuals, we’re all just people and should be written as people.

 Don’t write a male character or a female character. Write a character.

Thus, endeth the lesson, we can all go home now.

---

 What? That wasn’t enough? Fine.

 According to Wikipedia, typical female traits include gentleness, empathy, and sensitivity. Typical male traits include strength, courage, independence, violence, and assertiveness. However – and this is important – there is no male trait that only men display and no female trait that only females display. There are many men who are gentle and empathic, and many women who are brave and assertive.

 But those are subjective and difficult to measure. If you need something more objective than empathy and courage, here’s some measurable traits.

 According to the CDC, the average American man is about 5’9” tall. The average American woman is about 5’4” tall. Because of this, you can accurately say that men are taller than women.   However, we all know women who are 5’9” or taller and men who are 5’4” or shorter. If you look at the overlap between the two bell curves in the image, you can see that it’s not at all unusual for a woman to be taller than a man. Meaning, we all know women who are taller than most men and we all know men who are shorter than most women.

Image borrowed from: https://sugarandslugs.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/sex-differences/

 But strength, right? Upper body strength. That’s exclusively male territory, right? Well…

 According to Livestrong.com, an average untrained man can bench-press about 135 pounds (I’m very much simplifying the stats, this post is about gender traits, not weightlifting). An average untrained woman can bench about 80 pounds. However, the average woman who has trained can bench 145 pounds. More than the average man. (to be fair, the average trained man can bench double that). Point being – even in what seems like an exclusively male arena, there is overlap.

These results from the 2017 New York Marathon show that the first place woman finished ahead of the 20th man. Of the top 100 finishers for men and women, 18 women finished ahead of the 100th man. As a group, men finish marathons faster than women. As individuals, a woman beat the majority of the male runners in the 2017 NY Marathon.

 There are far far more things that are universal than there are things that are distinct. We all know what it feels like to be hungry. To be cold and tired. We all know what it feels like to be embarrassed, to be scared. We all know what if feels like to need to pee, to be sick. We’ve all experienced loving someone who doesn’t love us back. We know what it feels like to drink ice water when we’re parched or take that first bite of a delicious meal when we’re hungry. We’ve all woken up from a nightmare and been confused about where we are and what’s real. Most of us have broken a bone, fallen off a bike, or stepped on something sharp. Some of us are great in a crisis, some of us are not so great. We all have good traits and bad traits.

 Don’t write a male character or a female character. Write a character.

The two sides of writing a different gender

 When I first heard we were doing this blog topic, I jumped at the chance to do it. Most of my characters are male, so it seemed like a gift of a topic. However, I soon came to realise I am just not conscious of choosing character gender. My characters arrive in my head with some things preloaded. Gender is usually one of them, and it is normally so set in stone that I can count on one hand the amount of characters who have actually had their gender changed in my stories.

So, rather than getting myself wound up about my personal reasons I decided to look at how you may want to approach writing characters of different genders.

There are two sides to this. One is from inside- your character’s drives, fears, personality, and innate traits. The second is from the outside- how other characters perceive each other. Let’s deal with inside first.

The first thing is to step away from thinking ‘I am writing a character of a different gender’ because focusing on that too much could result in a cookie cutter character, a gender stereotype. Approach it as you would writing a character of your own gender. I have several female relatives and friends, but we are all really different people. Some of them are very feminine, some are sporty, some are tall, short, long haired, short haired, quick to anger, quiet and introspective. We are all female, but we share very little in common just because of our gender.

It’s the same with writing characters outside your gender. There is no one type of person. You could use shortcuts, like if your character is male, you could include a love of sport or the fact that they are generally more assertive, but those are not things exclusive to men, nor will all men have these traits.

All characters should be developed the same way. As 3-dimensional people with a background, a personality, drives, and fears. Gender really doesn’t affect people's personalities as much as we think. You could have two transwoman characters who have had a similar journey throughout their lives and transition, but each of them will react differently to that journey. It's not enough to say, ‘transitioning is difficult’, you have to ask why it is that way for your character.

The second step may bring in a lot more research. How your character is perceived by others rests on things like your setting, time period, the outward appearance of your character, and the personality of the others around them. Again, we can’t rely on stereotypical information. Yes, some men do not like working under a female boss, and some women are gossips, but this is not true for all. As a woman writing male characters I try to remember that I don’t really have any idea how men react in the company of other men, and it’s something I could never test out, but it is largely accepted that people are more comfortable around people of their own gender, and that can be a good place to start.

Setting and time periods can give you much more structure to work around. While it may be tempting for us women to think men had it easy back in the day, if we are writing male characters we have to remember there were strict codes of conduct, etiquette and chivalry. Men had a public face they needed to show at all times or they risked shame and ridicule.

It becomes a harder task to write when we consider non-binary and trans characters. Does your non-binary character present as feminine in some situations and masculine in others? Could they run into other characters outside of their normal setting and not be recognised? Do your characters know that one of them has transitioned? Did they know them before? Are their issues with old colleagues, family etc and dead naming? There is a lot to puzzle through, but it is worth it.

Writing a character with a gender different to yours does not have to be the headache it first seems. Remember the two sides to your character, what they are inside and what people see on the outside, and research anything you are not sure of. Don’t worry if your character seems outside of the norm for their gender, because for every person who thinks that character doesn’t represent that particular gender, there will be someone out there who will marvel at how you wrote a character just like them.

K.Lawrence

K.Lawrence hails from the wilds of north east Scotland and has been writing for longer than she can remember. Her first novel, The Raven And the Nightingale, is currently available through Amazon and Inkubus Publishing. The sequel is in the works. K has also written several short stories which have appeared in Inkubus Publishing Anthologies and one short story that has appeared in the latest A Murder of Storytellers anthology.

When she is not writing, K likes to play guitar, go to concerts, take photographs of everything and anything, and paint. She is also an avid collector of Funko Pops and other geek memerobilia.

You can keep up to date with her works through Instagram and Facebook .

If You Want to Write like a Woman, Read their Fiction

When I was nineteen, Stan Lee ran a contest looking for new comic writers and artists to flesh out his idea for a worldwide search for aliens who’d been on earth for centuries. The winners would take creative control of the comic and Stan Lee would edit. I was so new to writing that I thought I might actually win. I punched out a script and sent it to a friend for feedback. A day later she gave me the first writing feedback that really pissed me off: Ryan, you can’t write women.

It wasn’t a philosophical question of whether or not a man could write something from a female point of view. It was about craft. It irked me, because like all good insults and great criticism, it was absolutely right. I hadn’t yet done the necessary, lifelong, work of identifying and disassembling the misogyny I had learned.

I’d spent the last four years at an all boys high school, so my understanding of women was shaped by the four or five women I interacted with regularly—two being my mother and sister, and women in 90s sitcoms and action films replaying in the 2000s. As most gender theorists or women with televisions will tell you, those characters are either male sex fantasies or wisdom bearing elders. Worst of all: I still thought of women as a homogenous group. I believed they had one voice, and every woman I knew was an outlier.

College helped me grow out of that. If I ever turned a corner, it was around my senior year. I read fiction by women. There’s the quiet, contemplative prose of Alice Munro portraying the world of working class Canadian women. Jill McCorkle with her incredible metaphors and caustic Southern humor. Roxane Gay with her amazing, plain spoken but biting prose. Toni Morrison. Grace Paley. Julie Otsuka. Karen Russell. Alison Bechdel. There are so many talented women writing, and none of them sound alike.

The secret, if there is any, is just that. Women don’t write a certain way. Neither do men. (Think of Ernest Hemingway versus Michael Chabon. Stephen King versus James Baldwin.) If you’re a man trying to write a woman, start out by identifying your misogyny. From there, try to craft a character that’s not tainted by that. Give them a distinct voice and focus on the ways that you’re alike, and try to breathe emotional truth into something you’ve never experienced. I hope that’s something that I don’t need to tell you.

Whether it is or not, get yourself to the bookstore and read people that are different for you. Your fiction will thank me.

Ryan C. Bradley

Ryan C. Bradley’s work has been featured in The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, Dark Moon Digest, and in other venues. He regularly contributes to Wicked Horror. You can learn more about him at https://ryancbradleyblog.wordpress.com/

Bypassing the Gender Spectrum

This month we’re discussing gender. Gender is that wonderful spectrum that encompasses each individual’s relationship with their own body, identity, and (gender) expression. It is a complex ideal that seems to grow daily, and just when you think you have a firm grasp of the concept, something new crops up, and you have something new to learn. Characters in literature can also encompass this complexity, and it’s because of that I have decided to cheat and not write about gender at all.

I first started writing non-gendered characters with my short story Finding Annie. (If you want to read it, pick up a copy of Happy Days, Sweetheart, published by A Murder of Storytellers, or you can find it in my short story collection Pale Shadows.) I don’t remember why I initially decided to not reveal the gender of the narrator, but by the time I had finished the story, I was glad I hadn’t. The story involves a situation that anyone could find themselves caught up in. That, I think, is the great thing about non-gendered characters—they’re all-inclusive. They give the reader the ability to put him-/her-/themselves into the story and experience something they might not otherwise get to experience. There’s also a connection that some stories may not be able to make if they contain characters of a gender different than the reader.

The best part of writing non-gendered characters is the realization that situations faced by the vast majority of people are no different in the grand scheme of things. There is an ultimate level playing field for everyone walking the planet, and it’s only altered slightly by the varying personal circumstances of the individual. It’s more humanizing, and tears down constructs of “us vs. them.”

Writing non-gendered characters presents some issues to the author. First of all, pronouns for the narrator are right out, unless it’s “I.” The idea is to write an “anyone” character, and you can’t do that if you’re assigning pronouns. (Now understand, this is from my perspective, so if you write non-gendered characters, and you’ve been able to accomplish this in a different way, I would absolutely love to hear about it.) In my opinion, this is a great exercise for finding innovative ways to address character identification and how the character handles and perceives “self” in different situations.

Another issue is readers are going to assume the narrator’s gender is the same as the author’s, if they know the author’s gender. This really isn’t something the author can control, so if you’re having the piece critiqued, the best way to handle it, I’ve found, is to constantly refer to the main character as “the narrator” or “they.”

Issues aside, if you pull off a piece with a non-gendered character, I think you’ve created something that truly showcases your abilities as a writer. (Maybe I’m just tooting my own horn with that, but I’ll let you be the judge.) If you haven’t tried writing (or reading) stories with non-gendered characters, I greatly encourage you to do so. You might be pleasantly surprised at the creative avenues you can explore and the more humanized characters you can create.

Shannon Iwanski

Shannon Iwanski is the former president of the Tulsa-based writing group Nevermore Edits, a member of Oklahoma Writers' Federation, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of Inkubus Publishing, LLC. To learn more about him and his plans to turn the world into a dystopian society, check out shannoniwanski.com.

September is all about Writing a Gender different from your own

In Septembers, your Murderers will be talking about how to write characters who aren't your gender.

Working Your Way Back: A Guide on Writing Backstories

Wondering at the way writers weave such wonderful, whimsical, or worrisome backstories of your favorite characters? Now you’ll get a chance to see a behind the scenes, at least at one writer’s style. It tis I! Hello. To keep this post under sixty pages, we’ll be narrowing our focus solely on the creation of backstories. When, where, how, and even if they should be revealed within a story is another topic all together.

Formulating backstories can appear to be quite the challenge. The limitless options, the family ties, and the region of their birth seem to spawn an endless sprawled out network of questions that beg to be worked on until 600 pages later you’ve mapped out one whole family tree, a new country, and ninety obscure talents—for one single character.

There is a better way, and it starts at the end, not the beginning. Much like a puzzle, it’s easier to start with the edges and work our way back towards the center.

For example, let’s say we have a charming rogue character, Carter, and he’s a thief that steals from cruel aristocrats in medieval fantasy setting. We can assume he’s agile, skilled at picking locks and pockets, and at sneaking around because that’s his job. Great. We have now made the stereotypical rogue character that can be found in one trillion books. Go us.

These are those “edges” I mentioned before. I’ve decided he’s going to be my main character so we need to set it apart from the masses of other rogues crowding us. Let’s make things harder on Carter, shall we?

You monster!

Hush, voice in my head.

I want his right hand, his lockpicking hand, to have tribal tattoos that glow light-blue when he uses it for thievery. Why do I want that? Cause it looks cool, but that’s not enough of a good reason. We’ll have to explain that somehow.

Next, we’re going to give him an eyepatch, except that both his eyes work just fine. And lastly, I like the idea of him ending each theft with a line from a famous poem either by leaving them written on parchment or saying them as he makes his escape. They’re always from some anti-establishment slant against the government in his world.

The questions are mounting!

Indeed, voice, they are.

Due to his job, we know why he is able to climb buildings, open doors, and slink away unseen. His knowledge of obscure, and let’s say, banned poetry is not something every rogue needs to know.

So where did Carter learn these banned poems?

Why does his hand glow when he picks locks?

What’s up with the eyepatch?

All these traits were picked at random, or because as I envisioned the character I thought they’d make him more interesting, but now it’s time for us to fill in the blanks.

He could’ve stolen a book of banned poems from an aristocrat’s safe, and that’s how he knows them, but we can do better than that. Perhaps earlier in his career he was imprisoned with the very poet who wrote them. The poet’s views helped shaped Carter’s ideas of freedom, but sadly the poet was executed for his refusal to stop writing them. Now Carter carries on his legacy.

A glowing hand could be a lot of things, but I decided it only glows during thievery. What if through some magic a retired master thief transferred his talent to Carter? Of course, there must’ve been a price.

Yet another question to answer!?

We’ll leave that a mystery, even to ourselves, for now.

My name is Carrrrrterrrr

There are stories of pirates wearing eye patches in order to keep an eye adjusted to the darkness when shifting from fighting in the sunlight to battling below deck. Carter could use this tactic to give him a visual advantage on robberies when moving from bright rooms to dim ones, but it also means that he could’ve served on ship at some point. This would also explain any fancy knots he knows.

Now let’s boil down what we’ve done and why. We’ve made a character as they’ll appear in our story, and we added a few features to make them stand out. This forced us to figure out how or why these traits came to be. It narrows our options and makes the overwhelming task of the backstory channeled into, at least for me, a game. Notice that I still left parts of the backstory unanswered or at least vague. This leaves me further wiggle room to embellish later on if the character becomes a larger part of my story.

 But what’s the purpose of having a backstory for characters anyways, you never did answer that one did you!

I’m getting to it! Backstories have many functions.

They explain how a character might have skills the audience wouldn’t assume they do. A city slicker that knows how to hunt might’ve gone hunting with his hermit uncle as a kid. Nothing pulls the audience out of the immersion of a story than the question, “Well how would they know how to do that?”

Backstories explain why a character might have a unique reaction to a situation. A character might cry at the sound of a particular song because their lover was murdered as it played on the radio. To everyone else it’s a happy melody.

They also help a writer maintain consistency for their characters actions and attitudes. Perhaps a character was saved by a band of pirates and always sticks up for them when others talk badly about those dastardly scallywags.

And finally, a simple rule I go by is, “Does this make sense?” For example, I wanted to have a character wield a katana in a cyberpunk world filled with machine guns. If the only reason she wields it is because I think swords are cool, that’s just not enough. In a world where bullets win out over really long knives I needed a better reason than wicked awesome sword right!?  This led to the creation of her backstory as a mob enforcer. Anyone that can’t make their payments winds up getting some expensive piece of cyberware cut off by a single slice of her razor-sharp blade. Now she’s got a backstory and a plausible reason for wielding it, and I get to have a cool katana in my story. I see that as a Win Win.

In short, make the character you want, one that fills the role for your story, and work your way backwards so it all makes sense.

Kaz Kirkpatrick

Kaz Kirkpatrick is the author of the dark fantasy short stories Repelzul and Unraveling which both appear in the anthology Happy Days Sweetheart (A Murder of Storytellers). Kaz has been crafting stories and scenes for drama events for the better part of fifteen years. He’s always been interested in creating compelling characters, inventive scenarios, and imaginative settings in a variety of genres. Now he’s using that experience to transfer his multitude of stories to print.

Backstory Development a la Mental Health Counselor

Developing backstory is my favorite part of the brainstorming phase of the writing process. As a very character-driven author, and as a mental health counselor, I find I’m very motivated to discover why it is that a character I’ve written behaves in a certain way. Backstory helps me to understand a character—to connect with a character in a visceral manner, such that the question “what would this character do next?” becomes answerable at last. Backstory can make a character real, granting them three-dimensionality.

I’m not going to tell you how to actually incorporate backstory into a manuscript.

That’s a topic that others have covered, so I won’t cover it here. Instead, we’re going to focus on developing backstory during the brainstorming phase, before you actually put pen to paper. Well—pen to manuscript. You’ll need to put pen to paper for this one.

For the purposes of this activity, I’m going to create a character description: My character’s name is Stephen. He goes by Steve to his few friends, but at work, people call him Stephen. Stephen is 32 years old, and he’s a counselor and he works at a community agency. He’s a severe man with a serious face, and he dresses like he’s twenty years older than he looks. The people he works with don’t know much about him. He intimidates the front desk because of his short manner and laconic way of speaking. His clients, though, love him—for some reason. They keep coming back, asking to see Stephen specifically.

Create your own character description. Include the character’s name and age. Make it short like mine, but give yourself enough material to work with. Five sentences should do. Describe only the present of the story. If your story is written in the past tense, consider the present the time at which the story is happening and not the time at which the story is told.

Now that your character description is complete, you’ll find that you have at least a name, an age, and a list of behaviors that your character engages in. For example, Stephen is 32 years old, a severe man with a serious face. He dresses like he’s twenty years older than he looks, keeps his personal life a secret from his coworkers, and intimidates people with his short manner and laconic way of speaking. But his clients love him. The question that keeps popping up in my mind—and it should start to pop up in yours—is why? Why does Stephen have a serious face. Why does he keep his personal life a secret? Why do his clients love him while the front desk is intimidated by him?

The answers are hidden in Stephen’s backstory. To discover them, let’s find out how much time we have to work with. Since my story is set in 2018, then Stephen was born in 1986 (2018 – 32). I have 32 years to work with. I’m going to break those 32 years into thirds. Thirty-two divided by three is 10.667, or between 10 and 11 years. The first one-third of the character’s life is their foundation, the period in their life where behaviors are first learned. The last two-thirds of the character’s life is full of opportunities for reinforcement, or the inculcation of a behavior by repetition.

If you want to, you can picture this all on a sheet of paper by folding it into thirds. Then mark the one-third and the two-thirds lines with your character’s age at that point.

Now we get to play with the past. After all, that’s why we’re here. Start with one behavior. I’m going to select “Stephen dresses like he’s twenty years older than he looks.” Imagine a foundation for this behavior, taking place in the first one-third of Stephen’s life. What might that look like?

Human beings learn behavior in three ways. Often these three occur together, but for the sake of backstory, let’s simplify an instance of learning by separating it into one of the three major categories: instinct, experience, and modeling.

An instinctual behavior is a behavior that is learned from repeated instances of engaging a stimulus with one’s instinctual reaction to that stimulus. For example, my instinct is to recoil and make a warning sound when I see something that disgusts me; since I am disgusted by cockroaches, when I see one now, I will often gasp and jump back. An experiential behavior is a behavior that is learned from repeated instances of engaging with a novel stimulus. For example, when I feel bored, I check the time; since my mobile phone keeps time, whenever I need to check the time, I pull my phone out. A modeled behavior is a behavior that is learned from repeated instances of observing someone else engaging with a novel stimulus. For example, my mom would often criticize others for what they wore; when I am walking in public with a friend, I will turn to her and talk cattily about other people’s clothing choices.

We don’t need one example of each type of learning in order to flesh out a backstory, but knowing the three types of learning can help us come up with one foundational event and one reinforcing event, both of which can teach us about why the character is the way that they are. Here’s my foundational event:

So Stephen’s mom goes to jail at some point after Stephen is born. Then he’s raised by his grandfather, who dresses him up the way that he was dressed up as a kid. There’s no grandmother, so she’s either dead or gone somewhere. There’s no father, so he’s either dead or out of the picture for some reason. Then, when Stephen is six years old, his grandfather dies. This is Stephen’s foundation for dressing the way that he does; he was taught how to dress by his late grandfather (modeling). As he idolized his grandfather, it’s easy to imagine why he would continue to dress like an older man.

Now I need a reinforcing event, which takes place during the latter two-thirds of Stephen’s life. Reinforcing events can be one or many, but they must build upon the behavior learned in the foundation. Here’s my reinforcing event:

So Stephen’s in high school, and he’s made fun of a lot by his peers. They rip into him for the way that he dresses—after all, kids can be cruel. Instead of changing, however, Stephen digs his heels in. He goes all out and decides to start wearing a bowtie every day. He becomes the weird kid who always dresses formally for school. He doesn’t make many friends in high school, and he learns to be wary of his peers. This is a reinforcement for Stephen dressing the way that he does; he is, in a sense, standing up for himself in a way that he knows how (experience).

Also note that this is a reinforcement, perhaps, also for Stephen’s standoffishness with coworkers. After all, he has a reason to not trust his peers now. Behaviors often travel in packs, so it’s easy to imagine how choosing to dress in an unusual way can correlate with Stephen’s feeling of being disconnected from others. See if your character’s behaviors travel in packs. The best combinations of behaviors usually do.

You can now create a new reinforcing event for the same behavior, or you can move on to a different behavior and start with a new foundational event. The choice is yours. After all, this exercise is about creating backstory. If the thought of Stephen’s grandfather sparks an idea, run with it. Let your imagination run wild.

Once you’ve created a fleshed out backstory for your character, you’re done with this part of the brainstorming phase, and you’re ready to move onto more brainstorming. When you’re ready to write the backstory into your main story, keep in mind some of the suggestions others have posted and will post this month. The backstory I helped you to create is for you, not for the reader. The reader may not need to ever learn about Stephen’s grandfather if the grandfather isn’t important to the story. Maybe he’ll come up in a sentence. Maybe the story would benefit from a flashback to when Stephen was five years old. Only you can know what the story needs, and that’s not a question that this post will have helped you answer.

Good luck with your backstory brainstorming!

Jack Burgos

Jack’s fiction interests include science fiction, urban fantasy, and horror. He is a founding member of Nevermore Edits and the webmaster for the Oklahoma Writers' Federation. He has a website, Facebook page, and Twitter account.

Backstory is Earned

Jerald Walker taught me to think of opening any piece of writing as striking up a conversation with a stranger on a bus. When you’re starting a conversation with a stranger you need to grab their interest quickly, or else the other passengers move away, slowly, not taking their eyes off you.

On a Greyhound bus from New Haven to Boston, the only empty seat was next to an older gentlemen. I’m normally not the most talkative on public transit, but when he saw me eying his Budweiser, he offered me one. I have no way of verifying anything any of the things he told me, but he introduced himself as Rooster, a nickname he got from his time as a trainer for a Bridgeport cockfighting ring. He said the birds were naturally aggressive toward each other, so his job was to hold the rooster down between his legs until it tired of flapping.

I don’t condone cockfighting. It’s barbaric. As an attention grabber though, it certainly got me. It never came up how he got into that line of work. From there he’d gone on to become a shoe shine in an upscale barbershop where the Governor knew him by name.

We chatted for an hour. He was going to a funeral for a friend, and I guess that he needed someone to talk to and I was a warm body. Or maybe he would’ve struck up a conversation with me no matter where he was going. There’s no backstory when you meet a stranger in real life.

Fiction should be the same. Backstory doesn’t make a character believable. The right details do. When Rooster told me his name, he rolled up the sleeve of his coat to show me the rooster tattooed on his forearm. He might’ve been bullshitting me, but that tattoo was enough to convince me that it was for real.

The beer helped his case too. One Budweiser might not give much of a buzz, but the five Rooster gulped down before stuffing them in between his seat and the wall convinced me that he wasn’t the kind of person to worry about the little rules and regulations that governed my life. He wouldn’t be bothered about the legality of cockfighting, though he probably should have been concerned with the morality. Again, there was no indication in our conversation sliding in to explain to me what made Rooster that way. Maybe his family had been oppressed by an overzealous police force. Maybe he followed the rules to a tee until he was fifteen and he was wrongly accused of a crime and decided that if he was going to be punished either way he might as well break them all. He could’ve been born that way. Or it could’ve been something entirely different. The point is that I didn’t need any backstory to tell me who he was. He was showing me.

Good fiction works similarly. Han Solo had no filmed backstory until this year. From 1977 to 2018, film only fans like me were content with Han grifting Obi Wan with what I’d always thought were lies about how fast his ship was and then shooting Greedo (first) to avoid paying off his debts. In the Uncanny X-Men comic, Wolverine joined the team in 1975. His actions defined him with close to no backstory (though it is teased) for almost ten years. That decade that catapulted him into becoming one of Marvel’s most popular characters. Shirley Jackson makes readers wait for nearly the entire novel before she reveal the parts of Merricat’s backstory that have shaped the world of the story even though we’re in Merricat’s point of view.  

Backstory is earned. If I’d seen Rooster again, regularly, I might’ve eventually gotten his backstory. It’s earned in fiction too. Han Solo, Wolverine, and Merricat Blackwood all spent significant time earning their way to backstories. If you want your fiction to be any good, your characters need to as well.

Ryan C. Bradley

Ryan C. Bradley’s work has been featured in The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, Dark Moon Digest, and in other venues. He regularly contributes to Wicked Horror. You can learn more about him at https://ryancbradleyblog.wordpress.com/

Forge Ahead, Look Back

It should come as no surprise that I am, as a writer, eternally a pantser. I’m not even quite sure where this blog post is going yet. I just have a general nebulous concept of it, which is, honestly, exactly the way I live my life.

(This moment of silence left intentionally blank, as a buffer so all of my peers can acknowledge that, yes, that seems about right.)

So, backstories! Not to crow my own triumphs, but I’ve often had to suffer the praise of my peers, including the time I spent on world-building and backstories, so here I am to reveal to you my dark secrets: leave the backstory for basically everything as nebulous as possible for as long as you can. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t make big decisions in your story early; you just don’t really need to have the most cohesive reasons why things are the way they are yet.

(To be fair, this is definitely more useful for earlier drafts, as you generally want to start closing loops and answering questions (or rather, choosing which questions you want to answer) the deeper into your drafts you are. Still, this can cut down on your research time in the beginning stages of writing, which is time that can be better put to… writing. Shocking, I know. Also, if you opt to do this, perhaps wait to show your new works to your peers until you have some of those answers, as there’s few things as infuriating to me as asking a friend about a cool thing in their story and receiving no real answer.)

But no, really. The quicker you pin everything down, the less flexible you can be as the story develops, the fewer options you have as you get deeper in. I don’t mean to have no backstory, of course, but tend more to keep it more general than specific until the story demands it. If a character has lost someone important in their past, for instance, the simple fact that you know that can help you write them well enough to start and gives you the freedom to decide how that tragedy occurred as you get further into the story. Same for writing the backstories of your setting; if you need a war, just write knowing there’s a war, and worry about the players in it a little later.

If I had to guess where I got this habit from, I’d probably guess it’s from my time spent making characters for video and tabletop games (which could (and might one day) be an entirely article), as you generally have to leave gaps if you’re crafting a backstory that takes place in someone else’s world. The same, I imagine, is true for fan fiction in ongoing works, as you may have to adapt your characters around changing rules and events in a world that isn’t entirely your own. But you can adapt those same skills to your own writing just as well to help keep your drafts a little more fluid.

The reason I take this approach is simple: the longer you write a story based around a set of concrete, decided facts, the more attached you grow to them, and, in my experience, the first day’s worth of ideas I have on most things are kind of dumb garbage. So, I have to make a choice: take at least a day to do nothing but loosely research and brainstorm an actually good reason for things to be the way they are, or put it on the back burner and keep writing, and trust my brain to work on it as a background process. (To get weirdly meta, that’s definitely the way I finished writing this blog post.)

Maybe this is all a uniquely “me” bit of advice, and if it is, then that’s fair. But if any of this helps any of you out at all, then I’m willing to call the time it took me to write this all worth it.

CJ Miles IV

CJ Miles IV is a member of Nevermore Edits and the Oklahoma Writer's Federation, Inc. He lives in Tulsa, OK, spreading the unspeakable word of the Old Ones. He does not write or blog nearly enough, but, much like spotting a blurry sasquatch, you can occasionally find him on his website or Twitter.

Waving Around Your Backstory

To paraphrase a saying, backstory is like a penis. Just because you have one, it doesn’t mean you take it out and show everybody. Unfortunately, too many authors fall into the trap of doing just that—providing readers with every bit of backstory on their world, their characters, their settings, and so on.

Let’s face it, a lot of blood, sweat, and tears—and sometimes cursing, screaming, and head banging—go into writing. It doesn’t matter if it’s a flash fiction piece or a novel, writing isn’t for the faint of heart. So, when it comes to all of the effort we expend on building everything from the ground up, it only stands to reason that we want to include it in the final product.

That is exactly what we shouldn’t do.

Backstory, while fascinating to the author, primarily serves to bog down the narrative and pace with extraneous information. For the most part, it doesn’t progress the plot. It can also be frustrating for some readers, who just want the author to get to the point and not bore them with anything that isn’t truly necessary. That can lead to readers putting down the piece and never picking it back up. Otherwise known as the kiss of death. No one but the author is going to be as enamored of the backstory as the author is. Sorry to burst your bubble, but it’s true.

Now I’m not saying to have zero backstory whatsoever in a piece. Dribs and drabs here and there can really help to flesh out a world or characters. It gives a depth that makes everything feel dynamic and alive. It can set characters apart from one another. It can give meaning to the hero quest being pursued by the protagonist. It can make an antagonist more sympathetic or believable. It can make an otherwise dull story titillate the imagination.

Remember, though, dribs and drabs. If you’ve got whole paragraphs or pages of backstory, that’s the big no-no. The easiest way to gauge your level of backstory—because let’s face it, authors aren’t good, impartial judges of their own work—is to have a piece critiqued or beta read. Find someone or a group you trust and ask them to be honest with the intention of making your piece the best it can be. Then cut, cut, cut.

(I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t add a note that not only relates to backstory but also to other removed/edited parts of all pieces. Never, ever, ever, ever—and I mean never!—delete something once it’s written. Cut and paste it into a blank document. Save it. You never know when it’ll prove useful. This includes that lovely backstory that you’ve slaved over and can’t bear to part with for any reason.)

All authors fall victim to the siren song of backstory. It’s inescapable. But, fret not! It can serve a purpose, both for the author and for the reader who truly wants to be immersed into the world of their favorite book or author. If you don’t do this, I recommend starting a bible for each work you create. This has the initial purpose of helping to give life and depth to your characters and world. It also has the secondary benefit of helping you remember vital details that need to be maintained if your project goes beyond the length you had set for it. If you’re writing a series, a bible is a must! Don’t believe me? Try remembering everything about everything you’ve written from one book to another. It’s impossible, even for the most meticulous of authors.

Another benefit of the bible is to give backstory a place to exist. With your backstory living in the bible, it gives closure. The information is alive and serving a purpose. Later, you can include that information in related short stories, or in the glossary at the back of your book, or as content for your website. Backstory always has its purpose, even if it isn’t where you think it should be.

Ultimately, the author gets the final say (usually) in what goes into their work. Just make sure that what makes it in serves the purpose or all writing—entertaining the reader. That’s seldom achieved by waving around your backstory willy nilly.

Shannon Iwanski

Shannon Iwanski is the former president of the Tulsa-based writing group Nevermore Edits, a member of Oklahoma Writers' Federation, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of Inkubus Publishing, LLC. To learn more about him and his plans to turn the world into a dystopian society, check out shannoniwanski.com.

Sprinkle with Backstory to Finish

I recently discovered that I can write erotica. I’m as surprised as you are.

Here’s the thing about erotica. It’s not so much that nobody cares about the plot, as that it’s not the main reason your reader is there. It’s just that a good story along with your sexy times is a nice bonus, you know?

For my latest, I wrote what I think was a really nice story. Two lovers separated by a civil war reunite when one captures the other’s ship. The captured captain needs to distract his former lover long enough for an escape plan to work. Sexy times ensue. And then there’s a resolution. Boom. A story. A successful story, judging by the fact that it not only sold, but more stories have been requested.

Prior to writing this story, I opened up my timeline program and determined not just the birth dates of the two captains, but of the warring monarchs as well. I determined when the war broke out, why the war broke out, and why the lovers ended up on opposite sides. I knew when the two captains first became lovers, I knew the extent of their friendships with the monarchs, when the rightful queen was coronated, and when the usurper attacked. I even know what motivated the usurper to attack.

And none of that information is sexy. If I’d included all the detail I had in my head, not only would the story have been bloated, it would have been boring.  That backstory that I’d worked so hard to create formed a base that allowed me to enrich the world, like a sprinkling of Kosher salt - enhancing without overwhelming.

Backstory is important to any story, sexy or otherwise. It’s what makes characters feel like people and your world feel like their home. Too many writers, particularly fantasy, want to not just include it, but begin the story with it. There’s a very good chance I will never care enough to want to read about your rich tapestry of 1000 years of history for your kingdom. I definitely do not in your first chapter.

We all have different writing processes. Maybe you don’t need a full-on timeline with births, deaths, and major events for the past few decades, but you do need to remember that these characters should feel as if they existed before you started writing them. They have parents and cousins and old friends they haven’t seen in 10 years. They have fears and hopes and dreams. They’ve probably had a bad breakup or suffered the death of someone close. You should know these things, even though the reader gets only a hint of them. Whether you’re world building a small town in Maine, an entire fantasy world, or an entire sci-fi universe, that world existed long before your story begins, and you need to make sure your readers can tell that history exists.

Take your story on a backstory slim-down. Leave enough of it there to flavor your story, to enhance it. And if you still want to tell that backstory, post it on your blog as bonus content after you get the main story published.

Donna A. Leahey

As a child in school, Donna Leahey turned her vocabulary homework into short stories. Years later, she is still crafting stories. Geek, gamer, writer, mother, procrastinator, and pet lover, Donna is a practicing veterinarian and free-lance writer as well as an active creator of podcasts. You can hear her and her friends on Beyond the Cabin in the Woods: A Good Ghouls Guide to Horror, Collective Snark, and Once More With Feeling: A 20th Anniversary Buffy Fancast as well as her 4th podcast, The Family Business: A Supernatural Fancast. You can follow her on Twitter.

August is Backstory month

This month, your Murder-of-Bloggers will be discussing backstory and world-building. How to do it, how much to include, and more. Stay tuned to this channel for more!

The image above was created by Eris O'Reilly

Eris O'Reilly has been drawing since she could hold a pencil. When not drawing, she enjoys playing video games, writing, and practicing archery (although she's a terrible archer). She also likes pie.

Come check out her stuff at erisoreilly.com!