Kill the Backstory. By Josh Stallings

Q: How do you deal with backstory? How much do you need, and where do you put it? How do you know what to leave in, and what to take out?

I just finished reading Heather Levy’s debut novel, Walking Through Needles, it takes place in 1994 and 2009 from the point of view of two teenagers and later, adults. It is a hard book handled brilliantly. By jumping time frames she makes backstory feel immediate. It made me think, backstory must drive the story or be dropped. 

I’m editing my newest book and I hear in my head, “Dude, your research is showing.” You know those paragraphs you put in because you spent hours to discover the exact military vehicles bought by the LAPD in 1984? It’s the Vietnam era Cadillac Gage Commando V-100, or M706, if you’re wondering. I could give engine specs, but this info dump has slowed the essay down enough as it is. How about I go with  “LAPD was the first American police force to use tanks against its citizenry.” Readers don’t care about the rabbit hole I fell down to research the novel. 

Backstory is often things I discovered about characters in early drafts. My job in editing is only keep backstory where it is absolutely necessary. Tricky is the story of a detective trying to discover what happened the day of a shooting and more importantly who the suspect is. In many ways the book hinges on discovering Cisco’s backstory. What keeps the mystery going is how the backstory is doled out, and the fact that most witnesses that tell about Cisco’s backstory could be lying. I wrote entire chapters set in the past, used them as research and then tossed them out. I needed to write them, readers didn’t need to read them.

Tangent alert: Some research facts are needed, as proven brilliantly in Throw Mamma From The Train. A woman from Billy Crystal’s writing class reads from her MS, “"Dive... DIVE" yelled the captain through the thing. So the man who makes it dive pressed a button, or something, and it dove. And the enemy was foiled again!”

My backstory: At sixteen I moved to LA to study acting at The Lee Strasberg Institute. To build a character I was trained to start with biography. Know a character inside and out. Then forget it and simply be. 

No one needs to know that Detective Madsen’s grandfather was a Texas Ranger, and the truth of the Texas Rangers is darker, more racist, and evil than the myth we have been fed. Well no one except me. I need to know it to write honestly about Madsen. To understand a character I need to understand their backstory. The hat trick is to figure out what readers need and when? Early into Tricky I show a printout of Cisco’s rap sheet. It is the police record of an evil SOB. It is part of his backstory. I also introduce believable characters who swear Cisco is a good man, and incapable of doing the things they say he did. The tension in Tricky is delivered by this simple idea; are we our backstory or is real transformation possible?

I broke somebody’s cardinal rule by starting Young Americans with a flashback. A young girl works to open a safe while her grandfather times her. She is a safe cracking prodigy. I needed the reader to believe this fact from the get go. Next chapter she’s in her early 20’s, living in Humboldt dancing for a living. A character mystery is set in motion, why would a safe cracking wunderkind end up working in a low rent club in the sticks?

Catriona McPherson’s thrilling novel Strangers at the Gate hangs entirely on backstory. Discovering what really happened versus what people say happened is the difference between life and death. McPherson’s skill is such that I never once felt a writer’s hand on the mechanisms of suspense. It was scary as hell and felt natural and believable. 

Could you live without a backstory? The crime fiction trope where an amnesiac wakes to find a dead body in their bed, is fascinating and terrifying. The question of who are we without our history, is universally fascinating. 

Backstory can be used as a deception. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl gives us two compromised visions of the backstory, both factually kinda true, both leaving much out. Who do you trust, when you can’t trust your narrator?

When dealing with backstory remember, “show don’t tell.” My least favorite note, until on my 6th book, when I finally understood it. Now I’m starting to see how it applies to backstory. 

A Telling) “Johnny Killjoy grew up on a farm in Driscoll county… blah blah blah…”

B Showing) “‘Boy, grab that calf’s feet and pull.’ Johnny was seven and felt the mortal weight of the newborn animal’s life in his hands.”

Both of these examples give you the information that Johnny grew up on a farm, but only one of them makes you feel what that did to him, how it affected his world view. You know, the stuff we actually care about.

“But I want the readers to know Declan grew up in Belfast.” I say rather stridently to myself. 

“Why?” Myself asks me. “Irish isn’t a character trait.”

Oh… So once I really know who the character is, I can discern what information is actually needed to deliver that person fully alive in three dimensions. Why didn’t I say that to myself in the first place?

Now I’m starting to worry that I got this whole idea wrong. Maybe backstory simply means a character’s biography… If that’s true, and it doesn’t enlighten or amuse, or move the plot or widen the mystery… Then leave it all out.

Four pages into James Crumley’s The Wrong Case, Milo Milodragovich lets us know that he is broke, and when he turns 52 he'll inherit his family’s fortune. Pure backstory and yet it explains why he acts like a man in limbo, a true slacker, before that term came to be. I love it even if it ruins my “leave all backstory out.” So I’ll amend my earlier statement, leave all backstory out… unless it works.

Deeper and Deeper

Paul here:

This week I’m thrilled to have Dennis Palumbo guest blog here. Dennis is a screenwriter (My Favorite Year, Welcome Back Kotter, and more), psychotherapist and the author of the Daniel Rinaldi series. His mystery fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Strand and elsewhere, and is collected in From Crime to Crime (Tallfellow Press).

Dr. Daniel Rinaldi is a psychologist and trauma expert, who consults with the Pittsburgh Police Department and specializes in treating the victims of violent crime. And that’s something he knows about personally: Rinaldi’s wife was murdered in a mugging and he was shot. He struggles with survivor’s guilt. Now he’s on a mission to help others deal with their traumas, while at the same time getting involved in cases and helping to solve the crimes.

Head Wounds is the fifth Rinaldi story, preceded by Mirror Image, Fever Dream, Night Terrors, Phantom Limb. For more info, visit www.dennispalumbo.com .

Take it away, Dennis.

***

This week’s question: What difference do you notice between the prose in crime novels that were written twenty years ago and current ones? Do you think the writing has gotten better? Are the subjects different?

by Dennis Palumbo

The question is a tricky one, because no one regards the prose of such authors as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendell or Ross Macdonald more highly than I do. These brilliant stylists could craft starkly beautiful sentences while still retaining both the suspense and the mystery that their novels promise.

That said, there’s little question in my mind that, in general, today’s crime fiction has broadened in its subject matter and deepened in its exploration of those areas. As good as the above-mentioned authors were, both their own prejudices and the social or moral constraints of their respective eras prevented them from addressing (except in the most covert way) issues of sexual orientation, racism and child abuse.

Twenty years ago, most readers expected little more than action, suspense and a cluster of red herrings in their mystery stories. It was also fairly customary to treat characters who strayed outside conventional norms (in terms of gender, race, moral dictates, substance use, etc.) in somewhat stereotypic fashion. They were still presented, even if occasionally with sympathy, as the “other.”

Moreover, the point of most crime fiction of decades past, even at the hands of such famous masters of the form, was to solve the mystery and reveal the killer. The whodunit still reigned supreme.

But times change, and so has crime fiction. From Richard Price to Gillian Flynn to Megan Abbott, the themes---and even the very goals---of these novels have expanded. Today’s crime fiction addresses and explores a much wider and more inclusive variety of characters and situations, from sexual identity to immigration to child abuse. These issues are now frequently tackled head on, and with a more empathetic and knowledgeable approach. Such “outlier” issues---and characters---are no longer the exception to the norm; they are the norm.

As a therapist, I can’t help but think that some of these narrative shifts in tone, theme and characterization are due to a more mature understanding on the readers’ part of the complexity of the human condition. Moreover, as psychological terms and disorders are more commonly (though often erroneously) talked about, readers expect today’s authors to have a more frank, thoughtful view of life today.

(I could make the argument, for example, that Gone Girl is as much a sly, snarky commentary of the state of contemporary marriage as it is a crime novel. It was as if Phillip Roth or John Cheever had turned their talents to psychological suspense.)

In my own novels, featuring psychologist and trauma expert Daniel Rinaldi, the narrative itself is usually informed by the emotional issues (often birthed by the trauma of violence, abuse, etc.) of the characters. As a consultant to the Pittsburgh Police, and in his role treating victims of violent crime, my protagonist’s clinical acumen can help shed some light on what might be going on. (Except those times when he’s wrong.)

The point is, I believe my readers expect that the psychological underpinnings of character, motive and general plot conform to what most of us understand as how real humans behave in the real world. 

Maybe, twenty or thirty years ago, most readers didn’t expect a crime novel to take such a deep dive into character, nor expect the narrative context to reflect so accurately the current state of affairs, either personally or politically. But nowadays, crafting a mystery (even a cozy) without at least a glancing nod at the realities of contemporary life seems antiquated, almost deliberately opaque.

I’m reminded of a comment made about the work of P.G. Wodehouse: as wonderful as he was, he wrote as though neither Freud nor Marx had ever existed.

I think the same sentiment holds true for today’s authors. We live in a rapidly-changing, media-drenched world whose mores and behavioral expectations are in turmoil; a time of global pandemics, terrorism, economic inequality, gender fluidity, sexual predation, and other social and political concerns. For crime fiction to stay relevant, I believe it has to, at least tangentially, acknowledge these issues.

Which, I’m happy to report, it appears to be doing. The best of today’s mystery fiction authors, from Dennis Lehane to Tana French, Scott Turow to Denise Mina, George Pelicanos to Louise Penny, deliver prose that is both beautifully crafted and cannily relevant to the times.

Of course, there will always be readers who enjoy the simple pleasures of earlier mystery fiction, whether the comfortable world of Agatha Christie or that of tough-guy Mickey Spillane.

But, if today’s best-seller lists are anything to go by, crime fiction is continuing to evolve and change, as is the society it inevitably mirrors.

Besides, as the author John Fowles soberly reminds us, “All pasts are like poems; you can derive a thousand things, but you can’t live in them.”

***

Thanks, Dennis. And be sure to check out Dennis’s books and find out more about him, and them, at his website (above).

~.~.~

And now for the usual BSP:

Broken Windows releases on September 10th and is available for pre-order now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Down & Out Books.

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Writing Tics: The ‘Comfort Food’ of Writing

Do you have any writing tics (habits or problems which you repeat in your prose)? How do you deal with them?

by Paul D. Marks

“Go to hell,” I said with a Jack Nicholson grin. I jammed outta there, jumping in the car, slamming my foot down on the gas. The blood spread across my shirt like a Rorschach blot. I smiled. Shot out of there like a bat out of hell (hey, I made that one up, didn’t I?).

The above graph is from nothing I’ve written before today. But it could be a taken-to-extreme example of my writing tics. I do have certain words or expressions I fall back on, the “comfort food” of writing.

My characters tend to grin and smile. Not only guns shoot, but people shoot out of places, shoot here or there. They jam here and slam there and jump all over the place. So I definitely repeat certain words or phrases. Sometimes intentionally (hey, that’s my style, man), sometimes not so intentionally. And I do use Word’s Navigation feature (I think that’s what it’s called) to see how many times I might use a particular word or phrase. And I often cut them or rephrase them. And I also often start sentences with ‘and’ and ‘but’ but that is a stylistic choice. A voice choice, if you will, as I think it makes my narrators sound more natural and casual, which I like.

I also tend to use the word just maybe just a little too much. But it’s just because I just like the justness of it. Now, even I think that’s just too much of a good thing.

Even Gillian Flynn of Gone Girl fame, says “I'm trying to wean myself off my very Gen X abuse of the word 'literally. Gone Girl contains at least 33 uses of the word, which is 32 more times than any single novel needs.” This is where using Word’s Navigation feature can really come in handy and help you weed out those overused words.

And sometimes my characters use clichés—like ‘bat out of hell’—but that’s the way people talk. I also set things off in dashes a lot, so sometimes I try to cut down on that. If you read something of mine with a lot of that—well, you should see the earlier drafts. I use run on sentences, so I sometimes change them to two shorter sentences. And from the opposite side, I sometimes combine two short, choppy sentences into one sentence.

But I try to do better. I really do. I try to change things so they’re not so repetitive. I look things up in the thesaurus. Uh oh!

Stephen King says, “Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” I find that sophomoric—and yes I got sophomoric from the thesaurus when I really wanted to say absurd. But it’s not a word I would generally use. The thesaurus is a great help, despite what Mr. King says. And how many of us eschew them? Of course—I also tend to use ‘of course’ a lot—you don’t want to get those hundred dollar words when a two dollar word will do. But the thesaurus is extremely useful in helping you see things a little differently and pick just the right word for the job.

As I said, my characters smile or grin a lot. Sometimes it’s good to break that up with a different way of saying it. The thesaurus helps. And what’s wrong with that? Sometimes you just need something to help you get out of the rut of using the same words all the time. It’s not to use highfalutin words, but to the find the right word to express what you want to say. Sometimes your brain just needs a reminder of what other words are out there, begging to be a star for a moment.

One person’s tic is another person’s style. But you have to be conscious of what you’re doing and don’t overdo favorite things or lean on too many crutches. So, I do try to look for those weaknesses and repetition in my writing. And remember, it can all be fixed in the editing/rewriting.

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I just heard that my story “Ghosts of Bunker Hill” will be coming out in the December issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, last issue of Ellery Queen’s 75th anniversary year. Totally jazzed about that! – Bunker Hill (Los Angeles) was LA’s first wealthy residential neighborhood, right near downtown. Lots of film noirs were shot there (Criss Cross, Cry Danger, Kiss Me, Deadly and many others). It’s where John Fante lived when he wrote “Ask the Dust.” It got run down after WWI and became housing for poor people. And in the late 1960s it was all torn down and redeveloped. The fabulous Victorian houses were either destroyed or moved. They even flattened the hills. You can see the contrast of the old and new in the pic below. The insert is a Newell post that I copped from one of the Victorian homes on Bunker Hill before it was to be moved or torn down. It’s an artifact from Bunker Hill and the logo for my Bunker Hill stories and a prized possession.