back story
Friday Fictioneers for February
Balancing the need for back story and the need for clarity in a work of fiction can be more than delicate–it can be frustrating. I’m currently running a novella 5,000 words at a time through my new critique group. Though the novella uses the characters I’ve introduced in Blood Vengeance and Spy Flash, I wanted the novella to stand alone, i.e., someone who hasn’t read the other books could read the novella and know exactly what was going on.
That means sprinkling in some expository detail and back story so the reader has context. Turns out I overdid it a bit. I wrote about a page and a half, mostly dialogue, about an event which had happened in a previous short story. The critiquers liked it, found it intriguing, and assumed it would have some significance later in the novella. Oops.
My initial inclination was that the reader needed this amount of detail to move on. What I didn’t want to do is leave open questions which would hinder someone from reading further, but it turns out the readers got tripped up on the details. Not just tripped up–that amount of back story started them down a path which has nothing to do with the story I’m telling in the novella.
After some chat about how to address this, one person suggested that I simply remove the detail, allude to the event, then move on. I wasn’t sure that would work, and I thought about it for a couple of days. Then, last night I sat down and edited that scene. A page and a half of exposition and back story I edited down to three lines, and, lo and behold, it worked. Less sometimes is more.
One of the challenges in using a photo prompt to inspire a story is when the photo is of an inanimate object, or objects, in a mundane setting. When I first saw the Friday Fictioneers prompt on Wednesday, I thought, well, what do I make of this? On Thursday, I took another look, and a unique point of view came to me. So, let me know what you think of “Innocent Bystander.” As usual, if you don’t see the link on the title, scroll to the top of the page, click on the Friday Fictioneers tab, and select the story from the drop-down list.
Spy Flash – Week 15
When you develop characters who appear in more than one work, as a writer you know they have to have back story. This is true of Mai Fisher and Alexei Bukharin. I know their back story quite well. I should. I made it up. Some of it I wrote down; some of it has been rattling around in my head for a long time.
That was the reason I decided to use these two characters for writing stories for Jennie Coughlin’s Rory’s Story Cubes Challenge. Some of the back story is exactly what I had in my head, and, interestingly, some of it changed. Let’s be clear. I didn’t change it to make it fit whatever cubes were rolled for the week. The change was always there and needed to be made; rather, the cubes revealed it. Funny how it works that way.
The minor character introduced in this story, Roisin O’Saidh, is part of Mai’s Irish side. Mai’s Irish family, the Maitlands, have had an intricate–and perhaps intimate–relationship with the O’Saidh’s (pronounced O’Shay) for several centuries. The O’Saidh’s make the money the Maitland’s live on, but which of them has imbued the altruistic streak is unsure, at least for now. I’m sure there’s a story in me about that. One thing is clear, Roisin O’Saidh thinks of Mai as the daughter she never had, and, as with parents and children, no man would ever be good enough for Mai Fisher in O’Saidh’s eyes. Most parents, however, don’t have large sums of money available to buy off suitors or husbands.
Here is this week’s roll of the cubes: 
Here is what I saw: l. to r. – arrow; building/brick wall; blindfolded; near-miss; spying; credit card; counting money; moon; and flashlight.
The arrow and the flashlight were the two hardest items to include in the story, but I managed.
The story is “Another Brick in the Wall,” my shout-out to my favorite Pink Floyd song. If you don’t see the link on the title, hover your cursor over the Spy Flash tab above and select “Another Brick in the Wall” from the drop-down list.
If you’d like to take the challenge, write a story of any length using the objects and actions depicted above, then post a link to your story here.
unexpectedpaths.com 