Let me paint you a picture. It might be one you recognise. You’re nearing the end of your first draft, coming to the amazing climax you’ve been eager to write. But a subtle confusion about the whole thing is taking the wind out of your sails a bit. There’s a problem. Actually, there’s a few. You were vaguely aware of them before, but now they’re rearing up and getting all in yo’ grill, refusing to be ignored any longer.
The villain is villainous, but you’re not sure why they’re being so mean; you’ve invented a fun piece of technology, but it doesn’t serve the story in any way; another piece of tech gives you a great ‘get out of jail free card’ at the end, but you’ve no idea why someone would invent it in the first place; you’ve got at least two characters you don’t know what to do with…
In short, it’s all sort of there, but nothing quite fits together properly. Well, shizzle my dizzle, you may well say to yourself, I’ve got myself in a right pizzle here and no mistake. Read more…
Recently, in one of my many (failed) attempts to get back into the flow of writing, I had to take a few steps back, think about some of the advice (a lot of the advice actually) that Matt has given in a lot of his posts, and focus a lot on building the world of my current project. I touched upon this a few weeks back when talking about back story (deep back story, I called it) but I think it’s worth opening up a little more. Read more…
Following on from Matt’s post last week, I thought I’d throw my own experiences with backstory into the ring, along with a dose of some bad habits. As ever, I’m going to be exploring this anecdotally, as opposed to doing any actual research or anything, merely to highlight my thoughts and opinions as the resident ‘seat of the pants writer’. Read more…
So recently I have been fleshing out the backstory to my current project. Not only that by I have been thinking of ways of cleverly weaving the details into the story proper. I prefer backstory that feeds directly into the main plot, rather than it exist in isolation. But I was having a bit o’ bother.
Suddenly, and while I was thinking of something else entirely (isn’t it always the way), the Tetriminos of writerly inspiration aligned, and four lines of writing impediment disappeared, and I had my answer! Tetris!
I was also reminded that I haven’t written much about backstory on this ‘ere blog o’ mine. Read more…
After a brief discussion with Jeff Baker, I hit upon the idea of extending a comment that I made regarding back story. One could say I was inspired by what I said *laughs at own joke*. Read more…
I want to talk for a bit about developing well developed characters. I’ve mentioned back-story before, but not in this context. I’m of the opinion that the most important part of a character is their history. It informs their reactions to current events, and in contemporary story-telling, sometimes a character’s reactions are all you’ve got to describe the character. Read more…
I used to put a great deal of importance on backstory. Backstory, I thought, really makes a tale great. And I used to think that meant spending ages refining it, before even starting on the story proper. Read more…