Chip's Writing Lessons #31
In this issue:
Writers Speak – Ha Jin
Interview – Cultivating a Sense of Wonder: Four Questions with Stephen Buckley
Craft Lesson – Backstory: Using the Story Behind the Story
Tip of the Week – Hang From a Cliff
Podcast to Savor – “A Way with Words”
WRITERS SPEAK “Generally, when I write a first draft I’m writing the structure. I try to get the black on the white as soon as possible. It’s quite an intense experience. Then I can do the revision and editing by hand. Revision for me is where the book is made, because the process of revision is not just about making the prose more polished. While revising the manuscript, I begin to be aware of the nuances, the possibilities. So it’s a kind of interpreting process.”
– Ha Jin
INTERVIEW – CULTIVATING A SENSE OF WONDER: FOUR QUESTIONS WITH STEPHEN BUCKLEY
Stephen Buckley
For most of the past decade, Stephen Buckley has taught journalism, communications and leadership in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, the United States and Asia. He began his career with The Washington Post, where he spent 12 years as a local reporter and international correspondent, based in Nairobi and Rio de Janeiro. He later worked at the St. Petersburg Times (now Tampa Bay Times), where he was a national reporter, managing editor and digital publisher before turning to teaching. Stephen served as the Dean of Faculty at The Poynter Institute and has conducted workshops at numerous writing conferences. His awards include the International Reporting Award from the National Association of Black Journalists for his coverage of Africa and the state’s best reporter from the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. He served as a Pulitzer Prize juror four times. In 2015, Stephen joined the faculty of the Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communications in Nairobi, Kenya, where he ultimately served as an associate dean in charge of professional and executive programs. He is now a media consultant based in Nairobi.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
It’s tempting to think that good writing just calls for us to stitch together the fine tips and techniques we find in newsletters like yours. The tips and techniques are awesome, but they are no substitute for thinking deeply about a piece of writing. What’s the story about? What’s the theme? What’s the focus? What’s missing? Am I being intellectually honest? What am I really trying to say? Doesn’t matter whether it’s a piece of fiction, a column, or a longform news feature: The deeper the thinking, the more original and compelling the writing. This takes patience, which I don’t have much of these days. So I find that I have to be savagely intentional about not cutting intellectual corners. But, in the end, that’s the only way to find my way to clarity and meaning.
What’s been the biggest surprise of your writing life?
I'm going to cheat and give you two surprises: One is that cynicism kills creativity. When I was younger, I equated cynicism (which I think of skepticism poisoned by hopelessness) with sophistication. But the best writers cultivate a sense of wonder that only grows with age. It’s not that they are Pollyannas. It’s just that they see the world at odd angles, are generous and openhearted, and are always asking impertinent questions. They’ve trained themselves to be surprised. And as a result, their work gleams with beautiful simplicity and insight. The other is that writing doesn’t get any easier. After 30-plus years of writing professionally, I can't get over how much I still have to learn. It’s like a marriage: Attention must be paid. And I haven’t always paid attention to my writing. Growth is humbling—and more than a little painful sometimes. Which is why I've finally accepted that writers need community—virtually or in person, informal or formal. Because meaningful growth almost always occurs in community.
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be?
Gosh, this one is tough. None leaps to mind. If anything, I’d say I’m an owl. I always think of owls as being the best observers and listeners in the animal kingdom (I have no idea if that’s true), and I think that’s the writer’s first duty: to take in the world as it is and then transport readers to that world. As the late James J. Kilpatrick said in The Writer’s Art: “We must look intently, and hear intently, and taste intently…” He said that’s the only path to original, precise language and images. And I agree.
What’s the single best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?
I got a lot of good advice over the years, but two thoughts come to mind. The first was from Roy Peter Clark, who taught me that how we order words can enhance or dilute their impact. I think about this all the time, particularly given how impatient readers are today. Their attention always feels brittle, tenuous. And so, beyond insights and clarity, I feel like I can tug them along with language that’s precise and compelling—especially at the end of a sentence or paragraph. And I often think of something John McPhee says: Writing is selection. I find this oddly liberating, especially if I’m writing a long piece. McPhee’s advice frees me to just lay everything on the screen before I go back and slash away, and reorder, whole sections. Don’t get me wrong. Selection is hard. Sometimes really hard. But it’s also fun, even exhilarating, especially when it yields writing that’s both clean and muscular.
CRAFT LESSON – BACKSTORY: USING THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
Photo by Warren Wong on Unsplash
“We talked all night. We looked up and realized the restaurant was empty.”
How often have we heard these descriptions of successful dates, those close, and perhaps apocryphal, encounters when two people reveal their personal histories to each other for the first time?
In the vocabulary of fiction, we would say they’re giving each other their backstories, revealing past actions and influences that shaped their personalities, the way they think and behave. An abusive parent. An inspiring mentor. A serious childhood illness. A painful breakup.
The literary device of backstory establishes what happens before the main plotline. It’s the information that gives characters and narrative arcs a sense of personal and social history.
Writers use them to raise the stakes for a character. Can a young mother with a history of drug abuse keep the monkey off her back so she can keep her child from the clutches of a vengeful ex-husband or Child Protective Services?
A backstory makes a character’s psychological motivations understandable. In Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations,” why does the wealthy spinster Miss Havisham always wear her wedding dress, even after it’s tattered? Why does she leave the uneaten wedding breakfast and cake untouched on a table? Because in her youth, she was left at the altar, leaving her wounded and cynical. That’s her tragic backstory, and explains why she torments Pip, the protagonist of the novel, and Estella, the orphan she adopted. She had intended to spare her ward from the suffering she endured, but couldn't resist causing her pain.
“My dear!” she tells Pip. “Believe this: when she first came, I meant to save her from misery like my own. At first I meant no more.”
She continued, “But as she grew, and promised to be very beautiful, I gradually did worse, and with my praises, and with my jewels, and with my teachings, and with this figure of myself always before her a warning to back and point my lessons, I stole her heart away and put ice in its place.”
Backstories are critical elements in a novel or screenplay, although they should not dominate the front story, which makes up the scenes and exposition of the main action.
“Backstory has two main jobs,” writer Jessica Morrell says in her article “What Backstory Can Do For Your Story.” “A character’s backstory comprises all the data of his history, revealing how he became who he is, and why he acts as he does and thinks as he thinks. It also reveals influences of an era, family history, and world events (such as wars) that affect the story and its inhabitants.”
The writer needs to know each character’s backstory, even though they may reveal only a small percentage. Lives are long. Just as people don’t tell a new friend or lover every single thing about themselves during a first meeting, the effective writer parcels out the backstory judiciously rather than cramming them all in flashbacks that tear the reader from the main story that has grabbed their attention in the first place.
There are a variety of ways to introduce backstory, including flashbacks, exposition, dialogue, direct narration and a character’s recollections. Whatever method you choose, avoid dumping background information on the story all at once.
“The most important things to remember about backstory are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting,” Stephen King writes in “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.”
“Stick to the parts that are, and don’t get carried away with the rest,” King says. “Life stories are best received in bars, and only then an hour or so before closing time, and if you are buying.”
When Ernest Hemingway talked about the fact that only one-eighth of an iceberg shows above the water, he was describing a theory of omission that represents a form of backstory. In his short story “Hills Like White Elephants,” the backstory is that the couple sitting drinking wine as they wait for a train are discussing an abortion without ever saying the word. The original “Star Wars” movie and its first two sequels contain preconceived backstories that were later developed into prequels. Even its minor characters have backstories.
Other backstories are a form of foreshadowing. Early in the movie “The Silence of the Lambs,” which hews closely to Thomas Harris’ novel, agent Starling, played by Jodi Foster, sees a lineup of the gruesome photos of serial killer Buffalo Bill’s victims.
“Thus, when Catherine, the senator’s daughter, is captured,” Morrell notes, “we’re aware of the gruesome torments that await her. Further, because backstory reveals that Buffalo Bill keeps his victims alive for a certain number of days, the stakes are increased because time is running out for Catherine. When Starling confronts Bill in the climax of the novel, the backstory heightens the suspense.”
Backstories reveal characters’ motivations, as these examples in “Backstory: The Importance of What Isn’t Told” by novelist K.M. Weiland demonstrate:
the inability to measure up to his younger brother, which fuels Peter Wiggin’s anger and ambition (the “Ender’s Shadow” series by Orson Scott Card)
the long-harbored guilt for brutal war crimes, which impels Benjamin Martin to avoid war (the movie “The Patriot”)
the long years of loneliness, which influenced John Barrett to accept the compulsory swapping of roles with his French lookalike (“The Scapegoat” by Daphne du Maurier)
As you compose your novel or screenplay and develop your characters, you have to know their backstories. Study the backstories in classic novels like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” about Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, an impoverished law student who murders an elderly money lender. ShowTime’s “Dexter” uses flashbacks to reveal how a serial killer with a twisted ethical compass is born. Dickens launches “David Copperfield” with backstory. The backstory of the “Harry Potter” series is the murder of Harry’s parents by the dark wizard Lord Voldemort. Reread your favorite novels and study films to identify the backstories, their purpose and the methods the writers used to develop and present them to the reader.
As you start work on your own story, it’s crucial to answer a ton of questions about your characters to make sure you understand who they are and where they came from. Here’s one of the most comprehensive that I’ve found. It’s long, but essential if you hope to write a story that raises the stakes for its characters, furnishes psychological realism and above all, make readers understand how and why your characters behave as they do. Backstory has many purposes in the creation of realistic characters.. The most important is that it helps readers care about them.
PODCAST TO SAVOR – “A WAY WITH WORDS”
Calling all lexiphiles!
.
You’ll never look at words the same way again after you’ve listened to an episode of “A Way with Words,” a brilliant podcast “about language examined through family, history and culture.” I mean, who doesn’t want to be one of the lucky ones who gets to call in and hear the greeting “You have a way with words” from one of its genial, word-happy hosts, Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett. With Barnette’s grounding in Latin and Greek and Barrett’s talents as a lexicographer with “an ear for contemporary slang…they make a perfect duo” to field listener queries about the meaning and origins of strange and commonplace words, as an enthusiastic New Yorker review put it.
On the air since 2007, episode #1547 tuned into words related to the quarantine many of us are still living through. They have a gift for finding the timely and timeliness of linguistics, the scientific study of language. There’s the obvious—“cabin fever” and “stir-crazy”—but the Click and Clack of words (the show is modeled on “Car Talk,” the equally quirky NPR car-repair program) also came up with “hillnutty” and “shackwhacky” from their treasure chest.
It airs Friday afternoons on New York’s WNYE 91.5 FM, but the show’s incredibly rich and helpful website directs you to stations across America and every episode recorded.
A segment about William Faulkner’s penchant for unusual and often homemade adjectives—“shadowdabbled,” “Augusttremulous”—includes a link to 320 audio clips of the Nobel Prize winner taking questions from University of Virginia students about his life, times and work. Ever wondered how to pronounce “Yoknapatawpha,” the fictional Mississippi county that Faulkner created for his fictional world? You can hear him yourself.
TIP OF THE WEEK – HANG FROM A CLIFF
A cliffhanger is a plot device that concludes a chapter with the fate of the protagonist in doubt. We associate them with detective, thriller and Western pieces of fiction that “rely heavily on physical dangers,” Jerome Stern writes in “Making Shapely Fiction.” But cliffhangers that leave the reader in suspense abound in literary fiction. Should Madame Bovary borrow even more money? Will Joseph K. in Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” escape his guards? Whether they’re obvious or subtle, hanging your characters from a cliff, literally or metaphorically, can make the difference between a page-turner and a story that’s easy to put down.
BEFORE YOU GO
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May the writing go well, and may you be well.
Nulla dies sine linea / Never a day without a line
BLACK LIVES MATTER!