Backstories and bios

 I remember reading a novel some years ago in which the author plainly thought that his background notes about each main character should be included at some point in the book. This led to an absurd climax where everything stopped while the author gave us the backstory for one of his characters right in the middle of the action. Not just a paragraph or two, but pages.

 Writers often create long, detailed backstories for their characters, and it’s a great temptation to put most of this into the book – though hopefully in a more subtle way than the author I’ve mentioned above did.

 But for the most part, backstories should remain where they belong, in the files, not the book.

I wrote something similar during The Counterfeit Queen’s long evolution. Needing a bit of forward movement while struggling to find more of the story, I wrote at least two chapters, maybe three, in which the villain gave her side of events.

 What I found interesting was that in the course of writing those chapters I discovered some new ideas and some connections in the plot that I hadn’t seen before. These chapters, which were never intended to be part of the book, were far more fruitful than I realised.

Re-reading them sometime later, I thought, I should use these in the book. They’re great! I could make them the opening chapters, and…

 Thankfully the wiser part of my brain prevailed and I left them out. They would have stopped the story getting up and running by putting its main character on the back burner for several pages.

 But I still recommend this approach as a way of seeing the story from a different viewpoint. Or as a way of using the brain’s creative energy in a different way.

 I’ve sometimes tried to write two of these in a row. That doesn’t work for me. The creative energy pours into the first character’s discussion of themselves, and there’s nothing left over for another character. And that just makes you feel like a blah kind of writer again...