This week I'm delighted to have a guest post from the uber talented Zoë Sharp talking about creating back story for characters.
If you're a fan of action thrillers and you haven't read her Charlie Fox novels then you are missing out big time.
So without any further ado here she is.
I’m a short-fuse
reader. There, I’ve admitted it. If I pick up a book looking for slow leisurely
narrative and wonderful detailed descriptions, then that’s fine. But if I pick
up what purports to be a fast-paced page-turner, I expect it to hit the ground
running and I get fed up pretty quickly if it doesn’t live up to my
expectations.
This means I don’t
want to be waylaid by the main characters going through long introductions. I
don’t want to be shown snapshots of them as a child, graphs of their family
tree, and framed copies of their university degrees before we get stuck into
the meat of it. I should be able to glean enough about them as people at this
stage by what they do and say, how they carry themselves.
After all, in fiction
as in life, how people react under pressure defines them, and conflict is what
drives the narrative forwards. Doesn’t matter if it’s physical, emotional or
psychological conflict, as long as you’ve put your characters up a tree and
thrown some kind of rocks at them.
Choosing the right
jumping-in point has always been one of the hardest parts for me when I’m
starting work on a new book. The opening page is never where the story itself starts
― that began way before the body was washed up by the tide, the mysterious
client knocked on the PI’s door. Or, in the case of DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten
(due out in October), Charlie finds herself handcuffed to a briefcase on one
side, and Sean on the other, while a running gun battle takes place around her
on a crowded street.
Well, I did mention I
like to hit the ground with a bit of momentum, didn’t I?
Finding the ideal
situation to show off your character to their best advantage is never easy ―
that intersection between the past and the present, at a point where your
character’s motivations, strengths and flaws will be demonstrated to full
effect. The temptation is to concentrate on the story and not how your main
protagonist fits into it. I think this may be one of the reasons that there’s
so often a massive info-dump in the early chapters. It’s tempting to get all
that pesky scene-setting out of the way up front, and then you can get down to
it.
And, I have to
confess, that’s exactly what I felt Stieg
Larsson did in his Millennium trilogy. It took me several attempts to read
the first book because the opening section seemed to be entirely taken up with
a long explanation of how Mikael ‘Kalle’ Blomkvist acquired his nickname. I’m
sure there are plenty of people who can argue the merits of this approach, but
it didn’t really work for me. In the end I practically had to take a run at it.
It was worth the effort, though because once I got past that dollop of back
story, I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the series. But had that initial book not received such a massive build-up, I
may not have persevered. Can you take that chance with your own work?
I’ve always tried to
drip-feed the back story in relatively slowly, to make the reader interested in
finding out more before I ram it down their throats. I sometimes liken it to
getting onto a bus and sitting down next to someone who immediately starts
telling you their life history. At this point you don’t care, and may even get
off a stop early just to escape. But if they greet you quietly, have something
about the way they observe the other passengers, check out the scenery, when
they do finally start to open up a
little, you’re desperate to know.
Some of the best
advice I was ever given with regard to including back story at the opening of a
novel was to make a second pass through the typescript purely for pace, and see
if you can lose a chapter or two from the beginning.
I tried this out with HARD KNOCKS: Charlie Fox book three.
The book starts with Charlie attending the funeral of one of her old army
comrades, Kirk Salter. There’s a brief flashback detailing how Charlie got the
news of Kirk’s death, but originally that meeting happened in real time and it then
took me a couple of chapters to get to the funeral. Eventually I realised that everybody
would know whose funeral it was because of the information they picked up from
the jacket copy of the book, so why bother including it for real? I was able to
rip up the first two chapters and restart the story from three onwards.
So, I’m a firm
believer in less is more — and leaving out the bits other people skip.
Otherwise it can quickly turn from back
story into holding back the
story.
What about you? Do you
like a lot of scene-setting before you get settled into a book, or do you
prefer to maintain an air of mystery until you’ve got to know the characters a
bit more.
Whichever method you
prefer, happy scribbling and good luck with it!
Zoë Sharp is the author of the bestselling crime
thriller series featuring her ex-Special Forces turned bodyguard heroine,
Charlie Fox. Sharp opted out of mainstream education at the age of twelve and
wrote her first novel at fifteen before becoming a photojournalist in 1988. She
wrote the first of the highly acclaimed Charlie Fox novels after receiving
death-threat letters in the course of her work.
She has been nominated
for Edgar, Anthony, Barry (twice), Benjamin Franklin, and Macavity Awards in
the United States,
as well as the CWA Short Story Dagger. The Charlie Fox series was optioned for
TV by Twentieth Century Fox.
When not welded to her
keyboard, Sharp is a fan of fast cars — and faster motorcycles — sailing,
shooting, house-building, self-defence, and reading just about anything she can
get her hands on. Zoë Sharp blogs regularly on her own website, www.ZoeSharp.com, on the acclaimed group
blog, www.Murderati.com, as well as
wittering on Twitter (@AuthorZoeSharp) and fooling around on Facebook.
DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten
In the sweating heat
of Louisiana,
former Special Forces soldier turned bodyguard, Charlie Fox, faces her toughest
challenge yet.
Professionally, she’s
at the top of her game, but her personal life is in ruins. Her lover, bodyguard
Sean Meyer, has woken from a gunshot-induced coma with his memory in tatters.
It seems that piecing back together the relationship they shared is proving
harder for him than relearning the intricacies of the close-protection
business.
Working with Sean
again was never going to be easy for Charlie, either, but a celebrity
fundraising event in aid of still-ravaged areas of New Orleans should have been the ideal
opportunity for them both to take things nice and slow.
Until, that is, they find
themselves thrust into the middle of a war zone.
When an ambitious
robbery explodes into a deadly hostage situation, the motive may be far more
complex than simple greed. Somebody has a major score to settle, and Sean is
part of the reason. Only trouble is, he doesn’t remember why.
And when Charlie finds
herself facing a nightmare from her own past, she realises she can’t rely on
Sean to watch her back. This time, she’s got to fight it out on her own.
Feel free to leave any comments you may have and do yourself a big favour and grab a copy of one of Zoë's books. You won't regret it. Graham
I was on to chapter 4 of Stand By Me, the 6th Seahills novel, when suddenly a group of characters I had never met before invaded my head and just would not go away. Smiler would have fitted in well with the Seahills lot, but there are enough of his age group hanging around the Seahills so I shrugged and got on with Stand By Me. But the very next day Mike Yorke and his Aunt May were standing side by side with Smiler demanding their story be told, no way was I ever going to shake them off. 
So I opened a new page and Thorn In My Side was born. In a short time round about 3 months it was done, the rewrite took another month or so and it was finished. Ok I'd left it on a cliff hanger so best start right where I left off, again it took just under half a year to produce Nowhere Man. Then came the hardest part of the trilogy. The Final Countdown out this week in hardback. This took twice the time that the other two books had, a lot of that was because of illness, but I think that some of it was down to the fact that I didn't want to let Smiler, Aunt May, Mike Yorke, Shelly, Danny and the rest of them go. 
