Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 137

How much backstory?

Here’s a post from Pub Rants: The Making of Meaningful Backstory (Part I)

Backstory is one of the crucial elements of the craft of fiction, so it definitely deserves our attention. But should backstory be a workhorse that earns its place within your manuscript’s structure by serving more than one weight-bearing function? Or should backstory be part of the wallpaper, passively decorative and meant to be glimpsed only now and then in the background? Is there a point at which too little backstory makes a novel feel flat? Or a point at which a big backstory is too big?

Oh, these are all good questions!

I think this sort of thing is best examined by looking at specific novels. So let me see …

Backstory in The Hands of the Emperor:

This is such an interesting book! There is a TON of important backstory. Some is delivered practically up front: The empire came crashing down some time ago (an event ambiguously distant in time). That’s an important worldbuilding detail.

But the important backstory, the protagonist’s backstory, isn’t like that at all. The reader learns only very gradually about Cliopher’s own life during and shortly after the fall of the empire. This backstory is crucial for understanding many things about Cliopher — how he developed certain Islander skills, why he knows the full versions of the songs and the fire dance, how he came to learn how to make a boat with his own hands. Why he feels so disconnected from his family — his return home after the fall was so weird, and then when he arrived, the experience was very alienating. I think Goddard handled the backstory here very well.

Backstory in … The Death of The Necromancer:

This is another story with a big, important backstory. Everything about Nicholas Valiarde’s past is absolutely crucial — his parentage, his early upbringing (such as it was), his adoptive father and what happened to him — and we just hear about all that in glimpses, even though that backstory is driving a big element of the plot. Or, you could say, that element of the plot is the frame story that is wrapped around the necromancer story.

Backstory in … The Deed of Paksennarion

In contrast, in a story like The Deed of Paksennarion, the backstory is fundamentally very simple; so simple it’s practically nonexistent. Paks is a sheepfarmer’s daughter, she doesn’t want to get married, she runs away and joins a military company, and that’s it. Much later we learn about some of the bigger things that were going on that drive the larger plot, but that stuff really does act nearly as wallpaper, passively decorative. Fundamentally, this is a story that doesn’t have, or need, any backstory to speak of. The protagonist starts off very simple and familiar; and the world is also very familiar; that’s another reason Elizabeth Moon could get away with so little backstory. None of that is a criticism. It’s just that this sort of story makes such a great contrast with the above examples.

Oh, here’s one —

Backstory in The Martian:

This is SF rather than fantasy, but it’s a great example of a story that just doesn’t have any backstory to mention — not even as passive decoration — it’s just not there. The world is too close to contemporary to need any kind of description; the visit to Mars is so in-line with ordinary near-future life that it doesn’t need description or justification, and the protagonist might as well have no past life at all. That’s really interesting! I never thought about that before. This is such a fantastic example of a novel with (a) no past; and (b) no character development, that nevertheless (c) works beautifully. I should re-read it.

Let me see. All right:

Backstory in House of Shadows:

This one lacks backstory almost as completely as the Paksennarion trilogy, though not as much as The Martian. The father’s died, the sisters are in a fix, boom, moving forward. Everything that happens has to do with their present, not with their past. Taudde has a lot more of a backstory, of course. And the broader worldbuilding backstory is important. I mean, there is the dragon, among other things.

Backstory in Black Dog:

Of course the worldbuilding backstory is especially important in a lot of Paranormals and Urban Fantasy. That’s because a lot of the time, the world looks JUST LIKE OURS, except then (a) something dramatic happened, as in Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels series, in which powerful magic suddenly returned to the world; or (b) there’s a lot of magical stuff going on behind the scenes. Personal backstory is generally important as well.

In Black Dog, all that vampire-black dog war stuff is worldbuilding background. But the personal backstory about what happened to their family right before Natividad and Alejandro and Miguel fled for Dimilioc is never described in any detail. It had a big emotional impact on those three characters, but we still never look back at it very closely. We actually don’t get a lot about the personal backstories of any characters in the novels, as far as I can remember right now. Lots more of that is in the stories, though.

Backstory in The Death’s Lady trilogy:

Now here’s the one where personal backstory is most important. Not only Tenai’s huge, sweeping, epic backstory — although that’s very important — but Daniel’s small-scale personal backstory is important as well. Not quite as important as Nicholas Valiarde’s personal backstory … or maybe it would be more accurate to say, just as important, but not as dramatic.

Anyway, in this trilogy, wow, backstory is absolutely not part of the wallpaper, passively decorative and meant to be glimpsed only now and then in the background. Not at all. The backstory drives the whole current plot. The reader even gets glimpses of the backstory, as Tenai tells little vignettes of her past life to Daniel.

I think that’s one more way in which this trilogy is different from other things I’ve written.

I’ll just add a reminder that the Death’s Lady trilogy is available for preorder.

I’ll also add that so far — I’m halfway through — I have a penciled notation (or two or three) on nearly every page of the third book. ARRGH. I’m enjoying reading it, but dismayed at how enormously annoying it’s going to be to go make all those tiny little changes.

I should be finished with that by the end of this weekend, counting time off to read Fugitive Telemetry and plant the zillion or so little plants I bought yesterday. Hopefully it won’t snow again. I hear we’re supposed to get up to four inches of rain plus hail tomorrow, so ouch, but I will probably put most of the babies out this afternoon and cross my fingers.

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Now available in Audio

Just out today at Audible:

Which means also available in audio format at Amazon.

A few things I will just mention:

a) If you already have the ebook, you will probably be offered a serious price break on the audio version.

You should be able to see audio versions of all the ebooks you currently own if you click on this Matchmaker link.

If that link doesn’t work, I’d like to know that, so I’d appreciate someone clicking on it and letting me know. I don’t believe you need an Audible membership for that to work, but I could be wrong — that’s one thing I’d like to know. I have an inactive Audible membership myself and a library of titles I picked up some time ago, but I don’t think you need that.

b) I have codes for the audio version of TUYO and now for NIKOLES, so if you’d like a free copy, I can provide that. I would appreciate your leaving a review at Audible for either title if you listen to it.

c) I love chapter 6 best. Aras sounds just perfect. Extremely authoritative. I mean, I wrote the whole story in order to get to that chapter and write that … conversation sounds too casual for this exchange … anyway, this was the part I had in my head that I really, really wanted to write. I’m so pleased Jeffrey got Aras exactly right.

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The probably-not-definitive top ten list of SFF bodyguards

Okay, so, you all did an fine job pointing out many SFF bodyguards, so I think it’s now possible to do a Top Ten List of great bodyguards in SFF.

Ranking bodyguards in order from absolutely the coolest to still pretty cool.

1) Murderbot. Obviously.

I’m still baffled that I didn’t think of Murderbot first thing when bodyguards came up in the first place.

Two notes: first, “Fugitive Telemetry” releases tomorrow! So, YAY, but also, Well, there goes tomorrow for getting anything done. Which is fine! Good think I don’t have a hard deadline looming at the end of this month or anything.

Second, Tor now has under contract three more Murderbot novels plus three other novels by Martha Wells, so that’s fantastic. I can hardly think of another author I’d more like to see get this kind of deal. I’m really pleased that the deal includes three non-Murderbot novels because I look forward very much to seeing what she’ll write. She’s supposed to be releasing one book per year and the first non-Murderbot novel, Witch King, is due out in 2022. Hopefully nothing will go wrong!

2) Sergeant Bothari.

Mary Anderson said in the comments of the previous post: “He’s fascinating and tragic and heroic in so many untypical ways.” This is true. He’s one of the more complex and definitely the most untypical secondary character I can think of and that’s why I’m putting him second on this list.

3) Catlin and Florian from Cyteen.

I’ve read Cyteen many times. I never re-read it from the beginning. I don’t even skim. I just start where Young Ari is born. From that point on, this is one of my very favorite novels by CJC, and watching Young Ari and Young Catlin and Young Florian grow up is a huge part of why.

I like the recent sequel Regenesis too, largely because I really enjoy watching Justin and Grant get their lives thoroughly in order and I like Ari’s maturing relationship with them both. It’s a slow novel in which technically not much happens for most of the story, but since my favorite scene is the one where Ari’s friends move to Wing One, I obviously don’t care about that.

Having said that, this is a weird cover for Cyteen:

Who are those people? Justin and Paul? Who else could they be? Why are they on the cover? If these guys are supposed to be other people, who? If you’re putting people on the cover at all, why not Ari? Why not Ari with Florian and Catlin? I’m glad my cover of Cyteen is different.

4) Jago and Banichi from the Foreigner series.

Far, far better covers for this whole series:

It’s hard to remember back to the very beginning, when Bren had just met Banichi and Jago and doesn’t really trust them, far less have a real relationship with them.

5) Maia’s bodyguards in The Goblin Emperor — although of the supporting characters, the secretary, Csevet, is most important. Frankly, I don’t think Maia would have been able to manage without him.

6) Sarkis in Swordheart. It’s sooooo much easier to find good bodyguards in romance novels, and this is a fantasy romance. This isn’t my favorite book by Kingfisher/Vernon, but I did like it quite a bit. It’s light and fun (mostly).

7) Kemen in the Erdemen Honor series. which I reviewed at the link. Kemen is more a soldier than a bodyguard, but he takes a bodyguard role in this book. I liked this series in some ways more than it deserves. It has some very catchy elements, and the third book was an important inspiration for Tuyo, as you’ll see if you read that review.

8) Derisha in Matadora. I liked this book and this whole series possibly more than they deserved, too. In Matadora, we have very catchy, fun situations; a school setting — school for bodyguards — I do love the right kind of school story — and a protagonist who grows into herself in ways that appeal to me.

I know I said Top Ten, but that’s a pretty good list of the bodyguards I’m personally familiar with. I’m pretty likely to read some of the books you all suggested in your comments in the previous post, so I think I’ll leave some room here. If any more great bodyguards occur to you, by all means add them to the list. Maybe I’ll wind up making this an SFF Bodyguard Year and read a lot of bodyguard stories … and then be unable to stop myself from starting a fantasy novel with a bodyguard protagonist …

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Bodyguards

A post by Marie Brennan at Book View Cafe: New Worlds: Bodyguards

This caught my eye because I love bodyguards. Now all of a sudden I can’t imagine why I’ve never written a novel where the protagonist is a bodyguard. Or an assassin. Or a thief. But in a lot of ways I like bodyguards better than either of those other options because I could do so much with themes of loyalty and trust, which, as you might have noticed, I gravitate toward all the time anyway.

Of course I do have characters who sometimes take on something of a bodyguard role, including most recently Geras, for example. And Ezekiel sometimes takes that sort of role. But that isn’t their primary function.

I won’t say I suddenly want to drop everything else and write a fantasy novel where the main character is a bodyguard, but I will say, I suddenly DO want to add that to the list of future projects.

Now, I doubt that Marie Brennan is going to let this post turn into a list of SFF novels with great bodyguards … although that would be neat … but sure, let’s see what she says:

If money is the carrot, then the stick is threatening the bodyguard’s own life, or that of their loved ones. If you abandon me, you won’t live for long afterward. … That points toward the final motivation, which is loyalty. … Human beings are capable of remarkable altruism, and if someone believes sincerely enough that your life is more important than their own, they may willingly risk themself or even die to keep you safe. This kind of logic gets treated as natural in a society where ideology says some people are inherently superior to others. …

In the moment when a bodyguard’s services are truly needed, and in the aftermath of that crisis, you can learn a lot about both the characters’ personalities and the society they live in.

Bodyguard motivations: Money, threats, loyalty. Obviously I would move straight toward the latter if I were writing the novel. Let’s see what the motivations have been for bodyguards in SFF novels …

1) Matadora by Steve Perry

Dirisha Zuri… a dangerous drifter, a dark-skinned beauty, Khadaji’s colleague. A ronin, whose expertise in body control and knowledge of the fighting arts drew the attention of Matador Villa. The school wanted her talents… and the galaxy desperately needed her deadly skills.

The motivation here starts off sort of money and sort of supporting good causes and shifts to loyalty and then love.

2) The Foreigner series.

The motivation is loyalty atevi style, which is to say, man’chi.

And … wow, this is a very short list. So, what else? SFF novels where a bodyguard is either the protagonist or a very important secondary character, not just part of the background or scenery. Oh, I can think of one more. Wait, two:

3) The Goblin Emperor

Maia’s guards are among the most important secondary characters in the story.

4) The Hands of the Emperor

Not Cliopher, but two of the other important members of the Emperor’s household; plus plenty of other guards who are part of the background.

What are some others? Now that I’ve suddenly realized this is a trope I like a lot, any suggestions would be appreciated.

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Which Comes First: Character or Plot?

From Jane Friedman’s blog: Which Comes First: Character or Plot?

Both! Neither!

Let’s see what the author of the post says …

If you have read your share of books on the craft of writing, you will be familiar with the assumption that writers of genre fiction are plot people, while writers of literary fiction are character creators. Graduate students are often dismissive when it comes to plot.

Here’s what I tell them: Whether you are writing horror or haute literary, your novella or novel needs both an engaging protagonist and a compelling plot. …

Yep, I’ve seen that assumption, rolled my eyes, and moved on. Personally, I do think engaging characters are more important than an exciting plot. Or maybe I should say, a compelling plot can be astoundingly low key. I’m thinking here of The Hands of the Emperor. I can hardly imagine anyone would argue that this book is plot-forward. It’s so much a character story that it barely has a plot. Or at least, I think I might argue that the plot is essentially part of the development of the characters. If the characters didn’t develop in those ways, the plot wouldn’t happen at all.

Let’s see where this post goes …

I’ve been hedging on which comes first, plot or character. Honestly, you can’t divorce one from the other. … Put another way, it is not so much what happens to us as it is how we react to what happens to us. And because life gets complicated fast, so does fiction. Even in the most mundane situations, we have choices, lots of them, and how we react affects our destinies, sometimes by inches and other times by miles.

I like this post! Who wrote it? Ah, this is an adapted excerpt from  Writing the Novella by Sharon Oard Warner. Well, I like what she’s saying here.

This reminds me of a different question and answer:

Is it nature or nurture that causes xxxxxx?

That’s like asking whether it’s the oxygen or the hydrogen that makes water wet.

Is it character or plot that makes a story engaging?

That’s unanswerable in the same way. What happens is part of the plot, but how the character responds to events is part of the character. It’s like asking whether it’s the oxygen or the hydrogen that makes water wet.

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I don’t mean to complain, but

Oh, never mind, I totally mean to complain.

I read through the paper copy of Of Absence, Darkness and found fifteen actual typos. That’s five per hundred pages. It would take ten minutes to fix those.

I also made roughly 400 tiny adjustments to the text, figuring an average of slightly over one per page, which is about right.

It’s going to take HOURS to fix all those.

I know, I have complained about that before. I will try not to mention this again except just one time when I no doubt face the same tedious job for As Shadow, A Light.

Anyway, I will do that this afternoon and then it will be done and I can move on to something else. No matter what I do tomorrow, it will be less tedious than this.

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The view off my back deck

Spring! April 19th

Sudden return to winter! April 20th

I just realized I happened to be experimenting with the panorama function on my new phone’s camera at the right time to be able to post these contrasting pictures. You can actually still make out the nearest flowering dogwood, barely, even in the photo with the snow.

When I posted these pics on Facebook, a commenter pointed out that this looks quite a bit like two identical lands separated by a mystical river, which made me laugh!

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Now available in hardcover

TUYO, NIKOLES, and TARASHANA are now available in hardcover.

A couple of months ago, Amazon rolled out a hardcover option. Ooh! I said. I know just the books I’d like to do in hardcover!

Now, this option is still in beta testing, and I will say, it was just IMPOSSIBLE to get any size but 6×9 to work. I mean, other size options were supposedly enabled, but getting them to work proved too difficult to deal with. No doubt that will be smoothed out eventually. In the meantime, I revised Nikoles into a 6×9 format. I did that by fiddling around with the font and adding the entire first chapter of Tarashana as a teaser in order to make sure the story, a mere, what is it? 75,000 words or so? would not produce too thin a book. The other two just moved right into the hardcover format with no trouble, since they were already at 6×9.

The cover artist kindly redid the pdf covers to accommodate the new format, and poof! Here they are. I will certainly get hardcover versions for myself.

I don’t know whether I will do hardcover editions of anything else, except I will most likely do a hardcover omnibus for the Death’s Lady trilogy. That seems reasonable, doesn’t it? All put together, that will be a long sucker.

So I do have questions for readers.

a) If you’ve already decided to buy a paper edition, and both are available, would you personally prefer paper or hardcover? The hardcovers will cost more. There’s no way around that. Amazon sets the minimum prices. I just set the prices of paperbacks and now these new hardcovers so that each version gives me about the same royalty as an ebook. A little less, actually, but pretty close.

b) Do you think it seems reasonable to bring out individual books as paperback only, but an omnibus as both paperback and hardcover because the omnibus is so big? To me, it seems better to have hardcover for a book that’s 800 pages long or whatever, because I don’t think paperback covers hold up well for books that size. For books with fewer pages, it doesn’t seem like it would be necessarily worth the extra cost. But maybe that’s just me. What do you think?

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This is funny —

At Kill Zone Blog, this: Scamming Nigerian Funds to Build Your Time Machine

The scammer:

Sir — We have gone through your country’s investment profile and history and we are interested to invest in it, we will be willing to partner with you and invest a substantial amount of money in your company if you have an existing company or we can also partner with you to set up a new one, provided you have a substantial and complete feasibility study and a well prepared business plan on the business/company you wil (sp) need us to partner with you. …

The response:

Your unsolicited offer comes at a timely stage in a current venture I’m working on. I was planning to release investment offerings by-invitation-only prior to a NYSE IPO. However, I’m open to prioritizing your group’s investment of a substantial amount of money during my project’s Research & Development (R&D) stage. Therefore, I’d be pleased to accommodate you and your esteemed business associates in safely appropriating your funds.

With an understanding of your agreement to confidentiality, my project involves a revised form of hyper-velocity, multi-directional transportation. The concept for analogous movement between distant portals, both historic and forthcoming, is nothing new. Space-time dilation based on the Einstein-Rosen bridge theory has been conceptualized for decades. Practical application of Faster-Than-Light (FTL) amplification was bottlenecked due to tachyon condensation which restricted Portal Entrance and Exit (PEE), but there’s now a clear and unique opportunity for a massive breakthrough.…

Ha ha ha! I would never think of writing this sort of response when I received a scam email, but it’s funny. I wonder how far the scammers read before realizing it was bogus?

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A free Murderbot story —

Here at tor.com, a free Murderbot story, which is plainly being made available since the new novella is due out any day now.

This story is set right after Exit Strategy, the 4th novella:

“Is this really a good idea?”

There is no way to honestly answer that question without being insulting, so Ayda Mensah opts for, “If I’d known the survey team might almost be murdered in a corporate sabotage attempt, I would have picked another planetary franchise.” …

Click through to read the rest!

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