Boo to baggage and back-stories
How did back-stories become so important? Is it a television thing? Or a symptom of the modern-day call for everything, from Batman to Fifty Shades, to be 'darker'?
Whenever I watch Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with my children, I reflect on how refreshing it is that the family is simply a happy family, comprising a devoted, if eccentric, father and his adventurous, delightfully un-complicated children. No issues. No 'journey' other than the really important one in a flying car.
I was reminded of this in frequent debates about detectives on GoodReads. Modern detectives always have baggage. Hercule Poirot didn't, other than his discreet predilection for voluptuous ladies. Miss Marple and Miss Silver? Baggage-free. Gratitude for their relatively comfortable lives and a commitment to help others less fortunate is their overriding driver. Even Sherlock Holmes, while a complicated figure, is more interested in the work than anything else.
And that's the way I like it. In my novel The Day The Earth Caught Cold, there's very little time for people to bother with their own back-stories - they are too busy grappling with the apocalyptic situation they have been thrown into. That said, a darker theme begins to make itself felt during the later sections of the book - in a world in which the past has been wiped, can you risk taking anyone else at their own valuation? Exactly who has done what to survive?This is the question my heroine, Catriona Lindsay, begins to ask herself with increasing frequency - although she seems only too happy to trust the good-looking ex-Naval operative she is thrown together with. (That's human nature for you.)
First person is good for exploring these sorts of doubts and insecurities. My current novel, The Crooked Man, is written in third person, which gives different possibilities for back-stories. But I am determined to avoid giving the protagonist, Xan Ross, too much baggage. As a former private security specialist who has tired of his profession and come to England for the first time since his childhood, he might easily be a bundle of repressed traumas and haunting childhood memories, but I'd rather he concentrated on unravelling the rather curious murder case that has accidentally come his way. That said, there's something slightly suspicious about the fact that he won't talk about his previous career - not to mention his reluctance to return to the small town in which he was born...
Whenever I watch Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with my children, I reflect on how refreshing it is that the family is simply a happy family, comprising a devoted, if eccentric, father and his adventurous, delightfully un-complicated children. No issues. No 'journey' other than the really important one in a flying car.
I was reminded of this in frequent debates about detectives on GoodReads. Modern detectives always have baggage. Hercule Poirot didn't, other than his discreet predilection for voluptuous ladies. Miss Marple and Miss Silver? Baggage-free. Gratitude for their relatively comfortable lives and a commitment to help others less fortunate is their overriding driver. Even Sherlock Holmes, while a complicated figure, is more interested in the work than anything else.
And that's the way I like it. In my novel The Day The Earth Caught Cold, there's very little time for people to bother with their own back-stories - they are too busy grappling with the apocalyptic situation they have been thrown into. That said, a darker theme begins to make itself felt during the later sections of the book - in a world in which the past has been wiped, can you risk taking anyone else at their own valuation? Exactly who has done what to survive?This is the question my heroine, Catriona Lindsay, begins to ask herself with increasing frequency - although she seems only too happy to trust the good-looking ex-Naval operative she is thrown together with. (That's human nature for you.)
First person is good for exploring these sorts of doubts and insecurities. My current novel, The Crooked Man, is written in third person, which gives different possibilities for back-stories. But I am determined to avoid giving the protagonist, Xan Ross, too much baggage. As a former private security specialist who has tired of his profession and come to England for the first time since his childhood, he might easily be a bundle of repressed traumas and haunting childhood memories, but I'd rather he concentrated on unravelling the rather curious murder case that has accidentally come his way. That said, there's something slightly suspicious about the fact that he won't talk about his previous career - not to mention his reluctance to return to the small town in which he was born...
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