THIS IS US is a BOUNTY of BACKSTORY
In writer’s parlance, backstory is everything the has happened to the main character (MC) when a novel begins. It is everything that flows through their arteries and veins and makes up the thoughts, emotions and pains that person has experienced. Back story has formed them. As I say in my work-in-progress (WIP)–“There was dilemma with all of it, Ella knew, for in many ways the past had formed you—there was no escaping it.” And that’s on page 48. The reader already sees the foibles and problems of each character. And though it’s nice to think a person can re-create herself, well maybe. But the past never goes away.
That’s true in life and in the world of the story. But in writing there are these dubious RULES attached to backstory–that you can’t use it in the first sentence, on the first page, etc etc. You have to be immediate to pull the reader in. The reader isn’t interested in back story. The reader wants to know “the now.”
Some of this is true, but Dan Fogelman, the writer of THIS IS US, certainly knows the POWER OF BACK STORY and how to use it. That’s why we are in the third season and aching for more.
We knew the father of this family, of Kate, Kevin and Randall, had been in Viet Nam. So okay, we knew that. But now Fogelman is using that, is GOING BACK, creating powerful tension by relating WHY Jack Pearson (Milo Ventimiglia) went to Viet Nam in the first place. He did have a medical deferment because of occasional tachycardia. But he went for his brother, for Nick Pearson. The season starts with Nick’s fear of being drafted. It’s about THE LOTTERY.
Some of you won’t have any idea what that was, but it affected many lives, including mine. Viet Nam was not a war that many young men were eager to fight. The draft, however, was up and running, and unless you had a deferment like Jack’s, you went. Until rioting swept the country and a change was made–a lottery was held. This happened on December 1, 1969. My future husband and I were in love and in college. John had deferments for college, but this lottery would be fairer, school deferments would go away.
I remember being in my family’s living room, watching the television. The drawing was held at the Selective Service National Headquarters in Washington, D.C. All men between the ages of 18 and 26 were in this pool. And how did it work? The first birthday in a year of 365 days that was pulled from a box of all 365 would become number 1. This determined the order of call for induction during calendar year 1970.
Covered by radio, film, and TV, capsules were drawn, opened, and the dates inside posted in order. The first capsule – drawn by Congressman Alexander Pirnie (R-NY) of the House Armed Services Committee – contained the date September 14, so all men born on September 14 in any year between 1944 and 1950 were assigned lottery number 1. The drawing continued until all days of the year had been paired with sequence numbers. My husband drew 364. He would not be drafted!
BACK STORY, FOGELMAN’S FORTE
It has been written that often characters function at a level of morality that is really just moral inertia. They do things out of habit, out of biology. They do not make choices. A good writer creates a character that must make a choice, a hard choice. Thus Jack, despite his cardiac condition, purposefully gets drafted so he can go to Viet Nam to discover how his brother is doing. And that begins an entire new story for season three. We learn more about Jack and Nick’s parents, how they were raised. BACK STORY!! And now there’s this chain and medal Jack wore and a photo of a Vietnam woman wearing it–the secrets increase, we can’t wait for another Tuesday night to arrive.
STORY IS REAL LIFE DISGUISED, IMAGINED
Freud wrote: “Every child in his play behaves like a poet, as he creates his own world, or to put it more correctly, as he transposes the elements forming his world into new order, more pleasing and suitable to him.”
I find a clue to my own “writing life” in this quote. As a child, PRETENDING was my forte. With my younger brother agreeing, I could imagine the corner of our dining room to be my “house” where I was a mother and ruled the scene. (Sorry, a very female poet, I agree.) But my brother and I also were enamored of Davey Crockett and one coonskin cap could create an entire world of adventure, even in the winter when we were confined to playing in the upstair hallway or on the stairs. IMAGINATION!!
Later, I was always about MAKING THINGS UP, with a few props. I wrote a play in the early grades and performed it with my friend Jean in our basement. We even charged admission. We had too much fun creating our own world on stage or riding bikes that were really horses, or hiding behind the mock orange bushes that were really our hide-out.
DAN FOGELMAN and VIET NAM
Fogelman has always used his own experience in his writing. Too young for Viet Name, he had read Tim O’Brien’s THE THINGS THEY CARRIED, and wanted him to consult on the scripts. O’Brien had agreed to consult for one week, to help shape the story.
“We had an idea of how we wanted to get from A to B but not how we wanted to get there,” said Fogelman of how O’Brien contributed to the story — adding that now O’Brien is a fixture in the room. “He’s now writing episodes. He’s now reading scripts that have nothing to do with [Vietnam] — like, he’s giving notes on Kate storylines,” Fogelman said recently. O’Brien said he was impressed with how seriously Fogelman and his staff wanted to portray an authentic Vietnam experience. “I thought it was amazingly subtle, no mistakes. Most veterans would see [typical depictions of Vietnam] and go, ‘Oh, it doesn’t happen that way, nobody would react that way,'” O’Brien said — but not on This Is Us. “It felt like a dream of your own life. It was an amazing experience.”
IT’S ALL HOW YOU HANDLE BACK STORY
Milo Ventimiglia who plays Jack Pearson, talked about his own father’s experience as a veteran. “My dad and I have spoken quite a bit about his experience in war. I’ve got a lot of friends that are veterans of current conflicts as well as on active duty, so I get it from all sides,The one thing that I always try and do is just bring in the emotional responsibility to represent what they’ve been through in what I do as an actor and playing a fictional character.”
The research, the sensitivity to issues that both writer and actor are considering gives even more power to the stories that we experience while watching, THIS IS US. And though I might struggle now and again with how to incorporate BACK STORY into my own work, I know how valuable it is, how decisions, secrets, hurts and successes can determine the decisions we make in the future. Fogelman gets this too. And with his penchant for research and authenticity, he has a gold mine of scripts already written and probably swimming around in his creative brain.
Fogelman has realized the bounty of backstory and is using it to profound effect. I know I’ll keep watching. Falling in love with the work of a genius can inspire one that is still learning her craft.
THANKS TO GOOGLE TV BANNERS
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