The Sue Grafton Project: B is for Backstory

Here’s a nice surprise. When I went to update my website this past weekend, a note from Sue Grafton herself was waiting for me. “I’m pleased, flattered, and curious” about the Sue Grafton Project, she wrote. Was there anything she could do to help?

After I let her know this month’s blog topic, Grafton generously shared some notes of her own about backstory in a mystery series. So, this month, let’s begin with Sue herself.

Every mystery takes place on three levels: what really happened, what appears to have happened, and how the sleuth figures out which is which. I start with what really happened because until I’m thoroughly acquainted with that core story line, I can’t proceed.  The tricky aspect to murder (from both the killer’s and the writer’s point of view) is that the drive to take a life is usually critically important to the perpetrator of the crime. And if the determination is that strong, it’s usually obvious to the police who are very very smart. So the question is, how does the killer disguise his motive? If s/he’s driven by strong emotion, chances are someone else is aware of it which puts the killer in danger of being caught. If the motivation is money, that’s easily traced…unless the writer has a clever way to hide it. To cover a crime or to protect someone else? The set-up becomes more interesting. There are other motives, of course, but you need something solid and credible to jump-start a novel…and it better be subtle at the same time.

As if this thoughtful analysis weren’t enough, Sue sent me another email a little later, where she added, Most literary killers don’t have big stinkin’ public fights with their victims mere days before they do the deed. Most of us inclined to homicide are much more devious.

Note that Grafton does not consider backstory to be everything that ever happened to a character, but only what matters to this particular story. I mention this because, when writers realize just how much backstory can inform front story, they often get carried away. I could name a number of recently published books (all, for some reason I’ll not explore here, by men) where backstory meanders hither and yon—even though its bearing on what’s at stake in the novel matters only to the author.

Whether you’re writing character-driven literary fiction or plot-driven genre fiction, what happened before the book began is the reason the narrative begins where it does. In a murder mystery, there’s gotta be a body—and a killer—and there’s a lesson there for all of us. What happened before that brings us to this particular now? Thank you, Sue Grafton, for reminding me—and our readers—that backstory is the key to a front story that works.

The third week of each month for the foreseeable future, I’ll be blogging about the Sue Grafton Project, and what rereading the alphabet series has taught me about writing. Next month, I’ll be looking at C…for Characters. Hope you’ll join me!