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Philippa East posted an update in the group
December SloMo 7 years, 4 months ago Ug. Today I feel like I’ve gone backwards in my editing process. I’ve put in my three hours, but most of that was spent unearthing problems in my “back-plot” (or lack thereof) that have now thrown the other plot threads out of whack.
I feel like I’ve discovered dry rot and woodworm in a house I’m trying to redecorate.
How much backstory “fudging” do you think we can reasonably get away with? I mean, like, if every single detail about the characters’ lives in the eight years up to the start of the story doesn’t perfectly hang together in your plot, is that bad??
I’m worried that’s bad.
FWIW I guess this is what happens when you totally pants a novel and then try to cannabilise the whole thing through a total rewrite.
Feck.
How are the rest of you doing?!
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I’m actually reducing the number of words in my WIP which had reached around 50,000 (guess why) and has now shrunk to about 30,000 – rapidly. Work on it has stopped while I think about my Room With A View entry (836 words right now), and I have to get a first chapter in some kind of shape for a writers’ w/e in January (If anybody has a moment there’s a group called the Memory Thing with a very raw piece of text. Sorry it’s a private group with all the joining hassle but I’d love some feedback)
Oh yuck to backstories! Hope you are feeling less yucky about it today @philippaeast. I don’t know. I don’t think we need to know everything about a secondary character’s past, as long as their character and story are ‘real’ to us. Apart from bits of their past that are relevant, obv. I figure I don’t know everything about a friend’s past, but I know everything about mine (in theory), and I know everything about our relationship (in theory), so it’s the same for secondary and main characters, right?
That is definitely an issue with launching into an unplanned story: the pain of squashing continuity errors, conflicts and missing detail. I think you can get away with quite a lot as long as there are no bugs. If your MC was two years old in the year 2000 but somehow was in favour of staying in the EEC in 1975 then you have some explaining. If you don’t say what your MC did before the age of 5 – not so much. And I think Raine has got it just right about what the focus for back story should be like – mostly anyway.
This is one of the reasons my previous WIP is having a rest. I kept finding that as I extended the story line in one direction it needed tweaking in some previous writing, or an explanation, or worse I hadn’t spotted the issue until too late and a major rewrite was needed.
Hah hah @raine, who said anything about secondary characters?! These are my main characters I’m talking about! But hopefully as @athelstone says, it’s about there not being obvious “bugs” in the writing. Yeah the issue I stumbled into was that, psychologically, a particular character arc made sense if certain events happened when her child was about six or seven, but when I looked at the timeline it turned out her kid would only have been about two! Dammit. I’ve worked out a way around it, and hopefully it won’t show in the text. It just doesn’t feel quite as emotionally convincing and satisfying to me as I would have liked. Thanks guys, for your support. I did have a better day yesterday when I wasn’t getting so immersed in the detail, and today I’ve allowed myself a day off which I think was probably a good thing. Hope you two are getting on okay.