Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Wednesday's Links to Writing & Marketing Blog Posts


By: Roz Morris

Back story is events that have happened before the narrative starts. Most stories have it—because they rarely start from the beginning of a character’s life. However, writers tend to misuse it or include too much.

There are two fundamental questions with back story. The first is how to present it (e.g., a vivid flashback), and the second is whether those back story events should be used as part of the main plot.

Here are 4 ways that back story might be sabotaging your novel’s effectiveness.

1.   Your novel’s most engaging events are buried in a summary of back story.

I often see manuscripts where the writer has invented a detailed and dramatic back story for a character, but the main story events lack impact and substance. There is no meat left for the book’s real-time plot and so the novel seems empty and static. Of course, the story may be precisely that; the character might be coming to terms with past mistakes. The focus might be the finer detail of living with a burden, or leaving behind a golden period that is gone forever. But just as often, this approach is not deliberate and the writer is scrabbling around, trying to find stuff for the characters to do. They don’t realize they’ve already got fantastic ideas, but hidden them in the back story.

Could that back story be used as a fully fleshed flashback so the reader could participate? Or, more radically, could those same ideas be extracted from the past and reworked as a forward-moving plot? Consider whether your back story ideas should be front story.

2. Your novel relies on back story and secret wounds instead of character development.

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Read the full article HERE!  
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If you missed my writing & marketing tweets and retweets yesterday, here they are again:
  1. I Love Typography » Blog Archive Apostrophes don't swing both ways — I Love Typography http://ow.ly/IpFvG
  2. Are You Leaving This Crucial Ingredient Out of Your Book’s First Chapter? - Helping Writers Become Authors http://ow.ly/IpKaQ
  3. Karen Woodward: Three Kinds of Micro Fiction: The Drabble, 55 Fiction and The Twabble http://ow.ly/IpKQ5
  4. Branding 101: What’s Your Story? | Jami Gold, Paranormal Author http://ow.ly/IpLcu
  5. Writer Unboxed » Six Things Every Writer Needs to Succeed (Psst: MFA is not on this list.) http://ow.ly/IpLKh
  6. Does A ‘Writing Community’ Really Foster Writing? Or Community? | Thought Catalog http://ow.ly/IpMhA
  7. Finding the Hero : Women Writers, Women's Books http://ow.ly/IpMEK
  8. Facebook News Feed Changes (and What it Means for Pages) - Amy Porterfield http://ow.ly/IpN4z
  9. Kidlit · Positive Versus Negative Description http://ow.ly/IpNsn
  10. How To Write Fascinating Amazon Book Listings http://ow.ly/IpNMC
  11. Your Inner Author Nagging - Books & Such Literary Management : Books & Such Literary Management http://ow.ly/IpOuy
  12. Author, Jody Hedlund: Do Writers REALLY Need to Use Social Media Anymore? http://ow.ly/IpQ5A
  13. How to Tell if Back Story is Sabotaging Your Novel http://ow.ly/IpQk4
  14. Winning the Plagiarism Battle | Author Marketing Experts, Inc. http://ow.ly/IpSnq
  15. Helping Writers Become Authors - Write your best story. Change your life. Astound the world. http://ow.ly/IpSBj
  16. BookMarketingBuzzBlog: When Books Make Asses of Us http://ow.ly/IpSZv
  17. Q&A with Author & Editor Victoria Zackheim | by Chris Jane http://ow.ly/IpTkS 5 Questions on Writing
  18. The Must-Read Story for Writers with an "Impossible" Dream: Walter Reuben and "The David Whiting Story" http://ow.ly/IpTQB
  19. How much do you know about book marketing? - Build Book Buzz http://ow.ly/IpUJ6
  20. Talking Self-Publishing, Doing Rewrites | Catherine, Caffeinated http://ow.ly/IpV5i
  21. Writer Unboxed » Monotasking: The Forgotten Skill You (and I) Need to Re-Claim, ASAP http://ow.ly/IpVfV
  22. The Story Grid. How To Tell A Story And Edit Your Fiction With Shawn Coyne | The Creative Penn http://ow.ly/IpVtm
  23. When Your Novel Writing Clicks | WritersDigest.com http://ow.ly/IpW9z
  24. What’s the Biggest Lie You Tell Yourself? | Jami Gold, Paranormal Author http://ow.ly/IqTh6
  25. How To Write Great Content: 20 Tips From Famous Writers http://ow.ly/IriIF
Happy writing and running, Kathy 

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