"Morning Glory": Backstory Barriers

Staying out late yesterday and then losing an hour of sleep to Daylight Saving Time1 led to me not doing anything particularly postable today for NaCreSoMo, but I did put a little more work into Morning Glory and into “Okay, You Two”. So for today’s post I’ll talk a little about a specific problem I have with Morning Glory: backstories.

As I’ve mentioned before, Morning Glory was my first mystery, and as I’ve mentioned before, writing a mystery means keeping track of several possible worlds at once, one for the true events and one for each character’s guess at what’s going on. But one bit of feedback from my writing group is that while I have a lot of snappy dialogue and a lot of logic applied to solving the mystery, we still don’t know that much about the characters, which means none of them have enough context to really be suspects. Certainly some people are acting more suspicious than others, but it’s still a missing piece. So a lot of the more substantial editing I’ve been doing lately has been inserting more backstory for the main suspects, so that the reader has more to work with when considering them.

(Or not, since I’m giving them all more backstory. But still.)

The trouble I’m having now is that one character is introduced relatively late, and multiple people in the writing group have said they want to know more about them. However, I can’t find a good place to insert a conversation about that, and while the character isn’t exactly hiding their backstory, neither would they naturally bring it up themselves.2 Which is too bad, because it would help to understand the character better.

The group has had plenty of other critiques and suggestions, and some of them I’ve decided I’m just going to live with/without. But this is one where I might still try to find a way. And it’s my turn to submit again (it’s a big enough group that we have to take turns), so I’ll get another pile of feedback to start incorporating near the end of the month.

After that…we’ll see. Maybe I will share the story with everyone, even though the writing group has a few more chapters to go. Anyone interested? ;-)

Part of NaCreSoMo 2018.

  1. It’s not “Savings”. I know! I say “Daylight Savings” too but apparently that’s not really correct. Then again, if we just called it “summer time” we’d sidestep this problem entirely, though at the cost of being ambiguous with “summertime”. ↩︎

  2. “Themself”? ↩︎