Become the expert in your field of study and of the world you are developing. Make the notes for your world do the research. Use the characters to convey their expertise in their own proprietary language, which can add depth to a character and give a sense of what’s going on. Use a limited amount of shorthand that your readers will understand to convey what is going on. When dialogue sums everything up, the reader may wonder why he should bother to read on. It can be more fun to discover the world and plot along with the heroine than to have it all explained. Have faith in your characters, and even more faith in your readers. Even if I want to make sure that the reader is clear about time travel, a cumbersome description like this one only slows the action. In this example, we assume that John and Debby already know a great deal of the backstory and pertinent information because they are in the story. “All right.” John jumped out of his chair. Maybe they can divert more energy.”ĭebby did some quick calculations. “I think you need to contact Clare and Silas. It was nowhere near the 90 percent she needed. “Don’t know.” She glanced at the flux capacitor level and shook her head. “We don’t have enough energy here for Colleen to make the jump.”Īn alarm sounded, and Debby hit the panel to the left to silence it. Backstory, even in “active” dialogue, stops the present action.ĭebby frowned at the bank of blinking lights. To make matters worse, these types of monologues often take place in the middle of important action-and readers aren’t going to believe a character will stop and give a lecture when bullets are flying or buildings are blowing up around her. The main frame can handle up to 50 gigawatts, so that shouldn’t be a problem.” Also you need to contact Clare and Silas and make sure they can divert another 38 gigawatts of energy to the main frame so in one hundred hours she can make her jump back to the present. The flux capacitor is crucial for making a time jump, and needs to be at about 92 percent efficiency to work well. Just look at the flux capacitor levels-the microcosm indicator is off as well, and it needs to be at 90 percent for a guaranteed trip. “You know, John, that we can’t send people back in time without the right amount of energy, and even though we’ve done an excellent job in extracting energy from dark matter, as our last two experiments attest, I fear that there isn’t enough to get Colleen into the past and out of danger. Often the attempt to stuff backstory into dialogue results in long, tedious monologues instead of more believable two-way conversation.ĭebby started panicking. And readers still don’t want a backstory dump-even in dialogue. None of your characters should talk like the narrator. But instead of jettisoning their precious descriptions and explanations, they essentially put quotation marks around the same ponderous material. Aha, the author thinks, dialogue-of course! After all, dialogue is a great way to open in media resand cut to the good stuff. Then their editor suggests that instead of including all this material in the opening chapters of their book, they should just reveal the backstory through dialogue. They want to make sure the reader understands every feature of time travel or cloning in the year 2133. Or they want to make sure readers understand every nuance of Mexican politics in 1956 because it will be critical to the plot on page 103. They want to tell the reader all about the creation of their fantasy world. So many new writers start their books with pages-even chapters-of backstory.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |