WATCH YOUR BACK

I'm going to borrow a page from Bethany's book (pun intended) and indulge in a minor rant. Please, don't expect the same caliber -- I am but a soap box novice next to her way with cutting wit and observation, but this week I had a major disappointment and it went like this:

I borrowed a book from the library by one of my top five favorite authors. This is a guy I read all the time, I enjoy his continuing charcaters, his premise and his writing style (apart from his use of parathenses within POV. That always yells author intrusion to me.) Anyway, while going through his book list on Amazon I found I'd missed a book that came out a couple of years ago.

At the same time I started this book, I was hip deep in my own book, plotting the backstory. The husband in my book never makes a single scene except for the one where they come across his body, but what he's done with his life is the major catalyst behind the whole book. This character is loosely based on a real con man extroidanairre, but even then needed a lot of research and work. I know where my character was born, where he went to school, how he got started bending the rules and then breaking them. I know what events sent him into the current book's scope to create the on scene character's diemmas. That's all backstory, and mind you, it's not how he walks or chews gum, but the very fabric of his life that made him who he is. His story is backstory.

***It's up to me to leave hints that the other characters uncover so they can reconstruct the past and figure out how to stop the current mayhem.*** I am highlighting this aspect because this is where backstory ends and current story begins.

My book starts at the point of time where everything that's come before hits critcal mass and the world begins to unravel. Not just his, but the lives of the people around him.

This well known author I'm talking about, a man who has written award winning books, started his book with all that basckstory, giving us one scene after another baed in the far distant past. Not as a teaser. Not as action to prepare us for non-action. Not as forewarning. Just because he didn't (apparently) trust his charcters to discover the truths they would need to know. No, I'll go further. Because he didn't trust his readers to take the journey with him.

This book did not really get going until well after page fifty, and to make it worse, every time one of the characters finally revealed their piece of knowledge about the past we all ready knew it, we'd read it a hundred pages before! We'd even witnessed it! Merciful heavens, how this guts a plot.

You kind of expect this kind of thing from newbies. I know I did it, I know the temptation to include all those wonderful scenes and the action is hypnotic -- sometimes it seems the backstory is so much more interesting than what happens in the book and it feels wrong not to include it. But it is wrong and it's precisely because of what it does to the rest of the book. Your reader is reading -- not only in mysteries but in other genres -- to discover the questions and answers for themselves. If you hand them over before the book starts there's not much for them to do look at the words and wish they couldn't anticipate every single thing that was about to happen.

So, Wavy, for you perhaps it's an over the top hero or any one of a dozen other devices a writer -- almost any writer -- occassionaly slips into. For me it's this backstory issue. A good book needs a hell of a backstory. And an even better book needs to reveal it properly. In my opinion, this man's editor let him down big time, but frankly, I just can't imagine what he was thinking.

Agree? Disagree? Have an even bigger and badder issue that tears you from a book?

Do tell…..