#247 - Backstory and an Avatar's Wants, Needs, and Desires

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[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:00] TG: Hello and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you level up your craft as a writer. My name is Tim Grahl, and I'm a writer and the behind the scenes guy here at Story Grid. This podcast episode is hosted by Story Grid certified editor, Kimberly Kessler, alongside Shawn Coyne, the founder of Story Grid, and an editor with over 30 years of experience. 

In this episode, Kim and Shawn discuss backstory and the characters’ wants, needs and desires. Before we jump in, I want to recommend you pick up a copy of our book, What's the Big Idea?: Nonfiction Condensed, by Leslie Watts and Shelley Sperry. Inside this book, you'll find a crash course explaining how to know what kind of nonfiction you’re to writing. You'll discover which scenes, characters and other elements you must include. And you'll learn to shape a compelling beginning, middle and end that will enlighten your readers with the revelation they weren't expecting. You can get 20% off What's the Big Idea and all of our books at storygrid.com/books with the coupon code PODCAST. Okay, that's all in the announcements. So let me turn it over to Kim and Shawn.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:01:10] KK: Okay, Shawn, we are back. And we're talking about wants, and needs, and desires. And I can tell, I was been thinking about it. And it makes me really emotional to talk about this stuff, because it just feels so true, and just true to life. So I think the thing that I really wanted to ask you about is kind of maybe a more practical matter, right? So what is the role of backstory, and how it informs our wants, needs and desires of our protagonists and other characters? And also, how do you see using it on the page in a story?

[00:01:48] SC: Well, that's a great question. Okay, I'm going to have to walk through sort of a generic example. 

[00:01:54] KK: Okay. 

[00:01:55] SC: So the way everyday experience works is that there's a stimulus. So I'm walking down the street and let's say I see my old college roommate coming the other way. So that stimulus sort of penetrates my Markov blankets of my perceptual perceptions, right? My perceiving. And what happens? Well, that's a known stimulus to me. And so as I see him, my agency, meaning sort of my mind, goes through a number of different functional stages. 

Okay. So stage number one is just the photons that are my friend, Frank, come through my visual cortex. And I have an autonomic unconscious response, which is an elevation of hedonic tone. I feel, “Oh!” right? I get a nice little jolt of goodness, right? And then the next thing that happens is that, actually, I don't get goodness at that point. I just get familiarity. That's something I know. Okay. And then the next jolt is limbic. And I get a feeling of pleasure, “Oh, that's something I know. And it's good.” 

And then I get, “Oh my gosh!” Then my brain goes from limbic up into sort of like my mind three, and then it does a search function. And it goes into my RAM, my random-access memory, right? My working memory goes, “What's that? I haven't seen that in a while.” And then it goes further back into my long-term episodic memory and it pulls up these things of my friend, Frank, right? And then that rushes all the way back. And now I am now experiencing that's my friend, Frank. 

Okay. So if I'm telling that story on the page, I've got a bunch of options. I could report to the audience as the author, “Shawn was walking down the street and he saw his friend, Frank, coming the other way.” Or I could write in first person and say, “As I was walking down the street one day, I caught a familiar face that reminded me of blah-blah-blah-blah-blah,” backstory. 

So the practical matter of writing backstory is that it has to be stimulated on the surface in the moment. Instead of saying, “When Sean went to college, he had a friend named Frank. And Frank used to blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.” One day, Shawn, walking down the street, saw his friend, Frank.” You see what I'm saying? So that way it flows with within the narrative as opposed to it being imposed by the author or artist. And you can do the same thing with flash forward, which is emulation, right? 

[00:05:02] KK: Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah. I love those.

[00:05:04] SC: So let's say instead of seeing Frank, I see someone who looks like Frank. Oh, if that were Frank, what would I do? 

[00:05:12] KK: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:05:14] SC: So that's kind of like a very broad abstract heuristic about how to deal with backstory. So there's a famous screenwriter who wrote Midnight Cowboy. His name escapes me right now. But he always said, “Flashbacks have to be in the moment. They have to be generated by stimulus in the narrative action that's flowing on the surface movement of time.”

[00:05:37] KK: Okay. Yeah, that's right. So how do you deal with – And I guess these become devices, right? Different ways of telling a story. So something rather than you have your backstory that's stimulated, in the moment, on the surface, within a specific scene, versus like a dual timeline kind of story where you're sort of telling the story in the past and you're also telling a story in the present or something. So yeah, I don't know, just kind of what do you see as like the pros, cons, pitfalls, whatever of kind of like how to decide how much backstory, I guess, is going to play into a story? 

[00:06:19] SC: Well, you have to remember that what a story generally is, it's a deterministic discontinuous function. And all that means is that the artist author is God. So they get to, and they have to. They have to make all of the cause and effect choices in the storytelling itself. So there can be no ambiguity. And when people say, “Well, I was trying to leave it ambiguous.” That's a cop out, because that means you have no controlling idea, and you have no signal that you wish to send to the audience. 

[00:06:58] KK: Right? Thank you. 

[00:07:00] SC: Right. It’s just like, “Well, then why right at all?” Because if you don't have anything to say, just confusing people with ambiguity is we can do that by just logging on to the Internet. I mean, there’s massive ambiguity all time. 

[00:07:15] KK: There’s enough confusing ambiguity.

[00:07:18] SC: There's no clear signal, right? People want clear signal when they come to a story. That's why they come to the story, right? They want a clear controlling idea. They want a godlike figure to tell them how it is and why it is and explain to them their point, right? That's what the controlling idea is. So it's wonderful, because there's no worry about God. There is a God in the story. And the God is artist/author. They get to make all the choices, and they have to make them all.

[00:07:51] KK: Right. They get to and they have to. 

[00:07:52] SC: Yes. Now, the discontinuity comes in here is that you don't want to put in things that aren't important. So discontinuity enables the artist/author to be able to tell a story without linearity, because you leave out all the boring stuff. So you get to cut all the places in the story that are stupid. Like when they go and take a shower, and get ready for the day, and make their breakfast. You don't put that in the story. You just put in the good stuff. So the trick is to have the thread to keep the discontinuity feel as if it's continuous. 

So a higher level, a very, very good storyteller, is a master at being able to create discontinuity. And so the devices of moving in and through time are really the masterwork of really great writers, really great storytellers able to do that function. You have to master the function of discontinuity before you can do those higher-level chapter one set in 1918, chapter two set in 2023, and then have them converge on page 564 in a way that blows everybody's mind. Like, “Okay. Yeah, awesome. But why don’t you write a good scene first before you tackle something of that quality?” Yeah. 

So the trick is not, ironically, exactly what we just discussed about putting in a flashback. Like if you can manage flashbacks and flash forwards in a series of beats that develop into a series of tropes that create a scene, then the chances are, that in the future, you'll be able to do something really cool like that sort of macro manipulation of multiple character point of views, like George RR Martin. Don't try that. 

[00:09:59] KK: Right. It’s very complicated. 

[00:10:02] SC: Yeah. It’s 30 years to be able to make that signal of every single character's point of view so crisp, clean and clear that you can read them without having any introductory or interstitial tissue to tell you who is who and why. It’s a masterwork that people just kind of look like, “Oh, it's a fantasy.” No, man. That is like, “Whoa!”

[00:10:28] KK: Yeah. I love that you named it that way. Right? That you just drop in with a character and you acclimate to them so quickly. Yeah, that's really, really cool. And I think, what would you say the key to that is like? I mean, skills like specificity feels like – I don’t know. Just really getting in the moment and getting really – I don't know. Like I have to go back and look at a scene. But yeah, I don't know. I guess what comes to mind to you as the key to that?

[00:10:55] SC: The key to? I'm sorry? The key to – 

[00:10:58] KK: Oh, sorry. Yeah. No. Just the key to like what George RR Martin's doing to make you so acclimated to a character right away, like you said, without all the introductory this was so and so. And – 

[00:11:07] SC: Oh, it's just valence and language. It’s simply that. And that sounds like such an off the cuff kind of thing. But it's such a crystal-clear technique, but so few people do it.

[00:11:22] KK: What do you mean by valence of language?

[00:11:24] SC: To have very, very clear, positive or negative energy attached to the qualifications of nouns and verbs.

[00:11:32] KK: Oh, interesting.

[00:11:34] SC: “He looked at her passionately.” Okay. Could you be more specific? Looked? What kind of look? Her, can you be more specific? Passionately, that's just an adverb that's trying to pump up the energy of looked. So it's very soft, wet, boring. flimsy, placid. Not so good. Whereas, Hitler – Like I'm just throwing out a valence word, right?

[00:12:07] KK: Right. Right. Right. 

[00:12:08] SC: Slaughtered. And you can take it from there. Or Cleopatra seduced, you know? These are valence two words that give a very clear signal, a lot of hum to them. Now I do have a theory about why this is so difficult for people, and it's because we're in a culture that is telling everyone not to judge. It's not cool to judge other people. But the reality is, is that's the only way we can navigate the world.

[00:12:40] KK: Right. That’s really an interesting conundrum. 

[00:12:43] SC: Don’t be biased. Don't be biased. It's like I don't know how not to be biased. I don't like barley bars. I prefer chocolate cake. Does that mean I'm judgy? Or does it mean that I have clear defined valences that I understand can bring me certain hedonic tones? So if you're trying to get signal to somebody else to explain to them why you're upset, or why you're happy, or why you're sad, or why you're whatever. Use language that really gives a lot of energy to it. So valence language just means kick it up. Use verbs that are powerful. You can always bring them down. It's much easier to bring them down. But when you write with no passion, no valence, no qualifications, no metaphors that are really disgusting, or wonderful, or chaotic, or complex, or ordered. That's the other thing he does, right? 

So in every sentence, there's a declarative quality to it. A simple declaration of objective fact, “He looked at her.” That's a declaration of reported action. And then you put qualification all around that. So you change that declaration and you add a lot of juice in the qualifications. So the qualifications could be metaphors. “He looked at her as if she were a pumpkin on Halloween.” Right? Or, “She was such a slob that –” Like use some qualification of the language in a way that is very clear and sends a lot of energy. Instead of, “He wasn't quite sure that she might not be the one that could be the one that he fell in love with.” 

[00:14:45] KK: Right, right, right. 

[00:14:47] SC: It’s like, “What?” Just try and parse that in your own mind. This goes back to what we talked about a while ago, Kim, which is the I thou relationship between the author and the audience. Think of what the audience has to endure with your prose. Can they make sense of what the hell you're trying to say? Can they follow visually?

The other day, I read something, and it was like a little kid was in a car. And the next sentence was, “He hugged his mom.” I'm like, “But he's in the backseat. How's he going to hug his mom?” 

[00:15:20] KK: Right. How is he going to do that? So that's interesting. You're talking about discontinuousness, right? But also, sometimes you're going to need some continuity. Otherwise they're going to go, “Well, I don't get it, because he was just in the back of the car. And now he's hugging his mom. How did he do that?” right? So that's interesting.

[00:15:38] SC: Well, it’s the continuity of motor action, and the continuity of dialogue or monologue. So what you're basically doing is you're doing an edit function. So you're slicing out moments of event. And an event is a cause and effect kind of deal. So there's a beginning, middle and an end in an event. And so you need to frame the event and make it continuous. But then you can use this interstitial tissue of exposition to stitch these sort of sliced out units of events together. So that's how the discontinuity works is through the movement of sort of world building, camera shifting, and transitional kind of exposition that does that function for you.

[00:16:28] KK: Mm-hmm. So a follow up to the valence of language, it seems like in order to really be able to put those qualifications on language and know, “Okay, this really needs to be positive language or negative language to really make the your audience have this experience that you really need to know then what your character wants, and what their motivation is, and what their current frame of mind is and being really clear as you sit down to write, or at least certainly in revisions.” Does that ring true to you?

[00:17:03] SC: Yeah, there's a heuristic that you can use. And who's winning? Who won the scene? Who won the value? If I value quiet, and you value conversation, who's going to win? Who wins at the end of the scene? And so the want, that's where conflict comes in, right? So if both characters want the same thing and there's no opposing force to get for them getting what they want, then it's not very interesting to read. They both liked ice cream. So they decided to go to the ice cream store and get stuff. Do you want to read a story about, “Hey, Kim, do you want to go get some ice cream?” “Sure, Shawn. I love ice cream. What flavor you think you're going to get?” “Not really sure.” “Oh, here we are at the ice cream store. What are you going to have?”

[00:17:52] KK: I'd like to lick that, but not read that, right?

[00:17:53] SC: Yeah. But people will say, “Well, there's a beginning, middle and end.” At the beginning, they don't have ice cream. And at the end, they do. What’s the problem? The value shift from no ice cream to ice cream. I'm like there's no conflict, because the two people want the same thing. But if Kim wants coffee, and Shawn wants ice cream, now you've got a scene.

[00:18:15] KK: Right, right. Okay. 

[00:18:17] SC: It’s not very interesting, but it's a scene. 

[00:18:19] KK: But it could be. Who knows what sort of linear patterns would come up, right? 

[00:18:25] SC: Yeah. 

[OUTRO]

[00:18:26] KK: Thanks for listening to this episode of The Story grid podcast. If your heart is set on telling an internal genre story, but is struggling with how to get it on the page, I invite you to connect with me for a free consult at kimberkessler.com. That's K-I-M-B-E-R-K-E-S-S-L-E-R.com. For everything story grid related, check out storygrid.com. And make sure to pick up a copy of the book and sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss anything happening in the Story Grid universe. Also, make sure you go to storygrid.com/books to see all the titles that we've released through Story Grid publishing. If you'd like to check out the show notes for this episode or any past episodes, all of that can be found at storygrid.com/podcast. If you'd like to reach out to us directly, you can find us on Twitter @storygrid. And lastly, if you would like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcasts and leaving a rating and review. 

Thanks so much for subscribing and being a part of our work here at Story Grid. We'll see you next week.

[END]