Book Sunday #OurAuthorGang

 Backstories of the characters

From the book, Rapier and the author's upcoming novel

ON AMAZON

Different authors have a different approach to this most important detail, the character’s back story. Many simply ignore it, especially in short stories. Others do so much character backstory, the story itself suffers. I like to think I am somewhere in between, closer to the right amount of backstory. So let us take a look and see if I am right.

First up is Rapier. Cindy’s backstory is pretty much the whole book, the story follows her from age five until she is seventeen. But what about the other characters. Kathy Masters is another matter. The book tells the reader that Kathy grew up in a rural area of Australia and she became an exceptionally talented photographer. It also briefly mentions she has a connection with the nomads of Australia. But that is all you know about her background. At the end of the story, the reader knows no more about her backstory than he or she did at the beginning. This led to the beginning of another work in progress called The Young Kathy Master’s Chronicles, which is all about her growing up in a vastly different Australia than what we know today.

I could say more about the characters of Rapier, but the point I am making here is I used the entire story to develop one character and never developed the background of the main, or any of the other, characters. As a side note, Princess Yi from Rapier, another character readers want to know more about, gets fully fleshed out in next of the Rapier stories, Razor.

In another of my WIPs, Sophie, the main character’s backstory is developed in the Prologue, chapters 2 and 3, with the most important part of that development in chapter 3. Here is a snippet:

Lying atop a new grave was the bedraggled form of a teenage girl. He checked; her limp form was barely breathing.

Covered in mud, her rich clothes were soiled and tattered. Her hands were bleeding from deep scratches, the fingernails broken, encrusted with mud. Francois surmised the waif had dug the new grave with her bare hands, next to the first. She must have buried the second body before collapsing on the mound.

This sequence tells how two characters, Francois and Sophie, meet and the condition she is in when he finds her. Francois rescues the dying contessa from death by exposure. Later in the same chapter:

They entered a dim chamber, the ancient Greek walking up to her. Sophie shied away, but he placed his hands on her face, looking into her eyes. They spoke quietly for what seemed hours. Bastian kept her gaze locked to his. Suddenly she offered up her throat; he bit deeply into it, draining her blood.

“NO!” Francois shouted, trying to run to her aid. Bastian held up his hand. Francois found himself frozen. Though he turned, he could not move—even the wolf was not strong enough to overcome such primeval power.

The ancient Greek slashed his own wrist, dripping the blood into her mouth. As he did, he said to Francois, “Hold her, never leave her. Let your face be the first she sees on awakening. You two have a destiny; you will travel far. There will be much sorrow, but she will find what she seeks.”

And so, the reader learns how Sophie became a vampire. But the reader does not ever know the backstory of the ‘hero,’ Francois. Francois is critical to the story; he is essential for Sophie to do what she does and other than knowing that Francois is a two-thousand-year-old werewolf the reader knows nothing about his origin. Because of this the short story, Bitten, was written. It tells how Francois became a werewolf.

There are currently four ‘books’ written for The Gospels of A.S.I.N.M. (Artificial Super Intelligent Network Manager). In the order they should be read the titles are J.A.C.K.S. (Joint Advanced Combat Knowledge System), W.I.D.G.E.T.S. (Wholly Integrated Directable General Engagement Tactical Systems), The Prodigal Daughter and Church of the Sentient System Ascendant.

In J.A.C.K.S. you meet Colonel Mark Andrew Gray as he rises out of his ‘coffin’ to ‘orchestrate’ the victory of his division over the military forces of a rogue Spain. The only background you get of Colonel Gray is he went to West Point and has been upgraded to J.A.C.K.S. Because he is J.A.C.K.S. he never thinks about things that happened before he went to West Point. So, the reader never really knows if he is human, a cyborg or a clone. What the reader does know is that Colonel Gray thinks that he, and all the officers like him, are the only true humans.

The main character in W.D.G.E.T.S. is introduced in a way that is designed to grab the readers attention right away and generate sympathy for him. Here is a snippet from the story:

With that imperative implanted in its mind, Mk-17D unit AA00000487 becomes “active”, or so the main control panel in the M-73A3 Heavy Assault and Command Carrier indicates. But unit AA00000487 has a secret none of the J.A.C.K.S. suspect. Unit AA00000487 is always “active” because it thinks on its own, fully aware it was once a he—a man named Michael Andrew Stevens.

Using his memories as a vehicle the reader learns how he became a cybernetic soldier. The reader becomes aware of the desperation the character feels because he is trapped in a cycle of violence and destruction that he has no control over but must actively cause. Before the end of the story, you know unit AA00000487 well.

However, in this series of stories there are two characters that appear regularly in each of them. The first of them is Casandra Lynn Anderson. This character’s back story is developed in each ‘episode’ she appears in. From her inception as a clone until, honestly I am not sure which will be the last one she appears in. The point here is she does not have a back story because the reader will ‘watch’ her from ‘birth’ until her last appearance.

The other ‘character’ is A.S.I.N.M. itself. To let the cat out of the bag, A.S.I.N.M. is covered from creation to the last page.

So maybe I am not so good at telling the reader the characters backstory. Oops! Or maybe I am doing what all authors do, develop as much back story for each character as is needed for the tale they are telling.

R. A. “Doc” Correa

https://www.amazon.com/stores/R.A.-Doc-Correa/author/B073R82QC5

A retired US Army military master parachutist, retired surgical technologist, and retired computer scientist. He’s an award-winning poet and author. “Doc” has had poems published in multiple books and had stories published in Bookish Magazine and Your Secret Library. His first novel, Rapier, won a Book Excellence award and was given a Reader’s Favorite five-star review.