Backstory

By Jay Stringer

So, I watched the Veronica Mars movie over the weekend. You can hear me talk about it on the Fuzzy Typewriter podcast (link to come). Short version of a long chat- I loved the film, but on it's own terms, as a chance to spend more time with those characters and that world, not as a classic stand-alone film.

It got me thinking, not for the first time, of backstory.

It's something I fought with a lot while writing the Eoin Miller Trilogy. The series is cumulative, each book informs the next, but they all needed to work as stand-alone novels. And where was I going to draw the line? How was I going to balance how to give old information to new readers without alienating existing readers or derailing the story.

I fought with that concept all the way up until the second draft of Lost City when I realised- It doesn't matter.

We make it matter. We stress about it. We put needless time and energy into it. Whenever we're dealing with existing characters -be it a book series, a film sequel, an adaptation- we debate how much we need to reveal, when we need to reveal it. Comic book writers and readers always discuss how much they need to recap old events, and when those characters are translated to film, we've seen a great many of the fail under the weight of backstory.

Veronica Mars is a lot of fun as a film, but it opens with a monologue that tells us what happened during the three seasons of the TV show. By the time the first scene opens, we've already been given a tonne of backstory up front.

You know what? Forget it. Don't worry about it.

Every story that we ever encounter has backstory. Every great film, book, comic or play. Chinatown has an epic backstory, one that is revealed slowly throughout the film and helps us to understand the characters. Story is backstory. It's what has formed our characters and our plot. And part of the art of storytelling is revealing that at the right time, in the right place, through the course of the story.

But for some reason, when we come to returning to old characters -or translating them to a new medium- we forget this. We start to panic. But what if the new viewers or readers don't know the history? That means they won't get it? Of course they will. Just as they do in every story ever told. It doesn't matter if it's a sequel, a reboot or an adaptation; Just tell your story. Tell your best story, and tell it as if this is the first time you've ever told it. Think, if this was the first time I was writing these characters, where would I reveal the past? How little could I get away with revealing? What is it that will inform the present?

Trust yourself and trust your reader, or viewer. We don't need a recap, we just need your "A game."

Catching Up- Veronica Mars

By Jay Stringer

I've been on a run of deep, moody or depressing posts lately. Also I've been hustling to sell my book. Something a bit lighter and easier to digest  this week.

I've been told many times to watch Veronica Mars. It's one of those shows that's been talked about around me so often that sometimes I've even begun to think I had watched it, and had opinions on it. A few people have assumed that one of the characters in my books is named after her. After all the hoohah about the kickstarter campaign, I decided it was time to finally sit and watch some of it. I bought the first season through itunes, and a few days later I'd watched the whole thing.

Man, what a fun show. It's clever and witty and it does one of the most important things in mystery fiction -it makes you give a shit. It strikes me that the difference between good mystery fiction and bad mystery fiction isn't how clever or simple the central mystery is, nor how sharp the writer seems to be. It all rests in whether or not you care about the characters.

I guess at the time it came out I was done with school drama. I finished High School in the 90's, and then I'd had fun watching the early seasons of Buffy to remember the hell I'd just escaped from. But my tastes in fiction and music were gravitating older, and I wanted to read about adult lives. When Brick came out I tried to like it -and I can certainly admire a lot of the craft that went into it- but I wasn't engaged by the concept and the attempt to force a 1940's film paradigm into a modern high school. It worked for many people, but not for me.

But it seems that 32 is the right age to have tried this, because I've grown past most of my baggage and tend not to pre-judge as much as would have done in the past.

Veronica Mars herself was a great character. Fresh and "sassy," (as I think you have to refer to young female characters who are allowed to have a mouth) and managing to be an interesting and well-rounded teenage character without having to be "kick ass." Her supporting cast each had more than one degree to them -if some were allowed to be deeper than others- and I was sold on the reality of the show. Not that the show was real, but that the reality of the show worked.

And I loved her relationship with her father. I loved that she was allowed to have a relationship with a father. It was great to see a drama show -a crime drama show- that was willing to let a dad just be a dad, and to clearly have fun being a dad, and be simple and loyal and very good at his job. Maybe so much of our fiction is driven by parental issues that we sometimes forget to step back and tell the other story. And especially fathers. Sure, there are a million and one shitty dads in the world, but there are far more who are great parents.

The plotting was also very impressive and assured. It touched on some very interesting modern social issues with a well-judged grace -I'm thinking the episode Meet John Smith- and it managed to spread out a mystery over 22 episodes. Even the 'filler' episodes were not really filler, as pieces of information were constantly being revealed in both subtle and obvious ways to make the final episode all make sense. Nothing felt like it was thrown in at the last minute. I liked the way we would learn something about a characters violent or emotional state that would then pay of several episodes later, that clues could be hidden in plain sight, and that all of the reveals felt obvious after the fact.

I liked that Veronica and Wallace were allowed to be teenagers who simply had an easy going friendship, with no need to throw any extra angst in there simply because they're male and female. I liked that it never tried to treat the viewer like a fool, even when trying to fool us.

I think I kinda fell in love with this show, maybe just a little.
Now I need to wait until payday before I can download season 2.