Thursday, October 30, 2008

Also Known as Harper...the Backstory

Welcome to The Backstory where I'll be blogging about beginnings, middles, and the details that fuel our stories.  
Backstory is pretty much hindsight without the 20/20 vision.  I think, breathe and live backstory when I'm revising and building the lives of my fictitious characters.  I am constantly thinking about what drives and motivates them. 
When I create my characters, there is usually something real that makes them come into being.  A situation, a place, an actual person.  It was a feeling I got from a person that made the characters take shape when I began writing ALSO KNOWN AS HARPER.   I had been volunteering at my local soup kitchen. I was standing behind the serving counter and I couldn't stop wondering about the backstories of the people making their way into the line.  Did they have a home or a job?  Was the dinner we were serving their first meal of the day, or of the weekend, possibly?  And then came the children.  I wanted to follow them home with a bag of groceries and make sure they had a clean, warm place to sleep.  I didn't see the defeat in their eyes that I saw with some of the adults.  The hopefulness hadn't yet disappeared.  There was shyness, but there was also a streak of strength and stoicism that seemed to be carrying them through their day.  That crept into my mind and took hold of me until Harper's story began.
So...what is your backstory?

Next week...by special request:  The Call

6 comments:

Cuppa Jolie said...

Yay, Ann! Glad to see you're starting to blog. I'll visit frequently. Hope your well!

Annie said...

Hi Jolie

It's only my living room couch--NOT the Vault! But it's a big couch and I always have room for suggestions from a pro blogger!

Tim Haywood said...

I just happened upon your blog and it's really intriguing! Would it be okay to mention donkeys or monkeys riding on donkeys in your next installment? Because I like all three.

Annie said...

Thanks Tim. I'll put that in the "special request" category. Thanks a lot, by the way. You made me laugh so hard, I started coughing again.

Penny said...

Yay yay yay! You're on the internets! I'm so HAPPY!!!

Word verification: yowban

I'm wondering what that could mean...

Annie said...

It has to do with a middle-class Seattle suburb in the seventies...