Category: Backstory

Posted in Backstory, Writing craft, Fiction Writing

More Than a Setting: When Place Becomes a Character

Posted on by Patricia J. Parsons

A setting is where a story happens. But what if it can be more than that? A place that becomes a character is something else entirely.

It has a personality. It exerts influence by shaping the people who inhabit it. It shapes what they take for granted and often becomes something they can never quite escape, even if they leave physically. It holds secrets, preserves memories, and often complicates the lives of people who call it home or just come from away and stay only a short time. But unlike a character a writer creates in a story, a place arrives with its own history.

As writers, we describe a coastline, a city street or a small town. We establish the weather, sketch the architecture and provide the geographical coordinates. But none of that necessarily brings a place to life. A place becomes a character only when it matters to the story.

Think of the landscapes in the fiction we remember. They are rarely interchangeable. If you removed the Yorkshire moors from Wuthering Heights, the Mississippi River from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or, my favourite, Manderley from Rebecca, you would change more than the scenery. The story’s emotional and moral universe would change dramatically.

Place undoubtedly influences behaviour. It establishes boundaries, creates opportunities and imposes limitations. It even shapes local humour and social conventions, becoming central to the stories people tell about themselves.

But through whose eyes does the story of “place” become true? An outsider may see an extraordinary landscape, and yet a lifelong resident might see it as the site of a childhood humiliation, a family feud or a harrowing drive to the nearest hospital. A tourist sees the picturesque bits. A local sees a leaking roof. Both are telling the truth, but neither possesses the whole truth. This tension is fertile ground for writers.

As a writer, I’ve noticed the challenge is resisting the urge to turn a place—my story’s setting—into a travel brochure. This challenge can be exceptionally charged when the setting has so much to offer to travellers. The most interesting settings, though, are not necessarily the most beautiful.

I thought about this while writing We Came From Away, my book, a finalist for the 2025 Leacock Medal for Literary Humour. Newfoundland is more than a geographical backdrop. Its character, culture and distinctive sense of humour are inseparable from the story’s world. The place shapes not only what happens, but how people understand it and talk about it afterward.

Every place has its own vocabulary, rhythms and silences. It has things people discuss freely and things they know better than to mention. It has myths about itself, some deserved, and others maintained largely out of habit. Rather than decorative details, they’re part of a story’s social architecture.

Perhaps the real test is this: when readers finish a book, do they remember only what happened to the characters, or do they feel they have been somewhere?

When a place becomes a character, readers don’t simply visit. They form a relationship. They may recognize it, miss it, argue with it or want to return. They may even discover that a place they thought they knew looks different through someone else’s eyes.

Posted in Backstory, Books, Writing

When a Fictional Character Starts to Feel Real

Posted on by Patricia J. Parsons

One of the questions that fascinated me while writing my soon-to-be-released novel, A Necessary Fiction, was this: what happens when a fictional character starts to feel more real than the person who created her?

Novelists have wrestled with versions of this question for centuries. We spend months or years (more like weeks for me, but who’s counting?) inventing people who don’t exist, only to find ourselves talking about them as though they do. Even as I write that statement, I realize that for me, they do exist, just not in the reality you and I live in day to day. Fictional characters become familiar companions, occupying space in our imaginations alongside people we know in real life. But these days, it seems to me, the line between fiction and reality is becoming increasingly difficult to define.

Social media has given all of us the ability to create versions of ourselves. Most of us don’t think of these versions as fictional, yet they are inevitably selective. We choose which photographs to post, which stories to tell, which opinions to share, and which parts of our lives remain hidden. Over time, the person who exists online can begin to take on an identity distinct from the person sitting behind the keyboard. This idea became central to A Necessary Fiction.

One of the novel’s characters creates an online persona that gradually attracts attention, followers, and influence. What begins as an experiment becomes something more complicated. The persona develops its own audience, expectations, and momentum. People react to it as though it were entirely real. In some respects, it becomes real. It influences decisions. It shapes relationships. It changes events in the physical world. The character who created it discovers something unsettling: once a story acquires an audience, it no longer belongs entirely to its author.

Writers understand this phenomenon well. Some might say that every book becomes a collaboration between author and reader. Still, in my view, before that can happen, it must be a collaboration between the writer and her characters. Readers bring their own experiences, assumptions, and interpretations, but so do characters. Writers tell their story, and then the characters further evolve in the minds of those who encounter them. Meanings that the author never intended begin to emerge

Online identities work in much the same way. We create them, but we don’t completely control them. Other people participate in their construction. Expectations accumulate. Narratives form. Before long, maintaining the story can become as important as living the life behind it.

This tension lies at the heart of A Necessary Fiction. This book is a literary thriller that explores not only the stories we tell others but also the ones we tell ourselves. It asks whether truth is always as straightforward as we imagine and examines how narratives can protect us, deceive us, and sometimes take on a life of their own.

Perhaps that’s why the title resonates so strongly with me. A necessary fiction is more than a lie. It is a story we come to depend upon. It may begin as something invented, but over time, it becomes woven into our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

The question is not whether we live among fictions. We all do. The more interesting question is this: how do we know when a fiction has become reality?

Posted in Backstory, Writing books

Writing a Book Series: What No One Else Will Tell You

Posted on by Patricia J. Parsons

It seems that everywhere you look these days, writers are being told to write a series of books—often before they’ve even written the first one! As far as I’m concerned, this is the dumbest way to write a series or even a book. The thinking seems to be that if you can hook a reader on one book, that reader will buy another one that continues the story or theme.

And this can be either fiction or nonfiction. Bestselling writers like David Baldacci and Michael Connelly are the masters of the book series, so much so that readers lie in waiting for their favourite characters to reappear. But it’s not just for fiction.

If you’re a travel writer, for example, you might write a series of books on a variety of places. The same goes for a health or food writer. Regardless of the topic you’re searching for these days, you can find a series.

There is a lot of advice on writing a book series, and most of it is the same. Most of it starts with the admonition to plan out your series. I’m going to turn that advice on its head because my advice is 180 degrees in the opposite direction from the conventional wisdom. (Although, to tell you the truth, I’m not sure anyone who’s written that advice has ever really written a series).

Here’s what no one else will tell you: Do not, under any circumstances, think of your book as a series until you’ve written the last sentence of the last chapter and the book tells you there’s another one.

Now, I’m going to tell you why and what else you might consider.

What is a book series?

Let’s start by ensuring we’re all thinking about a book series in the same way.

First, a series is not just a number of books written by the same author. In fact, many bestselling series authors have penned several different series. David Baldacci has written something in the vicinity of ten distinct series.

There are also different kinds of series (even publishers can group books by various authors and call them a series―one of my nonfiction books is part of just such a publisher’s series), but I’m talking about a specific type of series.

The definition of a series we’ll use today is this…

“…a sequential group of books by the same author that share specific characteristics…”

My unconventional advice

First—and this is key—do not set out to write a series. No matter what anyone tells you, write one book and see how you feel about it at the end of the process. Could it be the beginning of a series? If it could, the book will tell you.

When I wrote The Year I Made 12 Dresses, I had absolutely no notion of writing a series. But Charlie Hudson, the main character, simply wouldn’t let go of me. She forced me to tell her mother’s secrets, and Kat’s Kosmic Blues was born―and even that wasn’t the last one. She just kept talking.

My second piece of advice is that each book should stand on its own outside the series. Not all readers will find your first book and then proceed sequentially through the series. So, you need to tell enough of the backstory but not too much.

For example, when I wrote book three of the “almost-but-not-quite-true stories,” a reader had to be able to become immersed in The Inscrutable Life of Frannie Phillips without having read Kat’s story. However, the reader also had to be able to think that he or she might like to go back and read the previous two books.

I also recommend that you keep meticulous notes on backstory—characters, places, events, etc.

If you’re writing a nonfiction series, keep a carefully crafted style guide. If it’s fiction, you need a notebook that contains the complete backstory of every character who might reappear. It also needs details on recurring settings, etc.

As you write the first book, let the process become organic. Let one book lead you into the next one. Each well-crafted paragraph in a book contains a transition into the next one. Each well-crafted chapter transitions into the next. It should be the same from one book to the next―even if you have to go back and rewrite the ending of the first book when the character tells you there’s another one that needs to be written.

Finally, think abt your readers. They always need something new, so keep the material fresh by introducing something new in each book,

When I wrote Kat’s Kosmic Blues, the main character was the through-line from one book to another, and the events were sequential. But in this book, although my use of point of view was the same as in the first one, this book came with a Spotify playlist―where each chapter was named for a song from the 60s and 70s, the years in which the book was primarily set.

Of course, there are different kinds of series: ones that have an overarching plot, ones where there is only one plot per book and the anthology kind where the individual books are only loosely tied together by a setting, perhaps. For me, that’s stretching the series definition, but it does exist.

I once saw it written that a series is the meal they keep coming back for. Maybe. But in my view, a series is at least as much a feast for the writer!