Backstory and the Ties That Bind: Guest post by Tansy Rayner Roberts

Tansy Rayner Roberts is the author of some of the best stories I’ve read in the last few years. Siren Beat won the “Washington Association Small Press Short Fiction Award” and is going to become a novel one day, and the first two books of the Creature Court Trilogy: Power and Majesty, and The Shattered City.

You’ll also be able to chat to Tansy (and me!) in person at Swancon next week in Perth /plug

Backstory was the bane of my life while writing Power and Majesty: Book One. I started the novel in the wrong place, several times, and had to go further back, further back. I wanted it to be one of those novels which began in the middle, and only explained what was going on in small increments, but it just didn’t work out that way.

Having said that, even starting the story where I do, there’s a lot that’s not told, and not said, about the pasts of my characters, until much later in the story.

One of the things I realised quite early on is that the reason people often start their protagonist off as either a teenager or a stranger to town is that if you want to tell a story with emotional resonance to it, you can’t ignore the backstory, and the older they are, the more weight they are carrying when it comes to past traumas, past relationships, and basic baggage.

But I wanted characters who had been around the block a few times, and that meant complexity. Which led me to tear my hair out, more than once and yes, there was a colour-coordinated spreadsheet going back fifteen years or so, to keep track of all the significant past events of my large cast of characters.

In reality, most people manage to shake off a lot of their baggage as they grow up. They move away from their home town, or at least from their family home. They make new friends, and only selectively hold on to the people they have known since childhood. Very few people are still in touch with their first boyfriend or girlfriend, and there are all manner of people who mean something to you along the way whom you just lose track of, Facebook or no Facebook.

But for my Creature Court, there has been nowhere to go. No escape. Their small town is an underground city, with a tiny population of monstrous powermongers who have known each other since they were children. With very few exceptions, the only people they lose are the ones who die. The survivors are jammed into close proximity with each other, relying on each other, and even the ones who are now rivals may once have been intimate.

It’s pretty much my idea of hell, actually. No wonder they’re all so screwed up.

I knew all along that in Book 3, I would be going back – one of my characters will be narrating their history in the Creature Court from childhood, that story woven in with the current narrative. So when writing Books 1 and 2 I was careful to clarify and settle what the history of the Creature Court was, but not to go overboard with my flashbacks. I also wanted to include other voices, other stories, so that the past still holds some secrets and revelations, but it is a known and familiar place for my readers to revisit. After all, so many of my point of view characters rely on that history.

Leaving aside all the romances and affairs – let’s face it, there are very few of the Creature Court who haven’t jumped each other’s bones – there are the power relationships, too. Every new member of the Court begins as a courteso, and a child, in service to a Lord. When Lords gain enough power to become Kings, they must relinquish their courtesi, who scrabble to find new masters. But those old relationships are still there, bubbling below the surface.

Needless to say, it causes tensions.

The whole point of Velody as a character is that she is the ‘stranger comes to town.’ She’s a great entry point to all this complex backstory because, like the reader, she is discovering it all for the first time. She doesn’t know whom has slept with whom, and what resentments and divided loyalties are going on – her ignorance could be a weakness, but she prefers to see it as a strength, because she comes to them without personal bias. Her power is so high that she never had to be in service to a Lord, and was never a Lord with her own courtesi. Her loyalties should not be divided at all. She is, in that sense, a perfect ruler.

Except, of course, she’s not. Her loyalties are every bit as divided as everyone else’s – only her circle is wider. She has ties to the daylight world, to her friends, and is desperate to protect them even as Delphine and Rhian are both pulled slowly into the world of the Creature Court, right along them. And yes, they have their own pasts which affect their choices now.

The Shattered City will be jam-packed with tales and revelations about the past, even as the Creature Court look to the future. The secret to saving the city is deeply buried in the past, and when someone finally digs it out, it’s not likely to be anyone who should be trusted with such vital information…

Tansy Rayner Roberts is the author of Power and Majesty (Creature Court Book One) and The Shattered City (Creature Court Book Two, April 2011) with Reign of Beasts (Creature Court Book Three, coming in November 2011) hot on its tail. Her short story collection Love and Romanpunk will be published as part of the Twelfth Planet Press “Twelve Planets” series in May.

This post comes to you as part of Tansy’s Mighty Slapdash Blog Tour, and comes with a cookie fragment of new release The Shattered City:

Garnet had always been pale, that shock of red hair over porcelain-light skin. Ashiol used to tease him that he was the one who should have been born an aristocrat, with looks like that. Garnet’s eyes, though… they were not familiar. The light in them was wrong, and try as he might, Ashiol couldn’t make them look real from any angle.

He’s not real, not here, that’s why. Don’t get stupid.

Garnet’s face was perfectly framed by the window frame, beside Ashiol’s darker hair, skin tone, eyes. “That’s what kills you, isn’t it? You finally figured out how I beat you – how I cheated – and you can’t strangle me. Can’t hurl yourself at me into one of those charming fits of rage before I put you into the ground, all over again.” The vision of Garnet brushed his lips against Ashiol’s ear lobe, and for a moment he could almost feel the touch. “Exactly how much do you want to bring me back, just so you can kill me all over again?”