Backstage at the Novel

Back in high school and college, I was briefly involved in class theater productions – not acting in them, but as part of the support crew, the people who ran lights, made costumes, painted scenery, made sure the right props were in the right places at the right times. One of the lessons I retained from that time was double-sided:  On the one hand, backstage was out of sight, and the crew could mess up in a lot of minor ways without the audience ever knowing (though you were sure to get chewed out by the director and/or actors if the briefcase was next to the wrong chair or the follow-spot lit up the wrong area). On the other hand, past a certain point, things going wrong backstage could wreck a performance past the ability of even the best actor to retrieve, even if the audience never understood why.

When I started writing, I realized fairly quickly that a novel required the writer to be the producer, director, the entire cast, and every last one of the stage crew, from the costume designer to the go-fer whose main job was seeing that the flowers the leading man threw at the leading lady at the end of Act I got entirely cleaned up before Act II started. As a result, the “backstage” of a novel is a bit more complex than that of a play.

“Backstage” for novels gets used as shorthand for “everything the reader doesn’t actually see play out in a scene,” but it’s more complicated than that. There’s a wide variety of stuff that the reader never sees, but that’s a big part of getting the book to work.

The easiest stuff to consider “backstage elements” are the boring-but-necessary everyday chores that writers skate over lightly if they show them at all. The majority of the time, writers don’t specifically mention these at all; they just say “After breakfast, he went to work” and let the reader assume that he didn’t go in his pj’s without showering or shaving.

Other times, the writer mentions that basic chores happened, but doesn’t bother going into detail. “They cleaned up the campsite, packed, and hit the road early” gives a sense of time passing and work done without making the reader sit through every bit of litter collected and bagged and every tent-peg loosened, cleaned off, and packed away. Generally, the only time the reader gets an on-stage glimpse of chores being done is when something important and/or interesting either interrupts (the bandits attack while they’re doing dishes) or happens simultaneously with doing the chores (the critical, deeply emotional conversation between the hero and his father takes place while they’re repairing the fence).

“Backstage elements” also include any plot-critical events that the reader doesn’t get to see happening in a scene. Hercule Poirot doesn’t witness the murders he investigates, and therefore the reader doesn’t get to see them, either. The closest it comes is when Poirot is giving his dramatic reconstruction of events at the end, when he reveals who the murderer is … and what the reader watches is still just Poirot describing what happened, not the murder itself.

As with the real-life performance of a play, there’s also a lot of stuff happening backstage that the reader not only never sees, but isn’t even aware of, even though it’s necessary to make the events on-stage work. Writers frequently know a lot more about their characters, setting, and backstory than ever makes it onto the page. Some of it is irrelevant to the story; other things are part of a larger context that never comes up explicitly.

And then there’s the question of what the villain (if any) was doing while  the heroine spent eight hours flying from New York to Paris. This can be a gray area, as can backstory. Sometimes, the author just assumes the villain was busy with something dastardly. Sometimes, the author never bothered to figure out what was involved in the Case of the Giant Rat of Sumatra case. These are the kinds of backstage element that authors can get away with sometimes, but that other times comes back to bite them.

When I was writing The Seven Towers, one of the characters made reference to the “Twelve Lesser Obligations.” I figured twelve was enough to cover anything that happened in the story, so I didn’t bother to get specific about exactly what they were when I was doing my story notes. And then, about three years after the novel was published, a reader wrote me to say that he could only find nine “lesser obligations” in the text, and he wanted to know what the other three were…

Which is another thing about backstage elements in a novel: non-writers seem to assume that a novel’s backstage elements have been invented and organized and carefully handled so that everything ticks over like the proverbial Swiss watch. In reality, in my experience, it’s a lot more like the chaos of a real-life backstage at an actual play, complete with close calls, near-misses, minor mistakes that barely manage to avoid affecting the performance, and the occasional minor miracle or happy coincidence.

Which brings me to the last element of a novel’s backstage – the writing process itself, which nobody but the writer ever really sees in total. There are a few bits that, for some writers, are visible from the outside (plot-noodling, for instance, generally requires at least two people), but even when one is in a position to see the writer’s face light up in revelation, one can’t know the exact train of thought that led to it.

This is as it should be. Backstage is always messy and chaotic; that doesn’t matter, as long as the audience doesn’t see it. The important thing is that the show onstage works.