Poetic Backstories

Backstory is a staple in fiction writing, even in the nonfiction endeavors of memoirs and recollections.

Readers are interested in how a character came to be the way they are—how they travel through life after bitter experiences.

In my own series, I’m mixing backstory with songs because it is a musical adventure.

I haven’t quite figured out how I’m going to make this work, but I’m going to introduce song lyrics (besides the ones at the beginning and end of chapters) to flesh out the details of a character’s backstory.

This will be coupled with leitmotif poetry that expands as the journey moves into its middle and late stages.

The world itself also has this as its truth, being written in a complex poem set to music that tells the future of the spheres.

You know how in movies and shows there’s a soundtrack playing during certain scenes?

That will be how it works in my novels, except there will be lyrics interspersed throughout the narrative at key moments.

Violeste Allegrette is a character where this recurring poem will show up to divulge her feelings on someone from her past, someone long thought to be out of her life.

If a story has done this before, I haven’t seen it.

I want my work to be the gold standard of musicality and poetry as part of a long-running epic.

The entire world is fashioned around music and poetic themes in many layers.

Could this be meta in some ways?

Yes.

Using song lyrics to explore the past and mental frame of a character in the same way as a movie might use it (though the mechanism I’m working on needs to be better-thought-out) is something I believe strongly that I can make work.

Delving into backstories doesn’t have to be the typical flashback.

In my series, there might be a duel of instruments with call-and-response poems, where the poem might relay information from days long past in that character’s life.

I want the character arcs to catapult the narrative forward, and part of that is the evolving poems in the leitmotifs of those certain characters.

Violeste is only one person for whom this is true.

There are characters like the Nine Golden Masks that will have this happen as well.

Entire secret societies and political factions that have revolving membership slots might inherit certain poems that will expand to pages upon pages.

This is the method I believe will tell the story best.

In what ways might you use your own mechanisms or motifs to enhance the tale?

Happy writing!