Episode 047 - Backstory and Flashbacks with Robert Dugoni
October 6, 2020
"This is my favorite episode of Indy Author Podcast so far--with the brilliant Robert Dugoni. EVERYTHING HE SAYS IS OF VALUE. Writer friends, check it out" --USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author (and podcast listener) Lisa Regan
Bestselling author Robert Dugoni discusses when and how to use backstory and flashbacks to keep readers engaged--by ensuring that they portray a character in action--in both standalone novels and series. He discusses the dangers of equating ambiguity with tension, and the importance of listening to what your story has to tell you.
Robert Dugoni is the critically acclaimed New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and #1 Amazon bestselling author of the Tracy Crosswhite police series.
Robert Dugoni is the critically acclaimed New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and #1 Amazon bestselling author of the Tracy Crosswhite police series.
He is also the author of the Charles Jenkins espionage series, the David Sloane legal thrillers, as well as several standalone novels, including THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF SAM HELL, Suspense Magazine’s 2018 Book of the Year, for which Dugoni's narration won an AudioFile Earphones Award. He is also the author of the nonfiction exposé THE CYANIDE CANARY, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year.
Dugoni is the recipient of the Nancy Pearl Award for Fiction and a two-time winner of the Friends of Mystery Spotted Owl Award for best novel set in the Pacific Northwest. He is also a two- time finalist for the International Thriller Award, the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, the Silver Falchion Award for mystery, and the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award.
Dugoni is the recipient of the Nancy Pearl Award for Fiction and a two-time winner of the Friends of Mystery Spotted Owl Award for best novel set in the Pacific Northwest. He is also a two- time finalist for the International Thriller Award, the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, the Silver Falchion Award for mystery, and the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award.
"A flashback is not a memory. It's not the character sitting and thinking. A flashback is a character in action." --Robert Dugoni
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Robert Dugoni. Hey Bob, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Bob: I'm good. I'm very good. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:09] Matty: It is my pleasure. Just to give our listeners our recap of your many accomplishments before we get started ...
Robert Dugoni is the critically acclaimed New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and #1 Amazon bestselling author of the Tracy Crosswhite police series. He is also the author of the Charles Jenkins espionage series, the David Sloane legal thrillers, as well as several standalone novels, including THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF SAM HELL, Suspense Magazine’s 2018 Book of the Year, for which Bob’s narration won an AudioFile Earphones Award. He is also the author of the nonfiction exposé THE CYANIDE CANARY, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year.
Bob is the recipient of the Nancy Pearl Award for Fiction and a two-time winner of the Friends of Mystery Spotted Owl Award for best novel set in the Pacific Northwest. He is also a two- time finalist for the International Thriller Award, the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, the Silver Falchion Award for mystery, and the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award.
And I can attest that Bob is not only a prolific and talented writer, but also a wonderful instructor on the craft of writing.
[00:01:19] And that is what we are going to be tapping into for our conversation today. We're going to be talking about backstory and flashbacks. So, Bob, let's start right out -- can you give a definition of what backstory is, what flashbacks are, and how they differ.
[00:01:34] Bob: Sure. So backstory, you need to think of it this way. When we open a book, we open to a point in a character's life. They might be 35 years old, married, and have two kids, but they obviously didn't start there. That's just where the story starts. So backstory is really who is the character off stage and how did they get to the place that they're at now. I'll give you an example.
[00:01:59] The Charles Jenkins series that you mentioned THE EIGHTH SISTER and THE LAST AGENT, which came out yesterday, September 22nd, so Charles Jenkins, when we first see him, he comes up in THE JURY MASTER, which is the David Sloane series. And he's living as a hermit on Camano Island in the state of Washington. He's in his fifties, and he pretty much keeps to himself. So, how did he get there? How does a man decide he's going to live like a hermit, he's going to live on a farm, he's going to isolate himself? And as the story unfolds, we begin to learn his backstory. His backstory is that he's a Vietnam vet. When he got out of Vietnam and made it home, he got a knock at the door because he was proficient in languages.
[00:02:39] And that knock on the door was the CIA. And they offered him a position as a CIA officer. And he was going to go work in Mexico City after he studied Russian, because in Mexico City, outside of Moscow, it has the largest, Russian embassy, which means it has the most KGB officers.
[00:02:55] That's his backstory. But when we open with David Sloane moving forward, and then we see Charles Jenkins living on his farm, so how do we get in that backstory? How do we get in who he was before the story in the novel started?
[00:03:11] The trick is that you don't want to intrude. The author does not want to intrude into the story because it takes away the enjoyment of the reader, because the reader, if you're doing it correctly, they want to become the protagonist and they want to feel what the protagonist is feeling. And when you step outside that, you slow the story down and you intrude.
[00:00:06] Bob: I'm good. I'm very good. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:09] Matty: It is my pleasure. Just to give our listeners our recap of your many accomplishments before we get started ...
Robert Dugoni is the critically acclaimed New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and #1 Amazon bestselling author of the Tracy Crosswhite police series. He is also the author of the Charles Jenkins espionage series, the David Sloane legal thrillers, as well as several standalone novels, including THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF SAM HELL, Suspense Magazine’s 2018 Book of the Year, for which Bob’s narration won an AudioFile Earphones Award. He is also the author of the nonfiction exposé THE CYANIDE CANARY, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year.
Bob is the recipient of the Nancy Pearl Award for Fiction and a two-time winner of the Friends of Mystery Spotted Owl Award for best novel set in the Pacific Northwest. He is also a two- time finalist for the International Thriller Award, the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, the Silver Falchion Award for mystery, and the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award.
And I can attest that Bob is not only a prolific and talented writer, but also a wonderful instructor on the craft of writing.
[00:01:19] And that is what we are going to be tapping into for our conversation today. We're going to be talking about backstory and flashbacks. So, Bob, let's start right out -- can you give a definition of what backstory is, what flashbacks are, and how they differ.
[00:01:34] Bob: Sure. So backstory, you need to think of it this way. When we open a book, we open to a point in a character's life. They might be 35 years old, married, and have two kids, but they obviously didn't start there. That's just where the story starts. So backstory is really who is the character off stage and how did they get to the place that they're at now. I'll give you an example.
[00:01:59] The Charles Jenkins series that you mentioned THE EIGHTH SISTER and THE LAST AGENT, which came out yesterday, September 22nd, so Charles Jenkins, when we first see him, he comes up in THE JURY MASTER, which is the David Sloane series. And he's living as a hermit on Camano Island in the state of Washington. He's in his fifties, and he pretty much keeps to himself. So, how did he get there? How does a man decide he's going to live like a hermit, he's going to live on a farm, he's going to isolate himself? And as the story unfolds, we begin to learn his backstory. His backstory is that he's a Vietnam vet. When he got out of Vietnam and made it home, he got a knock at the door because he was proficient in languages.
[00:02:39] And that knock on the door was the CIA. And they offered him a position as a CIA officer. And he was going to go work in Mexico City after he studied Russian, because in Mexico City, outside of Moscow, it has the largest, Russian embassy, which means it has the most KGB officers.
[00:02:55] That's his backstory. But when we open with David Sloane moving forward, and then we see Charles Jenkins living on his farm, so how do we get in that backstory? How do we get in who he was before the story in the novel started?
[00:03:11] The trick is that you don't want to intrude. The author does not want to intrude into the story because it takes away the enjoyment of the reader, because the reader, if you're doing it correctly, they want to become the protagonist and they want to feel what the protagonist is feeling. And when you step outside that, you slow the story down and you intrude.
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[00:03:32] So the way you do that is you do that piecemeal and there are a number of different ways that you can do it. You can do it through dialogue. You can have Jenkins sit down at a diner and David Sloane could say to him, What's your deal anyway, why are you involved in this? Why are you here? Why am I talking to you? Who are you? And Jenkins can give them a little bit about who he was before the story started.
[00:03:57] Stephen King does it really brilliantly in THE GREEN MILE where we want to learn more about who John Coffey is, the man who's on death row for killing two young white girls. And what Stephen King does is he has Paul Edgecomb go and talk to a newspaper reporter who covered the trial of John Coffey. And in addition to getting the backstory on who John Coffey is through the newspaper reporter, he also goes to the library in that town and he looks up some of the articles and he starts pulling out important information about who this man is.
[00:04:31] So what we're doing is we're getting the backstory on a character, but we're getting it in an active way. We're getting it through another character in the story. And we're not stopping the story to have the author jump in and put in two or three paragraphs of who the character is.
[00:04:49] Now flashbacks are different, but they have the same problem. A flashback happens when you're in the middle of the story and suddenly we flash back in time and the author wants us to know something about the character that happened off stage. And the problem is, again, if they're not done correctly, it's an author intrusion because the author steps into the story, stops the story, and says, Wait, I have something important to tell you so you're going to understand what's going to happen, so I have to go back in time and tell you something. That's the biggest mistake that I see in manuscripts that I review for students in that class I teach called the Novel Writing Intensive.
[00:05:27] What you want to do with a flashback is you want to remember that a flashback is a scene. So all the things that are important to making a great scene are important to making a flashback great. You want to have an opening sentence that hooks the reader. You want to have an interesting character right away. You want it to be active. You want it to be a character in action, that character speaking, hearing things, seeing things, smelling things, touching things. You want it to be like a play on a stage, so that our reader can see. So it's not static. It's not a memory. A flashback is not a memory. It's not the character sitting and thinking. A flashback is a character in action.
[00:06:06] And the other thing to keep in mind is while we're going back in time, a flashback should move the story forward. So for instance, if you have a woman and it's 1960s and she is living in France and she meets a man and she's never married, has no boyfriend, and she meets a man and she likes him and this man is trying to get close to her and every time he tries to get closer, she's pushing him away. We don't know why, we just know that she's pushing him away. Then we flash back and she's a little girl and she's in a Nazi concentration camp. Now we start to get an understanding of why she's pushing this man away.
[00:06:48] So we are moving the story forward. We are telling the reader, this is why she's having difficulty with intimacy. So the flashback actually moves the story forward. So those are really the two main things that a writer should keep in mind, is that a flashback or backstory should be active -- we should be able to see them and hear them in real time, we should be able to use all our senses as a reader -- and they should both move a story forward. We, or the character, the protagonist in particular, should learn something that's going to help the protagonist move forward in the story.
[00:07:23] Matty: Would you recommend that people write the flashbacks chronologically and then insert them into the story and then clean up the insertion into the point where you want to introduce them, or do you think it's more natural to write them in the order in which you want to present them to your reader?
[00:07:41] Bob: You know, the best advice I ever got on writing is that there are no rules. Actually, there's one rule, and the one rule is it has to work. I think that writers are all different. We're all different. We all do things differently. Some of us outline, some of us are organic writers. Some of us create storyboards, some of us would go crazy creating a storyboard. There's just a whole host of things that's different. So I really think that an author should do what an author is comfortable with.
[00:08:07] I've done both. I have written a story just chronologically going through it and I'll get to a place where a flashback is appropriate, and I know what I want to write and I'll go back and I'll write it. In THE TRAPPED GIRL, I had a whole series of flashbacks involving a young girl living in Portland. And I'll be honest with you. I don't know why this woman was speaking to me. Here I was trying to write a story about Tracy Crosswhite, my Seattle homicide detective, trying to solve a murder. She finds a body in a crab pot off Alki Coast, and the whole time I'm writing that story, this woman in Portland keeps talking to me in my head and I had no idea why she kept talking to me. And I've come to learn through Stephen King's book, and Diana Gabaldon's talks about magic and telepathy and the subconscious that you don't want to dismiss those things. And so I finally decided, all right, I don't know why you keep talking to me, but I'm going to listen to you.
[00:09:06] And so I let her tell me her story and I just started typing and I wrote probably 30, 35 pages of her story, what she kept telling me. And I still didn't really understand where it was going to fit in the book until I got toward the end of the book and suddenly I realized why she was telling me her story. And so I was able to go back, and I was able to take the flashback that I had written chronologically, the 20, 30 pages, and I was able to divide it up into sections and insert it into the story.
[00:09:37] So a lot of times you just have to be true to yourself and listen to yourself. Listen to what your subconscious is, talking to you about it and telling you.
[00:09:48] Matty: If someone takes that approach where they're writing what perhaps could be almost a little standalone short story, a little standalone novella, and they're using that to understand the backstory and they're using all the tips you're giving about being active and all the other ways that a writer would engage a reader in a non-flashback or backstory scenario, are there any tips for when they go to insert that into the main story, what they should be watching out for in terms of what might be too much of that story to include?
[00:10:18] Bob: You know, the only thing that you really want to do is you want to put them in a place where you're not frustrating the reader. A lot of new writers think that ambiguity equals tension. Ambiguity doesn't equal tension, ambiguity equals frustration.
[00:10:34] The reader gets frustrated that they don't know what's going on. The reader tension is created by a reader knowing what's going on, but not being sure that the protagonist or the point of view character is going to figure it out early enough to either save their life or prevent them from doing something, whatever it is. It's knowing what the goal is of the protagonist and, knowing what the obstacles are, and that's what creates tension, is the obstacles in the path of what the protagonist's needs, desires -- all those things.
[00:11:07] So when you insert a flashback into a story, you don't want to be going into it with this clever idea that I'm going to leave on this really high point of tension in the main story and then I'm going to have this long flashback to tease the reader. No, that's going to frustrate the reader. You want to have it strategically placed where the main story ends at a point of tension, and then maybe you need to have this flashback to tell what's happening, like why the woman can't be intimate, but you don't want to have a 25-page flashback. You want to have a four- or five-page flashback.
[00:11:42] In THE PERFECT STORM, Sebastian Junger does a great job of telling you the backstories of these men as they are on this ship and what's going to happen to them and he goes back and he starts to tell you all their backgrounds, so they become personal to us. We know the storm is going to hit because the book's called THE PERFECT STORM. But what we don't know is why would we care about these men, other than the fact that any loss of life is tragic. So he wants to let us know who these men are so that we can care about them.
[00:12:13] He does it also in BLACKHAWK DOWN. So in BLACKHAWK DOWN, for instance, there's a scene where you know that the Blackhawk helicopters are going to get shot down. I mean, that's what the book's about. So what he does is he brings us up to a point where one of the sergeants looks at his commanding officer and he says, I think I just saw a helicopter get hit.
[00:12:33] The scene ends. You turn the page and the next scene is the terrorists, it's the leader of the terrorists. He flashes to them because what he wants to show you is that these guys are not just these dumb people that don't have any idea what's going on. They're prepared for this. And they're prepared to the point where he's sending all these men out and they're pulling automatic weapons out of barrels and out of rice bins and they're arming themselves to the teeth. Well, why is that important?
[00:13:04] Because if that helicopter went down, we now know that the men on that helicopter are going to be in a hell of a lot of trouble because they're not just falling into some poverty ridden town, they're falling into a trap. But it's only about four or five pages. It's not 25 pages, it's four or five pages. And then we get back to the helicopter's down, these guys are in trouble, we need to get out there and try to save them. And so it builds the tension because we're learning things and we're moving the story forward and the tension is getting higher and higher.
[00:13:37] Matty: It's interesting that you can get these lessons from nonfiction as well as fiction works.
[00:13:41] Bob: Yeah, very much so.
[00:13:43] Matty: Do you always have to have established the main story first or what about a flashback in a prologue?
[00:13:49] Bob: So I like prologues, but what writers need to understand is that an a prologue is your first chapter. You can call it whatever you want, but it's the first thing that reader's going to read. And so all the things that I teach about what makes the first chapter great -- what makes any chapter great -- I have to apply to the prologue. So you need to hook the reader right away. That opening sentence needs to grab the reader's attention. It should raise a question that causes the reader to want to find the answer to that question.
[00:14:18] Mr. Bilbo Baggins of the Bag End would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence. Okay, who is this guy that lives to be 111? Why do they use the phrase eleventy-first? I mean, there's all these questions. So we want to find out. Now Bilbo is not the main character in THE LORD OF THE RINGS. He is in THE HOBBIT, but in THE LORD OF THE RINGS it's Frodo. So we're not in the main character's point of view and we're telling the story about Bilbo Baggins. Well, Bilbo Baggins is very interesting, right? It's long been rumored that the hill at Bag End was stuffed with treasure and time went on but Bilbo didn't age. Who is this guy?
[00:15:00] So give me an opening sentence that grabs the reader's interest. Give me an interesting character right away. And give me an interesting setting. He's at a birthday party for his hundred and 11th birthday. It's active. Prologues are active. Prologues are just like main scenes. We can see them, we can hear them, we can smell them. We can taste them. We can touch them, everything about it. Bam, boom. And we're going, and we got an interesting character. Boom. That's the main thing about a prologue -- putting something in there that grabs the reader's attention and makes the reader dive into it.
[00:15:33] Now, new writers need to understand if their name is not Stephen King or JK Rowling, they are not going to get the benefit of the doubt. Those two people, they could write a grocery list as their prologue and people would say, this is brilliant, right? New writers who are trying to break in, they're not going to get that. They're going to get, this person doesn't know what they're doing.
[00:15:54] So the opposite of what I just talked about, which is really important, is really understanding that prologue is your first chapter and it needs to do all the things I just talked about. And here's a trick I always tell my new writers at the Novel Intensive. If you're breaking in and you're worried about a prologue, because let's be honest in my asking, thousands of people that I've spoken to, in seminars and everything, there's about 50% people who like the prologue and 50% who don't. Because a lot of people go into the store, they pick up a book, they look at the back. Yep. I want to read this. I want to read this story. They open up and it's a prologue, which seemingly has nothing to do with the story. Well, wait a minute. So you run that risk with a prologue and I always tell my students, I say, just call it chapter one.
[00:16:41] If you write it well enough, your agent or your editor is going to go, This is really a fantastic opening, but I think it's a prologue, don't you? And you can say, Oh, yeah, I think it's a prologue. And off you go.
[00:16:52] Matty: So a lot of the tips you've given so far are completely applicable to standalone, but in terms of backstory, more so than flashback, series presents a whole different challenge because you have to accommodate the reader who's picking up a series at book three and you have to provide some backstory, one assumes, about what's happened earlier without boring the people who are binge reading your whole series. So when you're thinking about backstory for series, what are the special considerations there?
[00:17:22] Bob: I look at it this way. A series is not the story moving forward. A series is the characters moving forward. The story doesn't move forward, the characters move forward. So for instance, talk about the Harry Potter series. In the first Harry Potter book, it's HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE and the quest is whether or not Harry is going to get the Sorcerer's Stone and figure out why Voldemort wants it so badly. That story ends. That story comes to a climax and conclusion and a finish and it's done.
[00:18:00] Now, Harry goes forward. And Ron and Hermione go forward and Voldemort goes forward and Dumbledore goes forward, but they go forward in an entirely new story. And I don't remember the order, but let's say it's HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE. There's going to be a new story about whether Harry is going to get the Goblet of Fire. So what the reader needs is just a little bit about why is Harry living at Privet Drive? Or how did Harry get to Hogwarts. So you'll notice that almost I think every one of her stories opens with Harry back at home with the Dursleys, except for maybe the eighth one, the eighth book.
[00:18:37] And so we start in the same place and get a sense that Harry is in this horrible, ordinary world and he's going to go to this magical place, Hogwarts. You don't want to put too much in, because like you said, people who have read your first book, they're going to go, Why are you telling me all this stuff? I already know it. But you also don't want to have a situation where something is really important and the people that pick that book up for the first time, they don't have a clue what's going on.
[00:19:03] So for instance, THE LAST AGENT, which came out yesterday, opens with Charles Jenkins back on his farm on Camano Island in Washington, which is exactly where THE EIGHTH SISTER opened. And in THE EIGHT SISTER, Jenkins is on his farm and his former station chief of the CIA in Mexico City shows up and says, we need your help, and Jenkins takes the job and gets to Russia and realizes he's been completely duped, nothing is as represented and he's running for his life. And he finally gets back home and he's tried for espionage because someone's trying to keep him quiet. He ends up back at his farm on Camano and he's more even more disillusioned with the CIA than he was when it started.
[00:19:47] In THE LAST AGENT he's on his farm and here comes a young CIA officer. Well, the question for a reader, that's never picked up THE EIGHTH SISTER is, why is he so antagonistic toward the CIA officer? So you want to sprinkle in there a little bit about, Are you kidding me? I just went through an eight-week trial. You tried me for espionage, and nobody came to my help or my rescue. And you want me to go back and help you? Oh, okay, that must have happened off stage. That must have happened in the prior book. I have a dislike for the CIA. Why would I ever go back in. Boom.
[00:20:22] And so it's little things like that that is important to the reader in the story that they are reading. If the information is not important to the reader in the story that they are reading, then you don't need to put it in because it's going to do exactly what you said, which is it's going to confuse the reader. The reader is going to be like, I have no idea what this is all about. But I think the main thing for writers to realize is that characters move forward, not the journey, not the quest.
[00:20:55] STAR WARS is another good example -- the STAR WARS movies. The characters move forward. But in every single movie, whether it's the Death Star being made or whatever it is, that quest is concluded because it's not fair to a reader to have to make them read the first book in order to understand what the quest is in the second book.
[00:21:17] Matty: It is interesting to think about stories that are very standalone and most of the connection is just the same characters in the same theme, the same genre. And once that have both the arc within the story and also the arc over several installments. I think that STAR WARS is like that, that within each trilogy grouping. And even within the whole span, there's also this overarching story arc. So that's probably another consideration for people on how and to what extent they need to handle the backstory.
[00:21:50] Bob: Yeah. Voldemort goes forward in Harry Potter. And that's the ultimate story, the ultimate through line is what it's called, from the first book to the eighth book is will Voldemort or Harry win? Who's going to win this epic battle that is going to take place? Within each of those stories, there's a story, smaller quest that Harry has to overcome, and that Harry has to accomplish.
[00:22:15] But Voldemort goes forward and the ultimate story question, the ultimate arc, Harry is going to eventually have to take on Voldemort and what she was so brilliant and doing, JK Rowling, was in the first book, Harry is 12 years old and he's about five foot three and 90 pounds, and he's living under a staircase and he has no skills whatsoever. And he's going to take on the greatest wizard who's ever lived? I mean, you talk about tension and suspense. But over the course of the series of books, what she does is she begins to reveal Harry. He's loyal. He's honest. He's courageous. He's trustworthy. He's very good with the wand. He's good with the dark arts. He's good at getting people to do what he wants them to do and to follow him and to be loyal.
[00:23:01] So she begins to build all these things so that by the time you get to the last book, Harry is no longer 12 years old here. He's 18, 19 years old, and he's pretty dang skilled. And so when you see this battle is going to take place, you think, You know what? I'm giving a kid a chance. We know what's going to happen because it's a novel and people would blow up England if Harry had been defeated. But at the same time, you have incredible tension because you know that Harry's going to go through hell in order to survive.
[00:23:33] And, you know, the protagonist journey in many books, as weird as this is going to sound, it's not unlike some of the historical figures in our lives. Take a historical figure like Jesus Christ. Well, everybody knows the story of the Bible. It's the most read book ever in the world. So we know the story of Jesus Christ. We know how it's going to end. But when we went and watched the movie THE PASSION, for instance, we still cringed. It was still horrifying, what this man had to go through. And that's what you're trying to do with your story. The reader has a sense how it's going to turn out, they know what the ending's going to be, but they don't know necessarily what's going to happen in order for that end to get there. And it's that what's going to happen that creates tension.
[00:24:17] Matty: I'm always surprised at how much I can know about a story and still enjoy the things that should be spoilers. I just was binge reading another author's books and I was reading some of them in order but some of them out of order, and in some places, he was really specific about things that happened. You know, He thought back to the death of his girlfriend in the fiery car crash. And you're like, Why did he just tell me that? because it happened in a previous book. And yet when I get to that book and read it, I still enjoy it. It doesn't for whatever reason undermine my enjoyment of that thing that I already knew was going to happen.
[00:24:54] Bob: You know, the other thing I always caution new writers is, they'll say to me, I'm writing the trilogy, and I'll say, Maybe not. And that's the reality of the situation, right? Say you get a publisher and you get it published and the book doesn't do very well. They're not going to invest in the next book. And so you want that quest to be concluded in each book.
[00:25:15] Matty: I had another flavor of backstory, and I'm going to throw this out as the last topic of conversation because it will be a nice entree to let you talk about your latest book that just launched yesterday. So we've been talking a lot about mainly personal backstory, but THE EIGHTH SISTER, as an example, is sort of a Cold War spy novel re-imagined for the 21st century, and it does have a lot of historical backstory as well in it. Are there different rules that apply if you feel like you have to give some historical context to a reader who may not know that historical context from their own experience?
[00:25:49] Bob: I don't know if it's anything different. You still have to find an entertaining and interesting way to present the information. Our job as authors, especially in fiction, is to entertain. Nonfiction, there might be other factors, but when you're writing fiction, your primary goal is to entertain. So you have to figure out a way to tell the backstory of Russia, for instance, coming out of the Cold War and perestroika and why perestroika failed and all those things. You have to find an interesting way that this can all take place. So, you know, Jenkins is aware, he's intimately aware, of the KGB and the Soviet Union in the 1960s because he dealt with them. And so there are ways that you can drop in information through your main character in that instance. He knows what he's getting himself into and he knows the potential pitfalls and he knows what's going to happen if he gets caught. At least he believes he knows what's going to happen -- he doesn't realize he's been double-crossed. But he has a sense of what is going to happen and how it's going to happen.
[00:26:55] And what's really interesting with Russia is it's a country that has been, I think, struggling to find its identity for a long time. During czarist times, the people were really not treated very well. They were treated poorly and that's what led to the Bolshevik Revolution. Then the Bolsheviks and the communists came into power and communism was a falsehood, it was fake. This idea that you don't own anything, everybody owns it. No. You look at Stalin and he's estimated to have killed 50 million people and he started the gulags and he put all these people in the gulag.
[00:27:35] And then here comes Gorbachev with perestroika and we're going to be open and we're going to change and we're going to have a democracy and the people are going to get to travel and leave the country and people are going to get to know the real Russia. And what happens? The oligarchs step in and they take power because Gorbachev had no clue what he was really doing and how to do it.
[00:27:56] And he didn't understand the mentality of the people there. The mentality of the people there was steal what you can. And they didn't think of it as stealing because nobody owned anything. We all own everything, so it's not really stealing. And also it was a hardscrabble life, a hardscrabble existence, and they were just trying to survive.
[00:28:14] But you have this incredible mentality that Gorbachev basically ignored, and he didn't realize the power of the vory, the Russian mafia. It started in the gulags and it built, so you had the oligarchs, you had the mafia, you have essentially a mafia state. And then here comes Putin, and Putin steps in and he says, I'm the biggest mafia. I got the Russian military behind me. And if you don't do what I say ... So there's all this incredible background to this story.
[00:28:43] But really what it comes down to is why are the people of Russia this way? Why are the people of Russia hesitant to talk to people, strangers, in the country. So what you have to do is you have to figure out a way that you can show it in active voice and in real time. In THE EIGHTH SISTER, for instance, Jenkins is not going to get someone to just step up and help him because Russian people are not like that because they're worried about what the ramifications of that can be to them. So a lot of times he's knows he's very much on his own and he has to deal with that. It's saying nothing about the Russian people, it's just the history behind the country and how it all transpired and what happened.
[00:29:23] So when THE LAST AGENT comes into play, he's going back into a far different Russia than even the perestroika years. He's going back into a Russia that's vindictive, a Russia that takes vengeance on anybody that crosses Putin. And we've seen that recently with another poisoning of someone that is protesting against Putin. So there's a history about Russia that doesn't necessarily need to be told but needs to be reflected in the people in the story.
[00:29:52] Matty: That's a nice, subtle way of doing it because in THE EIGHTH SISTER, for example, you don't ever do an info dump of all that information, but it's just a little comments people make, or their behaviors, that indicates that.
[00:30:05] So I have to ask you, feel free to talk a little bit more about the sequel to THE EIGHTH SISTER, and I'm also very curious how things are going with a book launch in a socially distanced world.
[00:30:17] Bob: Yeah. So THE LAST AGENT came out yesterday, and in THE LAST AGENT, Jenkins is back on his farm, basically taking care of business, but he's now gotten back into the spy world. And there's a part of that spiral that is always been a part of him. And so while he's happy, he doesn't necessarily feel fulfilled. He's got his wife and he's got his kids, and his daughter and all those things but he doesn't have anything really professionally that's fulfilling to him. And he's never really felt fulfilled since the time that he walked away from the CIA. It was a career that he really loved and really wanted to succeed at.
[00:30:53] So he's at his farm and here comes this young man who basically says, I'm from the CIA and I need your help. And Jenkins is prepared to basically kill this guy. Not literally, but he's like, Are you kidding me? After everything I've gone through? And the guy says, Just hear me out. And eventually Jenkins hears him out.
[00:31:13] And what he hears is that they've lost track of an agent in Russia. They had someone that was taken political prisoner at Lefortovo Prison. And that person was recently freed based on an exchange, which is really based on real life. And when that person came back, they said they interrogated him and they think that the agent they lost, might be in Lefortovo Prison. And Jenkins is finding this all very interesting, but all very irrelevant.
[00:31:43] Until the guy says the name of the agent that they've lost and it's Paulina Ponomayova. And Paulina Ponomayova is the reason why Jenkins is still alive. She gave up her life -- he believes that she gave up her life -- so that he could get back to the United States and be with his wife and his son and his daughter. And so when Jenkins hears that, he's prepared to go back in and find out if she is the prisoner in Lefortovo Prison, if she is alive, and to try to get her out.
[00:32:13] The COVID thing is really very interesting. It's a really hard time for a lot of people. And I certainly recognize that, and I feel very blessed that I get to do a job that I love to do, and I get to do it in my home. I don't have to travel any place. I don't have to meet a lot of people and all those things. I did a Zoom meeting the other day with Barb Peters at the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, Arizona, and it was a lot of fun and it went really well. It got a huge audience. I've been doing Zoom conferences and things all this week, and they've been great. I taught the Novel Writing Intensive for the first time over Zoom and I thought it went extremely well. But the thing that's missing is the personal connections.
[00:32:56] I don't get a chance to see people that I've come to know, come to really like. I don't get a chance to sign their books or just talk to them and find out how their life is going and how they're doing and all those things.
[00:33:10] So, you know, it's no different than what I think a lot of people are going through during this time period, which is just they're missing human interaction. And I think that's something that we have to be really careful about. Because with technology we're already becoming more and more isolated. Think of the people that you try to talk to and they're on their cell phone because they're just wed to that cell phone. They're wed to having it in their hand. That's where information comes from. That's your communication comes from you.
[00:33:37] I noticed it the other day with my daughter. She wasn't doing anything to be rude but, you know, she's 21 years old and I'm over at her apartment and I'm trying to secure her apartment, putting on deadbolts and things like that. And I'd say, Can you get me the drill? And I turned around and she'd be on her phone. She wasn't trying to be rude. It's just, that's how her friends are communicating with her. So if you take that and then you add this to it, and you start to say that we can start doing these interviews over the computer. We can have book signings over the computer. We can do all these things over the computer. Suddenly, we don't ever have to leave our homes. We don't ever have to interact. I think that's a dangerous thing, a dangerous precedent that we want to avoid.
[00:34:19] Matty: I think it would be nice when we get back to the place where we can have both we'll have the option of the in-person interactions. But I do hope that some of the things that have gone online continue. For example, I just joined Sisters in Crime New England, and I would never normally be able to participate in their events as a person who lives outside Philadelphia. And so it's been nice to be able to get to know people that way, but I also miss going to conferences and seeing them in person exactly as you're saying.
[00:34:47] Bob: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
[00:34:50] Matty: Bob, I appreciate so much you slotting yet another Zoom meeting in among all your others, and congratulations on the book launch. Please let people know where they can go to find out more about you and your work online.
[00:35:03] Bob: They can go to my website, which is www.RobertDugoniBooks.com or they can go on Amazon, which is Author Robert Dugoni. And they'll find all my books and they'll find out information about me and ways that they can buy my books if they'd like, ways that they can buy autographed copies of my books, if they are people that like to do that. The Poisoned Pen, for instance, has autographed copies of my books. The independent bookstore here in my hometown, BookTree, they're going to have autographed copies of my books. So a lot of different ways that they can go about it.
[00:35:37] Matty: That's great to hear because getting an autographed book is one of the things that I miss about not having in person events.
[00:35:44] So, Bob, congratulations again, and thank you so much.
[00:35:46] Bob: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
[00:03:57] Stephen King does it really brilliantly in THE GREEN MILE where we want to learn more about who John Coffey is, the man who's on death row for killing two young white girls. And what Stephen King does is he has Paul Edgecomb go and talk to a newspaper reporter who covered the trial of John Coffey. And in addition to getting the backstory on who John Coffey is through the newspaper reporter, he also goes to the library in that town and he looks up some of the articles and he starts pulling out important information about who this man is.
[00:04:31] So what we're doing is we're getting the backstory on a character, but we're getting it in an active way. We're getting it through another character in the story. And we're not stopping the story to have the author jump in and put in two or three paragraphs of who the character is.
[00:04:49] Now flashbacks are different, but they have the same problem. A flashback happens when you're in the middle of the story and suddenly we flash back in time and the author wants us to know something about the character that happened off stage. And the problem is, again, if they're not done correctly, it's an author intrusion because the author steps into the story, stops the story, and says, Wait, I have something important to tell you so you're going to understand what's going to happen, so I have to go back in time and tell you something. That's the biggest mistake that I see in manuscripts that I review for students in that class I teach called the Novel Writing Intensive.
[00:05:27] What you want to do with a flashback is you want to remember that a flashback is a scene. So all the things that are important to making a great scene are important to making a flashback great. You want to have an opening sentence that hooks the reader. You want to have an interesting character right away. You want it to be active. You want it to be a character in action, that character speaking, hearing things, seeing things, smelling things, touching things. You want it to be like a play on a stage, so that our reader can see. So it's not static. It's not a memory. A flashback is not a memory. It's not the character sitting and thinking. A flashback is a character in action.
[00:06:06] And the other thing to keep in mind is while we're going back in time, a flashback should move the story forward. So for instance, if you have a woman and it's 1960s and she is living in France and she meets a man and she's never married, has no boyfriend, and she meets a man and she likes him and this man is trying to get close to her and every time he tries to get closer, she's pushing him away. We don't know why, we just know that she's pushing him away. Then we flash back and she's a little girl and she's in a Nazi concentration camp. Now we start to get an understanding of why she's pushing this man away.
[00:06:48] So we are moving the story forward. We are telling the reader, this is why she's having difficulty with intimacy. So the flashback actually moves the story forward. So those are really the two main things that a writer should keep in mind, is that a flashback or backstory should be active -- we should be able to see them and hear them in real time, we should be able to use all our senses as a reader -- and they should both move a story forward. We, or the character, the protagonist in particular, should learn something that's going to help the protagonist move forward in the story.
[00:07:23] Matty: Would you recommend that people write the flashbacks chronologically and then insert them into the story and then clean up the insertion into the point where you want to introduce them, or do you think it's more natural to write them in the order in which you want to present them to your reader?
[00:07:41] Bob: You know, the best advice I ever got on writing is that there are no rules. Actually, there's one rule, and the one rule is it has to work. I think that writers are all different. We're all different. We all do things differently. Some of us outline, some of us are organic writers. Some of us create storyboards, some of us would go crazy creating a storyboard. There's just a whole host of things that's different. So I really think that an author should do what an author is comfortable with.
[00:08:07] I've done both. I have written a story just chronologically going through it and I'll get to a place where a flashback is appropriate, and I know what I want to write and I'll go back and I'll write it. In THE TRAPPED GIRL, I had a whole series of flashbacks involving a young girl living in Portland. And I'll be honest with you. I don't know why this woman was speaking to me. Here I was trying to write a story about Tracy Crosswhite, my Seattle homicide detective, trying to solve a murder. She finds a body in a crab pot off Alki Coast, and the whole time I'm writing that story, this woman in Portland keeps talking to me in my head and I had no idea why she kept talking to me. And I've come to learn through Stephen King's book, and Diana Gabaldon's talks about magic and telepathy and the subconscious that you don't want to dismiss those things. And so I finally decided, all right, I don't know why you keep talking to me, but I'm going to listen to you.
[00:09:06] And so I let her tell me her story and I just started typing and I wrote probably 30, 35 pages of her story, what she kept telling me. And I still didn't really understand where it was going to fit in the book until I got toward the end of the book and suddenly I realized why she was telling me her story. And so I was able to go back, and I was able to take the flashback that I had written chronologically, the 20, 30 pages, and I was able to divide it up into sections and insert it into the story.
[00:09:37] So a lot of times you just have to be true to yourself and listen to yourself. Listen to what your subconscious is, talking to you about it and telling you.
[00:09:48] Matty: If someone takes that approach where they're writing what perhaps could be almost a little standalone short story, a little standalone novella, and they're using that to understand the backstory and they're using all the tips you're giving about being active and all the other ways that a writer would engage a reader in a non-flashback or backstory scenario, are there any tips for when they go to insert that into the main story, what they should be watching out for in terms of what might be too much of that story to include?
[00:10:18] Bob: You know, the only thing that you really want to do is you want to put them in a place where you're not frustrating the reader. A lot of new writers think that ambiguity equals tension. Ambiguity doesn't equal tension, ambiguity equals frustration.
[00:10:34] The reader gets frustrated that they don't know what's going on. The reader tension is created by a reader knowing what's going on, but not being sure that the protagonist or the point of view character is going to figure it out early enough to either save their life or prevent them from doing something, whatever it is. It's knowing what the goal is of the protagonist and, knowing what the obstacles are, and that's what creates tension, is the obstacles in the path of what the protagonist's needs, desires -- all those things.
[00:11:07] So when you insert a flashback into a story, you don't want to be going into it with this clever idea that I'm going to leave on this really high point of tension in the main story and then I'm going to have this long flashback to tease the reader. No, that's going to frustrate the reader. You want to have it strategically placed where the main story ends at a point of tension, and then maybe you need to have this flashback to tell what's happening, like why the woman can't be intimate, but you don't want to have a 25-page flashback. You want to have a four- or five-page flashback.
[00:11:42] In THE PERFECT STORM, Sebastian Junger does a great job of telling you the backstories of these men as they are on this ship and what's going to happen to them and he goes back and he starts to tell you all their backgrounds, so they become personal to us. We know the storm is going to hit because the book's called THE PERFECT STORM. But what we don't know is why would we care about these men, other than the fact that any loss of life is tragic. So he wants to let us know who these men are so that we can care about them.
[00:12:13] He does it also in BLACKHAWK DOWN. So in BLACKHAWK DOWN, for instance, there's a scene where you know that the Blackhawk helicopters are going to get shot down. I mean, that's what the book's about. So what he does is he brings us up to a point where one of the sergeants looks at his commanding officer and he says, I think I just saw a helicopter get hit.
[00:12:33] The scene ends. You turn the page and the next scene is the terrorists, it's the leader of the terrorists. He flashes to them because what he wants to show you is that these guys are not just these dumb people that don't have any idea what's going on. They're prepared for this. And they're prepared to the point where he's sending all these men out and they're pulling automatic weapons out of barrels and out of rice bins and they're arming themselves to the teeth. Well, why is that important?
[00:13:04] Because if that helicopter went down, we now know that the men on that helicopter are going to be in a hell of a lot of trouble because they're not just falling into some poverty ridden town, they're falling into a trap. But it's only about four or five pages. It's not 25 pages, it's four or five pages. And then we get back to the helicopter's down, these guys are in trouble, we need to get out there and try to save them. And so it builds the tension because we're learning things and we're moving the story forward and the tension is getting higher and higher.
[00:13:37] Matty: It's interesting that you can get these lessons from nonfiction as well as fiction works.
[00:13:41] Bob: Yeah, very much so.
[00:13:43] Matty: Do you always have to have established the main story first or what about a flashback in a prologue?
[00:13:49] Bob: So I like prologues, but what writers need to understand is that an a prologue is your first chapter. You can call it whatever you want, but it's the first thing that reader's going to read. And so all the things that I teach about what makes the first chapter great -- what makes any chapter great -- I have to apply to the prologue. So you need to hook the reader right away. That opening sentence needs to grab the reader's attention. It should raise a question that causes the reader to want to find the answer to that question.
[00:14:18] Mr. Bilbo Baggins of the Bag End would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence. Okay, who is this guy that lives to be 111? Why do they use the phrase eleventy-first? I mean, there's all these questions. So we want to find out. Now Bilbo is not the main character in THE LORD OF THE RINGS. He is in THE HOBBIT, but in THE LORD OF THE RINGS it's Frodo. So we're not in the main character's point of view and we're telling the story about Bilbo Baggins. Well, Bilbo Baggins is very interesting, right? It's long been rumored that the hill at Bag End was stuffed with treasure and time went on but Bilbo didn't age. Who is this guy?
[00:15:00] So give me an opening sentence that grabs the reader's interest. Give me an interesting character right away. And give me an interesting setting. He's at a birthday party for his hundred and 11th birthday. It's active. Prologues are active. Prologues are just like main scenes. We can see them, we can hear them, we can smell them. We can taste them. We can touch them, everything about it. Bam, boom. And we're going, and we got an interesting character. Boom. That's the main thing about a prologue -- putting something in there that grabs the reader's attention and makes the reader dive into it.
[00:15:33] Now, new writers need to understand if their name is not Stephen King or JK Rowling, they are not going to get the benefit of the doubt. Those two people, they could write a grocery list as their prologue and people would say, this is brilliant, right? New writers who are trying to break in, they're not going to get that. They're going to get, this person doesn't know what they're doing.
[00:15:54] So the opposite of what I just talked about, which is really important, is really understanding that prologue is your first chapter and it needs to do all the things I just talked about. And here's a trick I always tell my new writers at the Novel Intensive. If you're breaking in and you're worried about a prologue, because let's be honest in my asking, thousands of people that I've spoken to, in seminars and everything, there's about 50% people who like the prologue and 50% who don't. Because a lot of people go into the store, they pick up a book, they look at the back. Yep. I want to read this. I want to read this story. They open up and it's a prologue, which seemingly has nothing to do with the story. Well, wait a minute. So you run that risk with a prologue and I always tell my students, I say, just call it chapter one.
[00:16:41] If you write it well enough, your agent or your editor is going to go, This is really a fantastic opening, but I think it's a prologue, don't you? And you can say, Oh, yeah, I think it's a prologue. And off you go.
[00:16:52] Matty: So a lot of the tips you've given so far are completely applicable to standalone, but in terms of backstory, more so than flashback, series presents a whole different challenge because you have to accommodate the reader who's picking up a series at book three and you have to provide some backstory, one assumes, about what's happened earlier without boring the people who are binge reading your whole series. So when you're thinking about backstory for series, what are the special considerations there?
[00:17:22] Bob: I look at it this way. A series is not the story moving forward. A series is the characters moving forward. The story doesn't move forward, the characters move forward. So for instance, talk about the Harry Potter series. In the first Harry Potter book, it's HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE and the quest is whether or not Harry is going to get the Sorcerer's Stone and figure out why Voldemort wants it so badly. That story ends. That story comes to a climax and conclusion and a finish and it's done.
[00:18:00] Now, Harry goes forward. And Ron and Hermione go forward and Voldemort goes forward and Dumbledore goes forward, but they go forward in an entirely new story. And I don't remember the order, but let's say it's HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE. There's going to be a new story about whether Harry is going to get the Goblet of Fire. So what the reader needs is just a little bit about why is Harry living at Privet Drive? Or how did Harry get to Hogwarts. So you'll notice that almost I think every one of her stories opens with Harry back at home with the Dursleys, except for maybe the eighth one, the eighth book.
[00:18:37] And so we start in the same place and get a sense that Harry is in this horrible, ordinary world and he's going to go to this magical place, Hogwarts. You don't want to put too much in, because like you said, people who have read your first book, they're going to go, Why are you telling me all this stuff? I already know it. But you also don't want to have a situation where something is really important and the people that pick that book up for the first time, they don't have a clue what's going on.
[00:19:03] So for instance, THE LAST AGENT, which came out yesterday, opens with Charles Jenkins back on his farm on Camano Island in Washington, which is exactly where THE EIGHTH SISTER opened. And in THE EIGHT SISTER, Jenkins is on his farm and his former station chief of the CIA in Mexico City shows up and says, we need your help, and Jenkins takes the job and gets to Russia and realizes he's been completely duped, nothing is as represented and he's running for his life. And he finally gets back home and he's tried for espionage because someone's trying to keep him quiet. He ends up back at his farm on Camano and he's more even more disillusioned with the CIA than he was when it started.
[00:19:47] In THE LAST AGENT he's on his farm and here comes a young CIA officer. Well, the question for a reader, that's never picked up THE EIGHTH SISTER is, why is he so antagonistic toward the CIA officer? So you want to sprinkle in there a little bit about, Are you kidding me? I just went through an eight-week trial. You tried me for espionage, and nobody came to my help or my rescue. And you want me to go back and help you? Oh, okay, that must have happened off stage. That must have happened in the prior book. I have a dislike for the CIA. Why would I ever go back in. Boom.
[00:20:22] And so it's little things like that that is important to the reader in the story that they are reading. If the information is not important to the reader in the story that they are reading, then you don't need to put it in because it's going to do exactly what you said, which is it's going to confuse the reader. The reader is going to be like, I have no idea what this is all about. But I think the main thing for writers to realize is that characters move forward, not the journey, not the quest.
[00:20:55] STAR WARS is another good example -- the STAR WARS movies. The characters move forward. But in every single movie, whether it's the Death Star being made or whatever it is, that quest is concluded because it's not fair to a reader to have to make them read the first book in order to understand what the quest is in the second book.
[00:21:17] Matty: It is interesting to think about stories that are very standalone and most of the connection is just the same characters in the same theme, the same genre. And once that have both the arc within the story and also the arc over several installments. I think that STAR WARS is like that, that within each trilogy grouping. And even within the whole span, there's also this overarching story arc. So that's probably another consideration for people on how and to what extent they need to handle the backstory.
[00:21:50] Bob: Yeah. Voldemort goes forward in Harry Potter. And that's the ultimate story, the ultimate through line is what it's called, from the first book to the eighth book is will Voldemort or Harry win? Who's going to win this epic battle that is going to take place? Within each of those stories, there's a story, smaller quest that Harry has to overcome, and that Harry has to accomplish.
[00:22:15] But Voldemort goes forward and the ultimate story question, the ultimate arc, Harry is going to eventually have to take on Voldemort and what she was so brilliant and doing, JK Rowling, was in the first book, Harry is 12 years old and he's about five foot three and 90 pounds, and he's living under a staircase and he has no skills whatsoever. And he's going to take on the greatest wizard who's ever lived? I mean, you talk about tension and suspense. But over the course of the series of books, what she does is she begins to reveal Harry. He's loyal. He's honest. He's courageous. He's trustworthy. He's very good with the wand. He's good with the dark arts. He's good at getting people to do what he wants them to do and to follow him and to be loyal.
[00:23:01] So she begins to build all these things so that by the time you get to the last book, Harry is no longer 12 years old here. He's 18, 19 years old, and he's pretty dang skilled. And so when you see this battle is going to take place, you think, You know what? I'm giving a kid a chance. We know what's going to happen because it's a novel and people would blow up England if Harry had been defeated. But at the same time, you have incredible tension because you know that Harry's going to go through hell in order to survive.
[00:23:33] And, you know, the protagonist journey in many books, as weird as this is going to sound, it's not unlike some of the historical figures in our lives. Take a historical figure like Jesus Christ. Well, everybody knows the story of the Bible. It's the most read book ever in the world. So we know the story of Jesus Christ. We know how it's going to end. But when we went and watched the movie THE PASSION, for instance, we still cringed. It was still horrifying, what this man had to go through. And that's what you're trying to do with your story. The reader has a sense how it's going to turn out, they know what the ending's going to be, but they don't know necessarily what's going to happen in order for that end to get there. And it's that what's going to happen that creates tension.
[00:24:17] Matty: I'm always surprised at how much I can know about a story and still enjoy the things that should be spoilers. I just was binge reading another author's books and I was reading some of them in order but some of them out of order, and in some places, he was really specific about things that happened. You know, He thought back to the death of his girlfriend in the fiery car crash. And you're like, Why did he just tell me that? because it happened in a previous book. And yet when I get to that book and read it, I still enjoy it. It doesn't for whatever reason undermine my enjoyment of that thing that I already knew was going to happen.
[00:24:54] Bob: You know, the other thing I always caution new writers is, they'll say to me, I'm writing the trilogy, and I'll say, Maybe not. And that's the reality of the situation, right? Say you get a publisher and you get it published and the book doesn't do very well. They're not going to invest in the next book. And so you want that quest to be concluded in each book.
[00:25:15] Matty: I had another flavor of backstory, and I'm going to throw this out as the last topic of conversation because it will be a nice entree to let you talk about your latest book that just launched yesterday. So we've been talking a lot about mainly personal backstory, but THE EIGHTH SISTER, as an example, is sort of a Cold War spy novel re-imagined for the 21st century, and it does have a lot of historical backstory as well in it. Are there different rules that apply if you feel like you have to give some historical context to a reader who may not know that historical context from their own experience?
[00:25:49] Bob: I don't know if it's anything different. You still have to find an entertaining and interesting way to present the information. Our job as authors, especially in fiction, is to entertain. Nonfiction, there might be other factors, but when you're writing fiction, your primary goal is to entertain. So you have to figure out a way to tell the backstory of Russia, for instance, coming out of the Cold War and perestroika and why perestroika failed and all those things. You have to find an interesting way that this can all take place. So, you know, Jenkins is aware, he's intimately aware, of the KGB and the Soviet Union in the 1960s because he dealt with them. And so there are ways that you can drop in information through your main character in that instance. He knows what he's getting himself into and he knows the potential pitfalls and he knows what's going to happen if he gets caught. At least he believes he knows what's going to happen -- he doesn't realize he's been double-crossed. But he has a sense of what is going to happen and how it's going to happen.
[00:26:55] And what's really interesting with Russia is it's a country that has been, I think, struggling to find its identity for a long time. During czarist times, the people were really not treated very well. They were treated poorly and that's what led to the Bolshevik Revolution. Then the Bolsheviks and the communists came into power and communism was a falsehood, it was fake. This idea that you don't own anything, everybody owns it. No. You look at Stalin and he's estimated to have killed 50 million people and he started the gulags and he put all these people in the gulag.
[00:27:35] And then here comes Gorbachev with perestroika and we're going to be open and we're going to change and we're going to have a democracy and the people are going to get to travel and leave the country and people are going to get to know the real Russia. And what happens? The oligarchs step in and they take power because Gorbachev had no clue what he was really doing and how to do it.
[00:27:56] And he didn't understand the mentality of the people there. The mentality of the people there was steal what you can. And they didn't think of it as stealing because nobody owned anything. We all own everything, so it's not really stealing. And also it was a hardscrabble life, a hardscrabble existence, and they were just trying to survive.
[00:28:14] But you have this incredible mentality that Gorbachev basically ignored, and he didn't realize the power of the vory, the Russian mafia. It started in the gulags and it built, so you had the oligarchs, you had the mafia, you have essentially a mafia state. And then here comes Putin, and Putin steps in and he says, I'm the biggest mafia. I got the Russian military behind me. And if you don't do what I say ... So there's all this incredible background to this story.
[00:28:43] But really what it comes down to is why are the people of Russia this way? Why are the people of Russia hesitant to talk to people, strangers, in the country. So what you have to do is you have to figure out a way that you can show it in active voice and in real time. In THE EIGHTH SISTER, for instance, Jenkins is not going to get someone to just step up and help him because Russian people are not like that because they're worried about what the ramifications of that can be to them. So a lot of times he's knows he's very much on his own and he has to deal with that. It's saying nothing about the Russian people, it's just the history behind the country and how it all transpired and what happened.
[00:29:23] So when THE LAST AGENT comes into play, he's going back into a far different Russia than even the perestroika years. He's going back into a Russia that's vindictive, a Russia that takes vengeance on anybody that crosses Putin. And we've seen that recently with another poisoning of someone that is protesting against Putin. So there's a history about Russia that doesn't necessarily need to be told but needs to be reflected in the people in the story.
[00:29:52] Matty: That's a nice, subtle way of doing it because in THE EIGHTH SISTER, for example, you don't ever do an info dump of all that information, but it's just a little comments people make, or their behaviors, that indicates that.
[00:30:05] So I have to ask you, feel free to talk a little bit more about the sequel to THE EIGHTH SISTER, and I'm also very curious how things are going with a book launch in a socially distanced world.
[00:30:17] Bob: Yeah. So THE LAST AGENT came out yesterday, and in THE LAST AGENT, Jenkins is back on his farm, basically taking care of business, but he's now gotten back into the spy world. And there's a part of that spiral that is always been a part of him. And so while he's happy, he doesn't necessarily feel fulfilled. He's got his wife and he's got his kids, and his daughter and all those things but he doesn't have anything really professionally that's fulfilling to him. And he's never really felt fulfilled since the time that he walked away from the CIA. It was a career that he really loved and really wanted to succeed at.
[00:30:53] So he's at his farm and here comes this young man who basically says, I'm from the CIA and I need your help. And Jenkins is prepared to basically kill this guy. Not literally, but he's like, Are you kidding me? After everything I've gone through? And the guy says, Just hear me out. And eventually Jenkins hears him out.
[00:31:13] And what he hears is that they've lost track of an agent in Russia. They had someone that was taken political prisoner at Lefortovo Prison. And that person was recently freed based on an exchange, which is really based on real life. And when that person came back, they said they interrogated him and they think that the agent they lost, might be in Lefortovo Prison. And Jenkins is finding this all very interesting, but all very irrelevant.
[00:31:43] Until the guy says the name of the agent that they've lost and it's Paulina Ponomayova. And Paulina Ponomayova is the reason why Jenkins is still alive. She gave up her life -- he believes that she gave up her life -- so that he could get back to the United States and be with his wife and his son and his daughter. And so when Jenkins hears that, he's prepared to go back in and find out if she is the prisoner in Lefortovo Prison, if she is alive, and to try to get her out.
[00:32:13] The COVID thing is really very interesting. It's a really hard time for a lot of people. And I certainly recognize that, and I feel very blessed that I get to do a job that I love to do, and I get to do it in my home. I don't have to travel any place. I don't have to meet a lot of people and all those things. I did a Zoom meeting the other day with Barb Peters at the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, Arizona, and it was a lot of fun and it went really well. It got a huge audience. I've been doing Zoom conferences and things all this week, and they've been great. I taught the Novel Writing Intensive for the first time over Zoom and I thought it went extremely well. But the thing that's missing is the personal connections.
[00:32:56] I don't get a chance to see people that I've come to know, come to really like. I don't get a chance to sign their books or just talk to them and find out how their life is going and how they're doing and all those things.
[00:33:10] So, you know, it's no different than what I think a lot of people are going through during this time period, which is just they're missing human interaction. And I think that's something that we have to be really careful about. Because with technology we're already becoming more and more isolated. Think of the people that you try to talk to and they're on their cell phone because they're just wed to that cell phone. They're wed to having it in their hand. That's where information comes from. That's your communication comes from you.
[00:33:37] I noticed it the other day with my daughter. She wasn't doing anything to be rude but, you know, she's 21 years old and I'm over at her apartment and I'm trying to secure her apartment, putting on deadbolts and things like that. And I'd say, Can you get me the drill? And I turned around and she'd be on her phone. She wasn't trying to be rude. It's just, that's how her friends are communicating with her. So if you take that and then you add this to it, and you start to say that we can start doing these interviews over the computer. We can have book signings over the computer. We can do all these things over the computer. Suddenly, we don't ever have to leave our homes. We don't ever have to interact. I think that's a dangerous thing, a dangerous precedent that we want to avoid.
[00:34:19] Matty: I think it would be nice when we get back to the place where we can have both we'll have the option of the in-person interactions. But I do hope that some of the things that have gone online continue. For example, I just joined Sisters in Crime New England, and I would never normally be able to participate in their events as a person who lives outside Philadelphia. And so it's been nice to be able to get to know people that way, but I also miss going to conferences and seeing them in person exactly as you're saying.
[00:34:47] Bob: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
[00:34:50] Matty: Bob, I appreciate so much you slotting yet another Zoom meeting in among all your others, and congratulations on the book launch. Please let people know where they can go to find out more about you and your work online.
[00:35:03] Bob: They can go to my website, which is www.RobertDugoniBooks.com or they can go on Amazon, which is Author Robert Dugoni. And they'll find all my books and they'll find out information about me and ways that they can buy my books if they'd like, ways that they can buy autographed copies of my books, if they are people that like to do that. The Poisoned Pen, for instance, has autographed copies of my books. The independent bookstore here in my hometown, BookTree, they're going to have autographed copies of my books. So a lot of different ways that they can go about it.
[00:35:37] Matty: That's great to hear because getting an autographed book is one of the things that I miss about not having in person events.
[00:35:44] So, Bob, congratulations again, and thank you so much.
[00:35:46] Bob: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Links
Author Robert Dugoni on Amazon
From my personal update:
Episode 045 - Nine Things Career Authors Don't Do: Exercise
Podcast For Writers: How to Start a Podcast for Beginners from Self Publishing with Dale YouTube Channel
Episode 045 - Nine Things Career Authors Don't Do: Exercise
Podcast For Writers: How to Start a Podcast for Beginners from Self Publishing with Dale YouTube Channel
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