Backstory in a Backpack

Years ago, summer of 1968, I decided to abandon the novel I had been working on, so I could start fresh. I was staying at a friend’s apartment in New York City. Three tiny rooms. The bedroom was his and the only furniture in the place was one mattress. The kitchen had a fridge, stove, sink and bathroom. In the living room, where I stayed, there was nothing except the floor where I slept, plus odds and ends in boxes.

Everything I was going to take on my journey had to fit in a backpack. All of my writing, all of my art, the remainder of my belongings, were being abandoned. My self-appointed mission was to search for America. That’s what wanna-be writers of my generation thought was important. Ten years later my wandering ways came to an end. The cross-weave fabric of American life was lodged in my soul.

Down the street was a neighborhood stationary store. I bought a canvas covered Record book. It was durable, light weight, and small enough for hard traveling. Those pages are where I began my backstory in a backpack.

Leaning against a wall, I used the floor as a chair. My legs were bent upward for use as a desk. Opening the Record book, I stared at blank page number one. Taking a ball point pen from my shirt pocket, I clicked it open.

Inspiration abandoned me.

The wisdom of the world was out there somewhere, as always, but none of it flowed forth from the tip of my pen. I leaned over and picked up some random book. From it I copied a few mystical symbols, just so I could put something on that page. Over the years I rambled west, south, north, and east. Then I did it all over again – this time traveling down different roads. My backstory continued to grow.

Protecting Our Culture

Fast forward fifty years. The twists and turns of creating a fictional universe turned out to be more of an adventure than what I had endured on my cross-country wanderings. With my own eyes, I had seen small towns and big cities. With my own ears, I had listened to voices from every heritage. These things were blended with impressions from beyond the stars.

The Supercluster Stories are an imagined road trip of what might be the next segment of our future. My youthful journey took me down highways and byways that are described in The End of the Sixties. The responsibilities of raising a family connected me to the importance of protecting our culture. These inner and outer experiences fueled the evolution of my narrative.

To Superclusters and Beyond!

Unscripted Conversations

The source of any backstory yields clues about how a particular drama came to be. For instance, J. R. R. Tolkien was a Professor of Anglo-Saxon Philology at Oxford University. Hobbits emerged from that belief system. Quest stories are universal. Characters have a standard range of fictional responsibilities. In many cases, a fresh backstory is what grabs the reader’s attention.

Unexpected source material was derived from unscripted conversations.

Sometimes, and it’s not often, and never for long, fragments from a deeper layer of human behavior get slipped into someone’s conversation. “Even though my mom has been dead for twenty years, I think she reached out to me in my dreams.” … or … “I started to do something, but this powerful urge came over me, so I did it completely different.” Inspirations such as these are common, but they generally go unremarked.

One thing a writer must do is listen to dialog with a keen ear. Another is to observe everyday scenes. These memories will be used to turn words into pictures.

While Stina and I were busy raising the kids, I began to realize that there was this “tiny category” of dialog which I nicknamed “beliefs about the powers-that-be.” While assembling Supercluster Stories I gave names, origins, and motivations to several varieties of invisible characters. These character types can be lumped together as the powers-that-be.

Here is some dialog from The End of the Sixties, which illustrates my point …
“You see … they need me … over there,” confessed Melona.
From the tone of her voice, Valerie knew exactly what she meant. “You mean them,” pointing at thin air. “The powers that be. The invisible ones. The guardians of order.”
“Uh, yeah,” admitted Melona, glancing away.

Beliefs About the Other Side

Science assures us that “them” can’t exist because there is no testable proof. I worked in a scientific research laboratory for two decades and I’m a great believer in the discipline of the scientific method.

Taking a contrarian view of this “them” subject, the nightmare characters from ancient pagan belief systems were horrid. On an opposite branch, I have no use for fictional angels, who seem to spend their days gently pushing toddlers out of the way of oncoming buses.

What astonished me, once I got this obscure series of observations figured out, is that we have a real-world laboratory for collecting data about what people actually have as their beliefs concerning the other side. It doesn’t matter if you can prove it or not. If this is what real people think and say, on a consistent basis, then this is something you can use in a story.

It’s like a lot of things, once you learn about a subject, you start hearing it everywhere. The supermarket, in airports, at work, parties (especially after the booze has kicked in, but before the slurring begins), sitting on a park bench. Not often and never for long. But it’s there. These words come from some deep place. What is revealed is what people actually believe about our connection to some invisible segment of reality.

Computer Generated Images

It was the pictures that triggered the tectonic shift in my backstory. At some point during the 1990s, I began reading dry technical articles about these newly identified gravity groups, which we now call superclusters. Words on paper. Boring – unless you’re an enthusiastic data wonk like I am.

Fifteen years later the astronomers had evaluated enough of this data to publish computer generated images of our supercluster neighborhood.

Let me provide some perspective. Back in the sixties, I traveled from New York to San Francisco, a distance of three thousand miles, and I needed a road map. That helped me to find my way around America.

On today’s computer screens are maps that take us on a mind-journey which is one hundred million light years wide. That series of supercluster maps fulfilled the development of my backstory.

Here is another familiar example. Murder on the Orient Express is Agatha Christie’s most famous book. It might be possible for someone to sit comfortably in an English cottage and create a murder mystery of that caliber. That’s not what she did. Agatha took her first journey on that legendary express train in 1928. She returned many times. An intricate riddle, such as Orient Express, requires precise attention to detail.

With these new big-sky maps (see the About page) I was able to “see” in my mind’s eye, what I had been struggling to set down in words.

As mentioned earlier, a writer needs to listen to dialog and observe settings. I taught myself to listen for spontaneous dialog about how people feel when they “interact” with the-powers-that-be. I also studied these supercluster maps, so that I could design the fictional neighborhoods, then inhabit them with the right mix of characters.

Connected To Everything

An incident from my personal life illustrates how this backstory grew from small to large. While I was on the road, winter of 1969, I was walking through a dark forest in a snowstorm. For no particular reason, I suddenly felt connected to everything everywhere. Cosmic consciousness had snuck up on me. Countless people, in every historical era, have experienced similar feelings. I felt a powerful urge to write about this because it seemed important. It seemed like something that needed to be shared.

Many years later, after seeing supercluster images, it felt as if that blinding snowstorm had come to a sudden halt, and then a bright moon emerged to illuminate the landscape.

My storyteller’s goal isn’t to convince anybody of anything. What I am trying to do is put into fiction this new way of seeing our cosmic neighborhood. From these tall tales, the reader will be able to “walk down” those supercluster roads, by using their mind’s eye. After doing that, the reader should read more stories and learn from them. A little here, a little there, it adds up.

I have a hope (and in the real-world hope often gets crushed) that a larger view, about our proper place in the grand scheme of things, might possibly make us better stewards of our planet.

There is no miracle, no propaganda, no doctrine, that will do these things for us. Each person has a vision of who they are and what they must do. Worldviews matter. The basics remain more or less the same, but it takes a team of storytellers to create course corrections for our shared narrative.

Props In Fiction

The backstory of Supercluster Stories is based on a combination of people-truth and book-truth. Truth has no face. Stories do have a face. That’s why we need them.

As I developed into an adult, my personal worldview took on increased meaning. Gomonish and Vartog helped me sort out the details. Those fictional place names are based on actual locations (Laniakea and Perseus-Pisces superclusters), but they are just props in fiction.

A spoonful of fiction helps the astrophysics medicine go down.