The best writing advice I ever received came from a playwright, not a published author. He showed me how to bring my reader and my characters as closely together as possible without intruding my own voice on them.

My writing is heavily dialogue with the absolute minimum of what we might call “reader feeder” to explain backstory or a character’s state of mind. I very much respect my readers and as such expect that they will understand what is intended without spoon-feeding it to them.

The backstory appears where it is organically intended, not where the author chooses to place it. What that means is that it’s not linear, we learn about Emma for example and how her upbringing bears upon the present when it’s appropriate to the story. Done right my stories are like being an audience in a theater that has no stage and no walls, so the interaction is very direct.