When I started building Sonny Marshall, I had a decision to make. Every crime writer needs a way for their protagonist to move through the world outside the investigation — a life, a job, something the reader sees them do when nobody’s dying. The easy choice would have been to make him a cop, a PI, a lawyer. Something that puts him naturally in the path of crime.
I made him a saxophonist instead.
That decision did more work than any paragraph of backstory could have. A private investigator’s job explains why he’s at a crime scene. It doesn’t explain who he is. Music does both.
Watch what happens in the opening pages of Storm Warning. Sonny’s not introduced solving anything. He’s introduced on stage, in the neon glow of a jazz club, playing to a room that came for the music, not the mystery. Then the story cuts to martial arts training — quiet, disciplined, controlled. Two rooms. Two versions of the same man. One where he channels everything he’s not saying into a horn. One where he channels it into his body. Neither room requires a line of exposition about what happened to him. The contrast tells you.
That’s the craft principle I want to talk about this week, and I want to state it more precisely than the title might suggest: a skill doesn’t replace backstory. It’s what backstory looks like once it’s still running. Sonny’s past — the violence in it, what it cost him — is the reason the saxophone matters at all. But I don’t have to explain that past on the page for it to be present, because the reader watches it operating in how he plays. Backstory explains what formed a character. A skill shows how that formation keeps moving through the present tense. Readers forget explanations. They remember behavior, and behavior is backstory with nowhere left to hide.
That only works if the activity is doing real work, though. A character who plays tennis on weekends because the manuscript needed a hobby isn’t more dimensional for it. An activity earns its keep when it’s rendered specifically and it costs the character something or gets him something he can’t get anywhere else — a second place where the character’s actual nature shows up, not a decoration hung on top of it.
Consider what the saxophone actually does for Sonny across two books. It gives him an outlet for feeling he won’t put into words. It gives him a found family in Garth and Eric — the kind of bond that isn’t explained through history but through hours spent making something together, night after night, in a room that doesn’t care about his investigation, and a band that knows him as a musician and a friend rather than as the guy who keeps finding trouble. And it gives me, as the writer, a way to show his interior life without ever having him sit down and think about his interior life, which is the thing I’m always trying to avoid. Nobody wants to read a paragraph of a tough guy contemplating his own trauma in the abstract. Everybody will read him lose himself in eight bars of a blues number and feel the pressure he can’t put into words.
Here’s how I put it into Sonny’s own words in Storm Damage, when he’s thinking about how a song gets written:
“Every song tells a story, whether written in words or the aural language of music. When I compose music, I begin with a feeling, a mood, an attitude — a note, the right note, which blossoms into a musical phrase that begins to tell the story… When I finish, I have a song that tells an emotional story in the tones and timbres of the saxophone.”
Notice that passage isn’t really about music theory. It’s Sonny describing his own process for working through feeling, and it applies just as well to how he works a case as it does to how he writes a song. That’s not an accident. I wanted the two disciplines — music and investigation — to run on the same internal logic, so that the reader learns how Sonny’s mind works in a scene that has nothing to do with the plot.
That’s not just a claim I’m making about him from the outside — it shows up directly in Storm Warning. Working a kidnapping case, Sonny sits in his car running a twelve-bar blues in his head and starts thinking about how a mystery behaves the same way: each new fact is another note, and the more notes accumulate, the more of the melody — the pattern — becomes audible. A minute later he’s using that same logic out loud on Kat, walking her through how a first fact makes a statement, a second creates an expectation, and a third starts to establish direction, and concluding that two data points don’t make a pattern yet, however suggestive they look. He’s not describing music. He’s reasoning through a case using the only internal grammar he fully trusts. That’s the payoff of building a character around a discipline instead of a backstory paragraph: the discipline becomes a way of thinking he can put to work anywhere in the book, not just in the scenes where he happens to be holding a horn.
If you’re building a protagonist and reaching for a page of backstory to explain who they are, ask a different question first: what does this person do with their hands when nobody needs anything from them? What’s the thing they were doing before the story needed them to be a hero? It doesn’t have to be an art. It can be gardening, rebuilding an engine, running a kitchen line, boxing, birding — whatever it is, it only earns its place if it exposes a pattern: how the character handles control, failure, other people, the moments when nothing is going right. Give them that, render it specifically, and you’ll find you need far less explanation than you thought. The reader will do the work of connecting the activity to the person underneath it and watching them make that connection themselves is more convincing than any scene where a character explains their own psychology out loud — which, if you’ve ever tried to write one, you know is nearly impossible to make sound like a real person talking.
Next issue, I’ll get into Kat Hastings and the challenge of writing a detective partner who has to be Sonny’s equal instead of the officer who exists to be occasionally impressed by him.