Flashback Other Stuff

flashback

Flashback Other Stuff

In the previous post, I discussed the importance of the flashback. Here I will cover some of the more mechanical issues when using this technique.

Flashback order

It’s not a hard and fast rule but sometimes it helps the reader if the flashbacks themselves occur chronologically. That is, if the flashback scenes have a particular sequence, it’s less confusing if they’re presented that way.

As I say, not hard and fast. Sometimes the narrative demands an out-of-order presentation. But if so, cue the reader in some way where they are in the flashback story.

Frequency

As I mentioned in the previous post, flashbacks should not take up the bulk of the story and as Carol Shields points out in Startle and Illuminate, there should be a reason for switching to them.

And while they need to be used frugally, neither can you use just one and then never again. Readers have some unconscious expectations of fiction and this is one of them—flashbacks are used in multiples or not at all.

You don’t need a big flag to signal a memory

Writers sometimes have trouble figuring out how to introduce a flashback. They often use phrases like “she remembered” or “he thought of his childhood.” Not egregious sins but can be a bit clunky.

It’s pretty easy to indicate a flashback. Just use a different tense. If you’re writing in the present, use the past. If the past, the pluperfect (‘had’). Reverse when you want to come out.

If you’re really worried that your reader won’t get it (and this isn’t usual since they are often smarter than us), double space or use a few asterisks to denote the switch.

By the by, you don’t need to use the different tense for the whole flashback scene. This is particularly true of the pluperfect. A lot of “he had had a problem” and “she hadn’t wanted to go,” is cumbersome and somewhat irritating. Use the pluperfect a couple of times at the top of the flashback and then switch back to the past.

At what point can they be used?

The placement of flashbacks, like any other technique which can slow the forward action of the plot (e.g. description), needs to be judicious.

Unless there is some really compelling reason in the plot that the character goes into a flashback at a moment of tension or drama, don’t do it. You dissipate whatever excitement you’re building by subtly pulling the reader out of the continuous dream you’re building for him.

If you need the character to reflect on the plot development or action sequence she has just experienced, by all means do it. But put her in a scene after the action where she can show her feelings or analysis of the situation. Just before falling asleep, riding the bus, waiting for someone or something, etc.

P.S. I can think of one time when flashbacks during the action are appropriate and that’s when the character is experiencing PTSD-like events. But then, these need to be part of the plot.

Anyhow, there you have it—the mechanics of flashback. Now let’s get back to the present.

January 8, 2021January 8, 2021

Flashbacks

Okay, so maybe your flashbacks don’t go back to pre-history, but they are an important component of any piece, particularly a novel but also memoir or a long short story.

I know you know this, so humor me while I provide an explanation. A flashback is a scene or scenes in a longer fiction piece which take the reader to a point in the narrative which occurred prior to the time in which the tale itself is situated. There are a whole bunch of good reasons to use them.

Flashbacks can be great support for the main plot

Just-in-time for the reader

One of the best reasons is to provide information/background/explanation the reader requires to understand the scene. This avoids the deadly piling on, at the beginning of the story, of all the history and research the reader will need. You can easily lose people because they don’t yet understand the context in which these details fit. Much better to give them info at the point they need it. Enter the flashback.

An example (italics for main story; flashback in red).

The children were screaming and running around in what seemed a chaotic tag. The adults were in the kitchen—the clink of the glasses rising even above the din. Alice sighed.

It hadn’t always been so. What she remembered most were the silent mornings where you were supposed to be reading your Bible and contemplating your sins. She tried, she really did, but it was hard not to see the toboggan-ready hill of snow just outside her window.

So, if it is important to understand the contrast between Alice’s present reality and her past, best to keep the two together rather than a description at the beginning of the olden days.

Fill out a character

You may want to make the character more vivid or real by providing bits of his personal history to explain his actions in the ‘present’ of the novel.

“Why did you do that?” Veronica yelled.

Jerry turned away and walked out of the room into the sunlight.

It had been snowing that day. Heavy, wet snow. Great for snowballs. A bitch for shoveling. Nevertheless, he was looking forward to the day. Gemma was sure to be at class today…And then you go on to explain why Jerry acted so strangely.

Variety

A story that starts at the beginning and goes through in chronological order to the hopefully satisfying end can be perfectly okay. For example, if you are writing an action thriller with a taciturn hero, flashbacks may be out of place.

But for most stories, they mix things up in a pleasurable way for the reader. The bouncing around can provide an enjoyable variety in the form of the story.

Get boring bits out of the way

There are bits of any novel which are a drag both for you to write and for the reader to read but are nevertheless important to the story. You may need to explain the history of a critical object or element. A short flashback at the point the info is needed can sometimes make the conveyance easier to read and sometimes to write.

Use sparingly

While they can provide variety, too many flashbacks can confuse the narrative, sometimes to the point of being unsure what the main story is. A large number also tend to annoy the reader as it begins to feel as if they’re impeding the main action.

So, flashbacks are good but not always flashbacks. There are other more mechanical dos and don’ts that I’ll cover in the next post.

December 18, 2020October 31, 2020

Ridiculously Small Targets

What a year this has been! A pandemic, no less. However you have been affected by it—whether it’s worrying about your safety or mourning the loss of a loved one—no one has escaped unscathed. In particular, I think we are targets for higher level of tension and stress than pre-pandemic. Goes up and down, isn’t always top of mind. But always there.

This continued stress is not conducive to writing and may even make it feel irrelevant. But if you, as I do, enjoy the moments of escape which writing provides, then I would encourage you to take a few moments over the holiday season to give yourself that relief.

However, this is often a busy season and is certainly a weird one this year. Doesn’t feel as if you could take the time.

You can with ridiculously small targets

The lack of time is a constant challenge for writers. And exacerbated over the holidays. What claims our attention may be different this year—staying connected rather than planning huge get togethers—but it is still likely to take time.

So, to keep your escape available, aim for ridiculously small targets. Rather than a lengthy session of concentration to turn out a substantial piece, why not decide on a five or ten word limit a day? An idea, a moment, a feeling, a grasp at your soul for a fleeting moment. Write them down.

This is one time when carrying around a small notebook might work best. You can of course use your phone as the repository if you won’t feel the urge to keep it short to save yourself the nuisance. Because, although you might set your minimum at ten words, the trick is to continue beyond that if the spirit moves. If you feel comfortable on your phone doing that, use it by all means.

Why bother with small—shouldn’t I be going big?

Of course, if you have the time over the break, by all means set the time aside. Even regularly if you can. But holidays often pull you this way and that, so planning for major time which isn’t realistic, will just lead to a sense of failure.

And by the by, if you aim incredibly low and meet your objectives, please congratulate yourself rather than thinking, “Well, it wasn’t much. I should have done more.” The point of aiming low is to create a sense of success. Don’t sabotage yourself by denigrating the goal itself after the fact. Instead, bask.

Using these minor moments

One of two things will happen. Either one of the ten word moments will inspire you to make time to expand on the idea that just hit you or you will end the holidays with a list of interesting notions.

After the holidays, you can use something from the list to kick start a longer writing session. Since writers often have trouble knowing where to begin, this will give you a built-in source that could last you for months.

Either way, you win. A little holiday gift to yourself.

December 11, 2020December 13, 2020

Not My Biography, Exactly

In the last post, using anecdotes as starter dough, I encouraged you to use your own biography as a launching pad for a story. The end product doesn’t have to resemble the initiating thought and may take you to an entirely different place than the ‘real’ story.

But while I think it is a great idea, there’s one caveat. This can be a way, however inadvertent, to slide into retelling the story so that your David wins against Goliath, your weasel against the lion.

The temptation in writing your own biography

In giving yourself permission to take off from the original memory into something possibly quite different, there can be a lure to weave the new story in a way where you look better/smarter/more prescient than you did in real life. I stood up to the bully and didn’t slink away; my ridicule was actually a gentle joke. It’s easy to shape things so that the story turns out as you wished it had or what you want people to believe.

Trust me, it almost always turns out to be way more compelling writing if you stick with the truth. I know it sounds as if I’m talking out of both sides of mouth—take flights of fancy and stick with the truth.

But the truth I am talking about is emotional truth. I don’t care if you change your school yard to another planet or make the stakes earth-shattering rather than hurt feelings. But I do care whether the underlying emotion is real. If you can capture the feelings when you let the bully to beat up another kid, so long as you were safe or the consequences of being less than what you aspire to, then the story can take off in any direction you like and still be true.

Memoir or fiction?

You would think that how close you need to stay to the truth would depend on whether you are writing fiction or a memoir. More truthful for a memoir, not so important for fiction.

Well, maybe, but it isn’t as easy as all that. For one thing, the two genres are often conflated. More than one author has used actual events in his fiction and we have all read memoires which we know have got to be more fiction than fact.

Sometimes this conflation seems purposeful. I didn’t want to be President anyhow; I was never wrong. But other times, the mixing of the genres may not be intentional. As I mentioned in my last post, I wrote a whole sub-plot which I thought was auto-biographical until my sister pointed out the event had happened to her rather than me.

But examples of this bleed between genres don’t have to be as blatant. You may use an anecdote whose interpretation is obvious, only to discover that another participant in the event remembers it completely differently. One of you is talking fiction but you’ll probably never figure out who.

Truthfully, I just can’t get worried about what genre you call your manuscript. As long as you keep close to that core of emotional truth wherever the story takes you, your writing will have the ring of reality to which readers respond.

December 4, 2020October 31, 2020

Using Your Anecdotes as Starter Dough

We all have anecdotes. Memorable moments, good and bad, which swirl around in memory. Carol Shields suggests that, like Alice Munro, you use your experience as starter dough[1]. For the non-bakers among you, starter dough is a piece of dough kept from a previous batch which is used as leavening for new bread. By careful tending, starter dough can last for years or decades and continue to provide the umph for bread. Great analogy, no? Remembrances from your life can be the starter dough to create the new bread of a story. It is a jumping off point to add the ingredients you want.

Norman Mailer, author of both fiction and nonfiction, had a similar although somewhat different take. He came to the world’s attention with The Naked and The Dead, a novel set in World War II. I saw an interview with him, discussing its writing. I paraphrase, but he said that he had never been in a war but he knew what it was to fear for his life. He used that life understanding to inform the writing of the novel.

So great writers have used their lives to infuse their writing with reality.

Starter dough anecdotes—an example

Although this seems like good advice, I realize that it may be a bit difficult to imagine how that might happen. So, an example might be helpful.

My novel, Kimono Spring, is a semi (emphasis on semi)-autobiographical novel. In it, the seven year old protagonist, Julie, is picked to play a child in an amateur Japanese theater production where her father is the lead. Julie only has two lines but her father won’t translate their meaning. The reader figures out that Julie is playing an illegitimate daughter and her father is loath to tell her that. But because she doesn’t know what she’s saying, she confuses them during the performance and forces the other actors to improvise around her blunders.

As anecdotes go, it’s all right, no? I used my memory of the event and embroidered it. I mentioned it to my sister who was three years older than me. She instantly took exception and said it was her not me who had been in the play. Well, honestly it did make more sense that they would use a ten year old rather than a seven year old. I guess I was so jealous of my sister getting the role that I implanted in my memory that I had been the star. Even to the point of remembering mixing up the lines.

So, in this case, it turned out to be borrowed starter dough. But it allowed me to take off into a whole sub-plot of the novel.

How do I do this in my writing?

In the example above, because I ‘remembered’ confusing the lines, I had to come up with a reason why she fluffed them. To add to the mix, I showed a seven year old preening in her role while the reader realizes that the father is slowly falling in love with a woman from Japan also in the play. This ‘memory’ allowed me to expand into story.

You can do the same with your recollections. Although I’d suggest using your own starter dough. Next post: Where starter dough and truth collide.

[1] Shields, Carol, Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing Random House, Canada, 2006, p.17