Lots of
requests from last week, thanks to you who've answered so far. However. I’m still gathering my thoughts on how to answer some of them. Plus, I’d already finished most of this,
sooooo...
I wanted to
take this week to go back to something I’ve talked about before. Flashbacks. I’ve encountered a few
books recently that lean heavily on this device and... well, most of them
weren’t good. One of them was good to a
point, but after that point it quickly tipped into frustrating, and from there
to just plain bad.
Why?
Well, let
me bring up a more important question for us all to ponder while I babble on. Why does my story use flashbacks? What purpose do they serve within the story?
Let me give
an example.
I read a novel
recently about a Black Widow-esque assassin who’d gone through a
nightmarish bout of training and indoctrination before being set loose on the
world and her assorted targets. Its chapters alternated between present day
and the past. The “now” of the story was
her carrying out a series of missions while the “then” was how she was recruited
and trained.
Except...
The two
plot lines didn’t make linear sense. Y’see, for the first two-thirds of the
book, our assassin (let’s call her Phoebe) was hunting down one target,
finishing her assignment, and moving onto the next one. It was kind of a Bond movie setup. But she was paranoid-nervous the whole time.
Was someone watching her? Hunting her
while she hunted down her targets? She’d
built up a lot of enemies over the years. Was one of them lining up on the base of her skull right now?
Meanwhile,
in the parallel past plotline (say that four times fast...), we saw how she was
recruited out of the foster system after a series of schoolyard fights. Her brutal apprenticeship. Her first kill. Her early missions.
And then, the
last third of the book rolled around...
In the
final “then” sections, Phoebe met Nadia, one of her peers (and, it’s vaguely
hinted, maybe even a long-ago love interest or at least regular friend-with-benefits). And it turns out Nadia is a traitor, a double
agent who Phoebe exposes and they end up in a huge battle that rages through a
shopping mall (again, really cool). In
the end Nadia gets away, but swears to return and kill Phoebe for exposing her.
And from this page on, in the “now” sections, Phoebe wonders if it’s Nadia out
there waiting to kill her. Maybe Nadia
has a rifle aimed at her head. Nadia,
the only one she ever let get away, could be right around that corner.
See the
problem here?
As the
“then” storyline progressed, it became clear that the “now” timeline was
cheating and tweaking things to create dramatic moments that wouldn’t exist if
the two lines were being honest. The
author forgot that all of “then” happens before every minute of “now”—the order they were telling the story in didn’t matter. The author tried to set this up as paranoia
in the “now” sections, except it turns out Phoebe was completely justified in
feeling this way. She knew all along someone
was actually hunting her. Hell, for the
first two-thirds of the book she knew the name of the person hunting
her, a person it’s strongly implied she’d been intimate with, and she never
thought of Nadia once—even though most of the story is from her point of view. She just had vague thoughts about “a possible threat” or “maybe another operative”
until this convenient point in the story.
This is the
type of thing people are talking about when they say flashbacks don’t
work. Well, okay, those people are kind
of stupid. Flashbacks do work and
you should use them... if they make sense within the story’s structure.
From a
linear point of view, does my story still make sense with this flashback? Or flashbacks, as the case may be. What happens if I rearrange everything so all
the chapters are in linear order?
If a lot of
my character motivations or behaviors become murky, it means I’ve got a
problem. I don’t have a good thread for
my character, and their reactions are based off my narrative, not their linear
experiences.
If large parts
of my story now drag, that’s a sign I’ve got a structure problem. The flashbacks were the only thing creating
tension. It means my story is really
either in the past or the present. I’m
just killing time and eating up word count in the other setting.
If I put
everything in order and my story works better—it reads smoother, its
easier to follow, and the plot moves faster—then that takes me back to those
early questions. Why does my story use
flashbacks? What purpose do they serve?
Don’t
laugh at that last one. I’ve seen people
who turned their stories into a mess of non-linear flashbacks that served no
purpose whatsoever, and they ruined an interesting story by doing it. It happens more often than you’d think.
Like any
element in my story, I can’t be throwing in flashbacks for no reason. Just
because something worked in that story doesn’t mean it’s going to work in my story—especially if I don’t understand why
it worked.
Do cool
stuff in your stories. But have a reason
for doing it. A real, honest reason that
doesn’t cheat or frustrate your readers
Next
time...
Well, I
actually got a fair number of requests and questions last time, so here’s what
I was thinking. I’m going to pluck out
the one or two that would work as full posts and we’ll probably see them in the
next three or four weeks. But next time
I’m going to do a whole post of quick topics that I can address in four or five
paragraphs (and maybe a link or three).
So if you have something writing-related you’d like me to address,
mention it down in the comments and it’ll end up on one list or the other.
And until
then... go write.
Hi Peter,
ReplyDeleteI would love to know how growing up in Cape Neddick MAINE influenced your writing. I live in Maine and it is a special place to me. I think Mike in The Fold is a Mainer at heart.
That's not really the kind of question I answer here, Anon. This page is about writing advice and tips.
ReplyDeleteYou can ask over on Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, though (pick your favorite), and I'll be happy to discuss it there.
If anybody needs an example of how to do this right, read Ex-Communication by Peter Clines. It works well with the Now/Then format, and the reveals that come across change the way you might see prior events, but don't take away from them making narrative sense.
ReplyDeletePeter Clines? Jeeez, I heard on the internet that guy's a jerk...
ReplyDelete