Flashback Feud, Part One: Guest Jenna Blum
By Sharon Bially | January 10, 2011 |
Guest contributor Sharon Bially here. In December I wrote a blog post about how the use of flashback in fiction seems to be going out of vogue. The post quotes Jenna Blum, New York Times bestselling author and one of the most effective writing teachers around. Jenna, who has a glowing track record of helping students get published, urges those she teaches to keep flashback scenes out of their manuscripts. Her response prompted a passionate, one-on-one debate that we thought would be valuable to the broader writing community. What better a place to air it than WU?
So a warm welcome to Jenna, who’ll explain her thinking. Tomorrow I’ll share a different point of view. Take it away, Jenna!
At Grub Street Writers, the novelists I teach call me The Flashback Nazi. This is because of my firm opinion that flashbacks should not be used in novels. But before I explain this gunslinging stance further (and it has already drawn me a lot of friendly fire), let me say a couple of things:
If anyone ever tells you how you “should” write, run far away from that person as fast as possible. There is no one right way to write. All I can offer my students is the bag of tricks that’s taken me years of trial and error to fill—if I can spare them some angst and save some time by handing them tools to work on their novels, so much the better. But not every tool works for every story.
And: If I’m going to shoot my gun off about flashbacks, I’d better first clarify what a flashback is. To me, a flashback is a scene complete in itself, replete with dialogue, description, and detail, that occurs before the current storyline in a novel.
But wait! You could stop me here and say, “Hey, Jenna, doesn’t half your first novel, THOSE WHO SAVE US, take place in Nazi Germany, before the present-day storyline? Is that not one big-@$$ flashback, Mz. Smartypants Flashback Nazi?” Actually, nein! What I did with THOSE WHO SAVE US is an alternate plotline. Because one heroine’s story, which occurs in wartime Germany, directly informs the other’s, which takes place in 1990s Minnesota, I dedicated half a book to each character, rationing out the scenes equally. A flashback would be if all of THOSE WHO SAVE US were set in the late ‘90s…but the wartime heroine sometimes flashed back (aha!) to a life-changing important scene from the past.
My argument is:
If what happened to the character in the past is that important, why not extract it and expand it so it becomes a consistent, reliable part of the book’s structure, instead of a temporarily distracting time bubble? Conversely: if the scene isn’t that important, why not condense it to a memory? By which I mean a succinctly written paragraph that supplies precious information to the reader but doesn’t distract from the main storyline.
Because, look. Here’s the main problem with flashbacks. They’re distracting. I’m not saying I don’t understand why they’re necessary. They are—to supply information to the writer. I wish I could take everyone who’s reading this and lead you all by the hand into my apartment, where while downing Scotch I would show you the 800 pages of flashbacks—for each of my novels, THOSE WHO SAVE US and THE STORMCHASERS—that didn’t make the final cut.
That’s 1600 pages of information.
Some of it really F-in’ good information.
In fact, some of my favorite scenes sit on my study shelves, accumulating mysteriously sticky dust.
But in revision, while troubleshooting the books’ structures, I realized that much of the information in those beloved, exquisitely descriptive, hilarious, poignant, thrilling scenes compromised the novels by weighing them down because it wasn’t necessary. As the writer, I needed to know what a divorced character’s marriage was like. I needed to know what happened when a German character easily spooked by gunfire heard her first American fireworks on the 4th of July.
But the reader didn’t need to know, since those scenes had nothing to do with the main storyline of the novel. So BOOM!, I whacked ‘em.
This whacking of flashbacks—which really hurts because you create a world when you’re writing a novel, and everything in it is alive, everything has integrity—this is also known as Killing Your Darlings.
(Although I admit, I cheat. I don’t really kill my darlings. In many cases, I shrink them—to the paragraph-sized bites of memory I mentioned earlier. And often I recycle my darlings by posting them on my website, where readers who want to read them can click on the link entitled “Director’s Cuts.” In writing, as in Native American buffalo hunting, nothing is wasted.)
I know good characters aren’t like the Sex And The City girls, who appear to have sprung from NYC sidewalks without any previous lives whatsoever. Characters needs backstory. And I know how painful it can be, once you’ve made all those discoveries about your characters’ pasts, to cut them.
Yet the main problem I see in novels—my novels, novels-in-progress, published novels—is structural. 99% of the time. The story drags because of repetitious scenes, scenes that don’t contribute to the main plot…. flashbacks.
When you take a reader who’s happily walking the storyline you’ve created—and worked damned hard to create, too, I might add, striving for conflict, tension, emotional investment, the appearance of reality—and you throw in a scene that’s off the timeline, you’re creating a cul-de-sac. You’re sapping the momentum you’ve just labored so hard to build. You’re losing what Stephen King calls “the I-Gotta,” as in, “I gotta stay up just til the end of the next chapter, honey, because I gotta see how this turns out!” Why would you want to do that, after all your hard work?
Plus it’s hard to get in and out of flashbacks. The past doesn’t fold well. In an effort to jam it in there, you might find yourself writing things like, “As Opal passed the rose hedge, the smell of the blooms catapulted her back to the night of her senior prom, when Buddy had presented her with a wilted corsage as if that’d be enough price for her virginity.” I call this time-tunnel segue the Brady Bunch effect, a la whenever Greg, Carol, Jan is about to flash back to an earlier incident, there’s that whshh whshh whssh sound, the screen spins, and we’re thrust into a scene with blurry edges. (No coincidence; flashbacks are often blurry.) Also, you’re asking the reader to believe Opal puts her life on pause long enough to relive the prom and subsequent devirginization—because this happens so much in real life, right? Already we’ve strained one tenet of good fiction, which is to mimic reality as much as possible. And don’t you want your reader to be riveted by the main plotline, instead of arriving back to the present, blinking and flipping pages and saying, “Okay, wait, where were we again?”
My point is, why risk a flashback when there are gentle, elegant, effective ways to provide necessary information? A clumsy flashback (and they’re almost always graceless beasts) is a terrific opportunity for readers to get distracted, put the book down, get up and wander away—and perhaps not come back. In workshop, I often find myself saying, “Never give your reader a chance to go to the bathroom!” And sometimes I get email from readers who say, “I couldn’t put your book down. I neglected my kids/husband/laundry/pets/ hygiene to finish it.”
The human being in me feels sorry about that.
The writer in me rejoices: there’s a reason for that.
Happy writing, all!
Sharon Bially (@SharonBially) is the founder and president of BookSavvy PR, a public relations firm devoted to authors and books. Author of the novel Veronica’s Nap, she’s a member of the Director’s Circle at Grub Street, Inc., the nation’s largest independent writing center, and writes occasionally for the Grub Street Daily.
I absolutely agree!
I tend to skim flashbacks. Especially if they happen too early. I dislike a flashback in general, but if I’m not invested in the characters yet, then it feels intrusive.
As a writer, I tend to avoid them. We’re in the here and now, forwarding the story, riding along with the characters as the conflicts occur. Let’s see what happens to these people and how they react, (uniquely) without the author intruding with explanations for why the main character acts this way or that.
Great post! The more writers that take this advice the better the reading experience will be.
Daryl Sedore
“In writing, as in Native American buffalo hunting, nothing is wasted.”
LOL! I wouldn’t have thought to put it that way, but I like it.
I am not a “Flashback Nazi,” but I agree that they stop the forward progress of a story, which is usually a bad thing.
Note that I said “usually.” I do think some stories get away with flashbacks, if not actually make good use of them. Of course I can’t think of a single example off the top of my head (I was up late writing — that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it!) but I know I’ve read a book or two that uses flashback without killing my interest.
Interestingly, I’ve also read a couple books (most recently WATER FOR ELEPHANTS) that uses a dual plotline, and I started to enjoy the past plotline so much that I came to resent being pulled back to the present!
So, as with all writing advice, I think writers need to understand WHY it is being given — “flashbacks stop the story’s progress” — and then figure out whether or not it applies to their story. 99% of the time, it will! But that 1%, when done right, can really sing. :)
I’d rather figure out a better way to get that information across, and if I do have to move back in time, I darn sure keep it short. I’ve read entire books that are really two books: the ‘now’ story and the ‘then’ story. It’s a risk if the reader isn’t interested in one of them.
Terry
Terry’s Place
Romance with a Twist–of Mystery
Jenna, thanks so much for touching on this because I am dealing with exactly this issue in my historical fiction novel-in-progress! I was making myself disoriented; I could only imagine what my readers would have felt like!
Awesome post!
Like Kristan, I’m blanking, but I have read fiction where a character suppresses traumatic memories, like people do in real life. Only as the present-day plot unfolds do they reconnect with the dissociated past.
I have also seen character-driven fiction where the psychological mystery pulls me through more than the plot. In that instance, flashbacks have worked to parse out backstory at exactly the right time.
Still, I don’t think it’s a choice that should be made for the sake of ease.
I am, however, very glad to hear you recycle. We all should do our best for our beleaguered planet. ;)
As a reader, I found this post incredibly interesting. When I read I don’t consciously think, “Oh, here’s a flashback.” I like backstory. I like the depth of familiarity, the subtle way an event may shake the character I have lived with, and come to care about, in the short span of time since my journey with them began. I want to know about the pocket of freckles smattered on their left knee. I want to know they don’t wear dresses because their mother told them their legs were so bow-legged you could shoot arrows through them. Sometimes flashbacks are connections, to you, to the past, to the present. The good ones push the current of interest along, giving you that jolt of the infamous “I-Gotta”. Jenna’s post made me realize it’s a delicate structure balance with the motto, “To the story, be true.”
I love the idea of posting deleted flashback scenes on your website. Great for promoting the novel while also ridding the manuscript of awkward passages. You’re not killing the scene (which I admit is very painful for me to do), just relocating it to a more useful place. Genius.
Wow–thank you all so much for the incredible comments! You’re being temporarily spared more voluminous gratitude & response on my part bc my router’s offline, so I am typing on my teeny-tiny iPhone keyboard. But for now, please know that *I* know flashbacks are a freighted subject; as with everything having to do with our writing, we hold our characters’ memories & backstories dear. I was quaking a bit in my boots this AM about this post going up & am so obliged & relieved it is helpful in some small way.
More when I’m back online. You are forewarned.
Happy whacking, posting, & writing!
“If what happened to the character in the past is that important, why not extract it and expand it so it becomes a consistent, reliable part of the book’s structure, instead of a temporarily distracting time bubble? Conversely: if the scene isn’t that important, why not condense it to a memory? By which I mean a succinctly written paragraph that supplies precious information to the reader but doesn’t distract from the main storyline.”
That is the most convincing part for me. Flashbacks tend to be neither here nor there. The parts of story that would be a flashback need to be either expanded or summarized.
Thanks for sharing your hard-earned ideas.
Yes, true scenes apart from the time line are distracting, but I think that is only one form of flashback.
There is also juggling and introspective association with events from the past. If we work in dialogue techniques without quotes, we can also blend indirect and direct dialogue into summary.
These sorts of paragraphs can lend wonderful texture to the sequels that surround scene.
But yes, these paragraph exist to advance the current storyline forward, even while looking back. They exist and work because this is how we think. We are not always rooted in the present, but our consciousness sometimes moves in two directions simultaneously.
However, our brains rarely require clumsy signals, and neither should our fiction.
And I was just hoping to revive my fallen Christmas Eve flashback. But I have you and the image of the Native American buffalo hunting to thank for talking me out of it, Jenna! Love it.
“As the writer, I needed to know what a divorced character’s marriage was like. I needed to know what happened when a German character easily spooked by gunfire heard her first American fireworks on the 4th of July.
But the reader didn’t need to know.”
This is the part that resonated with me. It’s something I’ve learned over the past year. I’ve just finished writing a book with flashbacks, dreams and dual storylines. Towards the middle of writing it, I wondered why I had done it! Finally, I figured out a way to make the flashbacks a short memory scene at the opening of each chapter–like a ghost that follows the MC–and it works much better than flashbacks.
This is absolutely fantastic and loaded with gems. I most appreciate your advice to condense flashbacks to memory paragraphs. That’s really helpful, thank you!
Although I like reading flashbacks in other people’s work, it never feels right when I do it. I feel the same way you do: that it’s distracting and unnatural. Personally, I like my writing to mirror real life. I don’t get flashbacks or foreshadowing, so why should my characters?
I like what the Mad Hatter says in Alice and Wonderland. Alice is about to tell a story and says, “I don’t know where to start.” He says, “Start at the beginning. When you get to the end, stop.”
I was happily reading a book (Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections) and when I got to the first flashback, I felt a sort of lurching feeling in my stomach. Not actual illness, but a very subtle UGH feeling.
And I finally understood.
And so I rushed to my computer and I cut that flashback from my WIP—the one that test-readers had been hinting wasn’t so great. The brain might justify a flashback’s existence, but the body knows when something is boring.
Flashbacks are a form of backstory, which is treated by agents and publishers as flip-pages; they flip through them. Reader mostly want to see what will happen, not what has happened. A flashback is backstory told in real time. In my teaching and editing, I’ve noticed that flashbacks are much beloved by new writers. To zip back in time is something we can’t do in real life, but in a novel we aren’t constrained by the inexorable clock and calendar, so back in time we go for a nifty flashback. Flashbacks are used by new writers often for no other reason than they can. But they shouldn’t, for the same reason that all backstory should be minimal: flashbacks slow the story—actually, flashbacks entirely stop the story—and usually they are much more interesting to the writer than the reader. Why are flashbacks so tempting to write? As we have plotted and researched, we have thought and thought about our characters and their histories, spinning out their backgrounds in our minds, which is a lot of fun. And as we’ve put together our outline, we’ve come up with lots of off-camera explanations for events in our stories. After all the work we’ve put into these explanations, the truth is sometimes hard to accept: readers are not interested in flashbacks and other forms of backstory.
Contrarian here. I’m not buying the banishment of backstory. It’s a perfectly useful technique and, like any other technique can be good or bad depending on the artistry of the author. Anything can be boring, anything can be compelling. It’s how the tool is used.
In my editing, I generally advise against flashbacks because of all the reasons cited.
For my money, the only reason to have a flashback is that the information it contains is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY to understand what is going on in the now of the novel.
I tend to skip them when I read.
However . . .
In my novels, I have used (sparingly) that which I shall now dub “flashbits.” They are only a paragraph or two in length, they are not necessary to understand what’s going on. But they do enrich the meaning, to the reader, of what’s going on. At least that’s what I believe.
Flashbits are relatively easy to weave into a narrative and can add to either the characterization or story values of a narrative. At least that’s what I think.
I’m going to be a contrarian along with Alex Wilson, but I noticed you did put the caveat about running from anyone who tells you how you “should” write. Like any technique, flashbacks can be used well or poorly. They can be used to reveal motivation or events that shaped a character, and at times may be less clunky than trying to insert that into the main body of the text. I do tend to like books more when it’s more of an alternate timeline, though, as you mentioned in your post. If there are only one or two flashbacks in the whole of a novel, it can feel a bit awkward, unless the plot involves something like the protagonist having forgotten a traumatic event and suddenly remembering it at the climax of the book. Flashbacks just seem to work better if they are a consistent and conscious theme throughout the work, in which case they do become their own timeline, even if they aren’t presented chronologically.
I am happy to hear that I am not the only contrarian, as we’ve been so-dubbed. As a reader, I am actually a flashback fan. Like Jan, I appreciate the psychological threads that form characters’ pasts often more than a fast-paced, present-tense plot. I want to savor background details and get to know my characters, whether it be through flashback or current action. I concur with Jen’s thoughts, also: ” Sometimes flashbacks are connections, to you, to the past, to the present. The good ones push the current of interest along, giving you that jolt of the infamous “I-Gotta”. I’m wondering, is this, once again, is a matter of genre – i.e. literary fiction and character-driven-fiction has more leeway to experiment with backstory and flashback? Or do established authors have more leeway to use the flashback than newbies?
Love the recycling idea and appreciate the ‘definition’ of flashback, as I feel it is often misunderstood. To know there are qualifications and different accepted rules re: flashback vs. memory is interesting. Thanks for the great post, Jenna and Sharon. Looking forward to the ‘other side of the story’ tomorrow!
I’m in the midst of revisions of my first novel, and one of the major items on my to-do list is to cut a flashback. I can’t cut it completely – it actually is central to my storyline and ties in with the present – but I do plan to slash most of it.
It will definitely be an exercise in killing my darlings … one of the most painful yet. But I know it’ll make the book better, so kill it I will.
Fellow contrarians, join me tomorrow! Wonderful post, wonderful comments. Thanks, all!
[…] thanks to Jenna for yesterday’s priceless wisdom! I couldn’t agree more that superfluous forays into the past weigh a story down and should be […]
This post inspired me today to write about my own flashbacks. Odd – how ideas get birthed?!
Whether or not I like flashbacks (as a reader) depends upon the story and its context. I can recall becoming more absorbed in the flashbacks than the present reality. At other times, I have thought to myself, “Well, this is a good place to stop for now.”
Jenna! Those 800 pages are killing me. I have 3 words for you and your agent to pursue: short story collection. Please!!!