Hello, writers. Tonight’s topic was suggested by jabney, who says:
Handling back-story and flashbacks. Like, how many can you get away with (is five or six too many?) and how should multiple flashbacks be handled when they're all up front vs. spaced throughout the main story?
The question of how many flashbacks is too many reminds me of something Teh Guru once said, in response to my asking whether something (I think it was killing your POV character) was permissible.
In his unfailingly mild tone, he said:
Well, you can do anything you can get away with.
So no, there’s no such thing as too many flashbacks. In fact, many stories are composed almost entirely of flashbacks—consider the movie Slumdog Millionaire or the similarly-plotted E.L. Konigsburg novel The View From Saturday. Or the Susan Powers novel The Grass Dancer, which flashes back continually, so that the novel actually moves backward in time…while still (and this is important) moving the story forward.
Which brings us to the second part of Teh Guru’s utterance. Yes, you can do anything… but you have to get away with it. Which means you have to do it very, very well.
You can have as many flashbacks as you want as long as each one is indispensible to the story.
Now, backstory is a different matter entirely. Especially backstory that’s been frontloaded. Most writers tend to overestimate how much backstory their readers need.
In The Writing The Breakout Novel Workbook, Donald Maass suggests taking every piece of backstory in the first part of your novel, and moving it to Chapter 15. Once you’ve done that, you can see if it’s really needed. Most likely it’s not. By Chapter 15 you will have already found an unobtrusive way to insert that Planet Groink is inhabited mainly by blue furry spiders, and you will have realized that it doesn’t matter that Eleanor and Wilma were once lovers, but broke up over the issue of blue furry spider suffrage. (Well, it matters to Eleanor and Wilma, but not to the story.)
Backstory can sink you big-time.
Now the last part of jabney’s excellent question: How should multiple flashbacks be handled when they're all up front?
Very, very carefully.
As we’ve discussed in the past, the first pages of a story have a tremendous burden. Not only does the reader have to be hooked into the story, but s/he also has to become convinced that you really know how to tell a story. Doing anything unusual in these pages is risky. But it’s a risk that can pay off big… if you do something unusual and do it brilliantly, then your reader is hooked and convinced in one swell foop.
You’re always taking a risk (of losing the reader’s attention) when you break the flow, either by changing POV or by changing time period. And any risk is multiplied when it’s taken at the beginning of the story.
And you’ll need to ask, and answer to your own satisfaction, the questions “Are these scenes necessary?” and “Am I cutting to the chase?” and "Is this really where the story begins?"
Basically, I can’t tell you a way to open with multiple flashbacks that will grab readers and keep them… but if you can find one, great!
Tonight’s challenge:
This was last week’s set-up--
A Callow Youth, having narrowly escaped from an evil wizard with the aid of his Stout Companion and a magic mirror, is still on the run, slogging through a swamp. The two adventurers encounter a
Least Grebe. This Least Grebe is damned important to the narrative—he’s not just scenery. He might turn out to be the key to everything, in fact.
(If you didn’t do last week’s challenge, don’t worry, you can still do this week’s.)
Take the set-up above, and, instead of opening the scene, do a flashback.
Have one of the participants—the Callow Youth, his Stout Companion, the Least Grebe, or the Magic Mirror—remember how it got into this mess.
But it’s got to be a valid flashback, it’s got to be important to the story, so— place some important information in the flashback. Something that one of the other characters really needs to know, but doesn’t know yet. It may be that the character having the flashback has no intention of ever revealing this information. Or it may be that s/he doesn’t know it’s important.
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