Stein on Writing (20 page)

Finally, here’s a POV checklist to use in examining your own work:

• Is your point of view consistent? If it slips anywhere, correct it. If it isn’t working, try another point of view.
  
• Is your point of view sufficiently subjective to involve the reader’s emotions? Have you been too objective?
  
• Have you avoided telling us how a character feels? Have you relied on actions to help the reader experience emotion?
  
• If you’re using the first person, have you used another character to convey in conversation what your first person character looks like?
  
• Is the “I” character sufficiently different from you?
  
• Have you told the reader anything that the “I” character couldn’t know or wouldn’t say? Is the author’s voice showing?
  
• Is there anything in your material that is not likely to be known to someone with your character’s background or intelligence?
  
• If you’re using third person or the omniscient point of view, have you used particularity in describing that person?
  
• Would it pay to narrow your focus so that the reader can identify more readily with one of the characters?
  
• Have you established limitations or guidelines for your third-person point of view? Have you then adhered to those limitations?
  

Subjects taught in colleges and universities are called disciplines. Writing is a discipline. And one of its most disciplined techniques is that of point of view. The choice of point of view is yours, but once you’ve decided, be sure that you stick to it as if your reader’s experience of the story depended on it. Because it does.

Flashbacks: How to Bring Background into the Foreground

When he was young, Barnaby Conrad, founder of the Santa Barbara Writers’ Conference, worked for Sinclair Lewis. Once he asked the master how best to handle flashbacks. Lewis’s reply was succinct. He said,
“Don’t.”

It is true that even experienced writers sometimes handle flashbacks awkwardly. It is also true that flashbacks are used too often, and frequently remove the reader from the experience he is having. Nevertheless, you sometimes need to use flashbacks, and therefore you should learn how to employ them properly.

Ideally,
all fiction should seem to be happening now.
That sentence is worth pasting on your makeup or shaving mirror or on your computer where you will see it every day.

We don’t read in real time. A writer can brush hours aside by one word: “Later ...” Some stories seem to read fast, some seem to drag. Proust, in
Remembrance of Things Past,
dwells for dozens of pages on thoughts inspired by a cookie. Zola, in his classic
L’Assommoir,
has a sumptuous meal that, as I recall, lasts for fifty pages. If we don’t read in real time, why not go back to some previous matter in a flashback? Why are editors so inhospitable to flashbacks?

The reason flashbacks create a problem for readers is that they break the reading experience. The reader is intent on what happens next. Flashbacks, unless expertly handled, pull the reader out of the story to tell him what happened earlier. If the reader is conscious of moving back in time, especially if what happened in the past is told rather than shown, the engrossed reader is reluctant to be pulled out of his reverie to receive information. If we are enthralled, we don’t want to be interrupted. Therefore, the art of writing flashbacks is to avoid interrupting the reader’s experience. I’ll show you how that’s done.

Let’s be sure we understand each other.
A flashback is any scene that happened before the present story began.

Note that I said any
scene.
A true flashback, however short, is a scene, preferably with characters in conflict.

If you find that you absolutely must use a flashback, there are a number of points to engrave on your mind:

• A flashback must illuminate the present story in an important way. Otherwise, why bother? If it doesn’t enhance the present story markedly, you may not really need it.
  
• Whenever possible, the flashback should be an immediate scene rather than an offstage narrative summary. The reader needs to witness the flashback rather than be told about what happened.
  
• You can go into a flashback directly or segue into it. The object is to make the transition to the flashback as unobtrusive as possible. Slipping into the flashback quickly avoids the risk of the impatient reader skipping pages because he sees the flashback coming before it grips him.
  
• The first sentence of a flashback needs to be arresting.
  

A flashback is presumably there because it provides information. To the reader that information should not come across as information about the past; it should be as immediate and gripping as a scene in the present. If you’re riding in an elevator, you don’t want to see the chains and pulleys of the mechanism. The reader doesn’t want to see your chains and pulleys, he just wants the ride. Ask yourself:

If the flashback is necessary, can the reader see the action in it as an immediate scene?

Is the opening of the flashback as interesting or compelling as the beginning of a novel or story?

Does the flashback enhance the reader’s experience of the story as a whole?

A good flashback is a scene that is depicted exactly as it would be in the present story except for how it is introduced and how the present story is rejoined.

Certain words should carry warning labels for the writer. “Had” is the number-one villain. It spoils more flashbacks than any other word. Most fiction is written in the straight past tense. When writing flashbacks, as quickly as possible use the same tense you’re using for the present scenes. That means in almost all cases the straight past tense, not the variants. Instead of saying, “I had been remembering ...”, say “I remembered ...”

Here’s an example of an author who gets tangled up in “hads” that are totally unnecessary:

I remember when my boss had called me into his office and had said, “Sit down.” He had remained standing. In those days I was like a new army recruit, I had taken everything said to me as an order. I hadn’t wanted to sit down with him looming over me.

When that author’s editor finished, this is the way the text read:

I remember the time my boss called me into his office and said, “Sit down.” He remained standing. In those days I was like a new army recruit, I took everything as an order, but damn if I wanted to sit with him looming over me.

The first example has five “hads.” The second example has none.

Sometimes authors double up on a fault with “had had,” or use the contraction for “had,” and compound the problem with another word to avoid in flashbacks, “then”:

Ellie had had a mother who wanted a boy and who’d made Ellie wear boys’ clothes and cut her hair like a boy for years. Then one day...

The author should have written:

Ellie’s mother wanted a boy. She made Ellie wear boys’ clothes and cut her hair like a boy’s for years. One day ...

In starting a flashback, your aim is to get into an immediate scene as soon as possible. Since dialogue is always in immediate scene, one way of handling flashbacks is to use dialogue early. What most writers don’t realize is that you can use dialogue even if the flashback is short. Here’s an example from the second page of
The Resort.
Margaret Brown, a physician, is reminiscing about her education in medical school. Watch how the thought of a certain instructor almost instantly becomes dialogue:

Margaret realized much too soon that the ultimate organ, the brain that harbored the mind, was
terra incognita
for most of her fellow students. Her wisest instructor, Dr. Teal, once asked her if brain surgery attracted her as a specialty.

“No,” she said much too quickly.

“May I ask why?”

“I find surgeons boring.”

Dr. Teal, a surgeon, blushed. Margaret quickly apologized, explaining she meant those of her fellow students who ...

Inserting those three lines of dialogue helps the rest of the reminiscence become visible to the reader.

There are two ways of introducing a flashback. First is the direct method. An example I point to often is from Brian Glanville’s novel
The Comic.
The protagonist is a comedian who is thought to be crazy. On the sixth page, he tells his therapist:

“I’ve always told jokes, Doc.”

The next paragraph begins a flashback in a direct manner:

Which is true. Go back as far as I can remember, and I’m telling jokes. In fact I think he’s right, it was a defense; or it began as a defense. At home, at school. My father, big bastard, keeping that pub in the Mile End road, always handy with his belt.

And so on, into the comic’s childhood. Brian Glanville hooks us with an intriguing character. We want to know more about this “mad” comic who is speaking to us over the head of his doctor, as it were. We’re glad to have his background brought to us by the flashback.

There are equally simple ways of concluding a flashback.

You can use a line space (four blank lines) to mark the passage of time and restart the present scene after the line space. Or you can begin a new paragraph with “One week later ...”

Or you can restart the present scene with dialogue: “Last week you didn’t talk this way.”

You can come out of the flashback by a direct statement. John, in bed with Anna, has been remembering (in a flashback) a scene in the past:

The next day John got out of bed as if he had his whole life to live all over again.

It needn’t be that direct:

Without taking his eyes off Anna’s sleeping face, John slipped into his undershorts, buttoned his shirt, put one leg and then the other into his pants, but when he sat on the bed to put on his socks and shoes, Anna opened her eyes.

While flashbacks are to be avoided whenever possible, the flashback thought can be immensely useful in enriching both a character and a scene. In life our thoughts interrupt us all the time. Frequently the thoughts are relevant to where we are, what we’re doing, what people are saying to us. Thoughts give texture to life and also to novels.

The first three pages of my novel
Living Room
show the heroine, Shirley Hartman, locking the door of her apartment in a Manhattan high-rise, taking the elevator to the top floor, and climbing the stairs to the roof. Then we get her thoughts, which are interspersed with thoughts of the past. Without those thoughts, of the past as well as the present, the scene would lose impact.

Let’s join Shirley Hartman one page into the scene, listen to her thoughts, and then examine them closely to see how the effect is achieved:

Through gaps in the clouds drifting across the charcoal sky, she made out the moon. As a child, she could always decipher its face; now it seemed to have only a scarred surface, crags and mottled ground where instruments had been implanted, sending messages, even now.

A few rectangles of light in the higher building across the street betrayed their occupants’ sleeplessness. Shirley leaned over the waist-high parapet, her feet on tiptoe, and dizzyingly saw in the street below a taxi disgorging its passengers. Suddenly she thought of the unwashed dish with the remains of the cottage cheese and fruit. She should have rinsed it off, stuck it in the dishwasher, left things neat. And the diary she kept in her desk drawer, the leather flaking with age, the broken lock, the coded recordings of long ago, the first time she had taken pleasure with herself, the crazy evening with Harry, she should have dropped it into the incinerator! And Al’s one letter, she should have flushed it away. Al, that intolerably independent man who could live without anyone, who she thought loved her but didn’t need her, how would he react when he heard, would it surprise him, the stoic who pretended never to be surprised by anything?

Its tires screeching, the taxi accelerated away in the streets below.

In the
Times,
she thought, her obituary would rate a picture. In the
News
it might even make the upfront pages, given her occasional notoriety and the scandalous nature of what she was determined to do.

Her father would think what? He’d say something like,
Death can’t teach you anything you can use!
In her mind, she touched fingers to Philip Hartman’s eyes, closing them so that he could not see.

Pulling herself up onto the ledge she scratched her right knee. She remembered the midtown traffic accident she had come upon and the badly injured woman lying in the street, her dress up, her pubic hair visible to the gaping onlookers; Shirley was glad she was wearing pantyhose,
as if it mattered.
Why was she still holding her handbag? She dropped it to the roof behind her, heard the glass of her mirror break.

What if her hurtling self hit that pedestrian late-walking his dog, or another one unseen, she was not a murderer, the only crime she wanted to commit was against herself. If there were a crowd below yelling
Jump! Jump! Jump!
would she leap into their midst?

It seemed funny to be afraid to stand up on the ledge. She swung her legs around to let them dangle over the side.

Would her limbs flail?

Might her head turn down as she fell? The thought of it striking the pavement first was terrible.

She stood up on the parapet, swaying slightly.

Al said she looked better naked than she did with clothes on, as if that were the ultimate compliment. Al had nothing to do with her decision. It was her life. She wanted out. Shirley held her breath.

Mingled in Shirley’s thoughts are the following flashback thoughts:

1. What she thought about the moon when she was a child.
   
2. The unwashed dish with the remains of her dinner.
   
3. The diary she should have burned.
   
4. Al, who loved her.
   
5. Her father.
   
6. A traffic accident with a badly injured woman.
   
7. Al’s comments about how she looked naked.
   

Why the flashback thoughts? If in the first chapter the reader saw an unknown woman trying to commit suicide, the reader’s emotions would not be engaged in any important way. You have to know the people in the car before you see the car crash. Shirley’s flashback thoughts, added to her thoughts in the present, are how the reader gets to know Shirley and begins to want her not to jump.

Note that the flashback thoughts are part of a visual scene in the present, a young woman up on a parapet, ready to jump. If the flashback element is to consist of more than quick thoughts in an ongoing scene, the writer must be certain to create a flashback scene that stands on its own to avoid the flashback becoming a narrative of something that happened elsewhere. To move from what is happening in the present to a scene from the past without breaking the reader’s experience requires segueing to a scene in the past as inconspicuously as possible.