Flashbacks threaded into a novel are handy devices for dealing with past events. But many writers misuse flashbacks, writes science fiction author
Samuel R. Delany in
About Writing: 7 essays, 4 letters, & 5 interviews. Delany, winner of both Hugo and Nebula awards, has written dozens of books, including science fiction novels, short stories, and nonfiction. That experience, as well as his 35 years as a creative writing instructor and critic, have convinced him that flashbacks are often constructed lazily and clumsily.
Here's Delany on memory and fiction:
However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory-not on the order of actual occurrence. It looks like the writer is telling you a story. What the writer is actually doing, however, is using words to evoke a series of micromemories from your own experience that inmix, join, and connect in your mind in an order the writer controls, so that, in effect, you have a sustained memory of something that never happened to you. That false memory is what a story is.
As if to corroborate Delany, an article by Gary Marcus appeared recently about a woman who seems to have perfect autobiographical recall. That's apparently a genuine oddity. Writes Marcus:
Ordinary human memory is a mess. Most of us can recall the major events in our lives, but the memory of Homo sapiens pales when compared with your average laptop. ... it's easy for us to forget things we've learned; and it's sometimes hard to dislodge outdated information. Worse, our memories are vulnerable to contamination and distortion.... The fundamental problem is the seemingly haphazard fashion in which our memories are organized.... Human recall is hit or miss. Neuroscientific research tells us that our brains don't use a fixed-address system, and memories tend to overlap, combine, and disappear for reasons no one yet understands.
Now back to Delany. It's the fiction writer's task, he says, "to make that unreal memory as clear and vivid as possible," which depends on the order of the words the writer selects. Delany, in fact, lauds the use of realistic flashbacks, the true-to-life flashes that last from half a second to 10 seconds at the most. "Thus, in texts," he writes, "they are covered in a phrase or two, a sentence, three sentences, or five sentences at most."
In my own novel-in-progress, I use a lot of momentary flashbacks, sometimes as a way of metaphor-making. Here are two examples:
1. He could smell his own skin, the prickles under his arms, in his groin. A fear scent etched in memory from the first week he'd had his driver's license and his car had skidded sideways on the freeway.
2. My husband dipped his hands again and again into a bowl of curly orange-colored snacks, until his palms and fingers took on a putrid glow. His wedding ring was incongruous on those oversized little boy orange hands. The setting sun glinted off one of the ring's small diamonds. A sudden image popped up of a glittery Cracker Jacks ring from when I was six, and me, in my bedroom, staring into the ring's central bit of multi-faceted glass. A microcosm lay within: a sunny country setting, large leafy tree to the left with a person sitting under it, a meadow, a stream. A sense of this being a place you could walk into. I shrieked for my mother, but try as she would, she wasn't able to catch a glimpse of it. Nor could I, ever again.
Realistically, explains Delany, when you try to concentrate on a past event longer than a very few seconds, the present always intrudes. So he refutes the logic of having a character walk down the street and run over the previous three months, say, in a relationship. Those stories simply start in the wrong place, he insists.
Originally my own novel's narrative was entirely chronological (except for those quickie flashbacks), until I realized it might be wise (if I were ever to sell the book) to get to the so-called action sooner. One way to do that was to have the narrator flash back and reflect on what had led to a particular event. Delany says that usually doesn't work. More specifically, he elaborates:
What I object to is the scene whose only reason is to serve as the frame for an anterior scene because the writer has been too lazy to think through carefully how that anterior scene might begin and end if it were presented on its own, and so borrows the beginning and ending of the frame scene, which-equally-has not been chosen because anything of narrative import actually happens in it.
Consider the scene in which the flashback occurs. Ask yourself, "Has anything important happened in the scene before the flashback starts? Has any memorable incident taken place? Have we seen any important change? Has the character done anything more than sit around (or walk around) and think?"
Of course, all rules are breakable, and many are broken to good effect by experienced writers. I'll share an example from a novel by Iain Banks whom I recently discovered. In Walking on Glass, Banks has a character walk to meet a girlfriend, making observations to himself along the way and also being delayed at length by a pesky yet amusing friend. Then, as he nears his assignation, the character slips into an extended reverie and we get a flashback.
Then he remembered; appropriately enough it had been at the party when Slater had first introduced Graham and Sara to each other. . . . Graham smiled to himself, and recalled that night.
The flashback scene goes on for many pages, culminating (for the moment) in a long walk home on a frigid night. The chapter comes to a close with Graham walking again in the present, but still feeling the chill of that months-ago night. The flashbacks are resumed later in the book as the Graham continues walking. The walk is more than the simple framing device it appeared to be at first. It works.
Still, crafting an effective flashback based on how real memory works is harder than it looks. Delany's nuanced discussion offers more useful advice than many of the usual how-to books.
