False Starts, Flashbacks,
& Framing Devices

68}COMING SOON TO A THEATER NEAR
YOU: COMPETING WITH MOVIES

Having been raised on movies and television, we’re used to having our stories diced, shuffled, and sliced; flashbacks and flash-forwards turn time itself into a card trick or a carnival ride. Fiction writers feel compelled to play similar games with time. Hence the proliferation of stories and novels jammed with flashbacks and framing devices.

Since the first silent films went public, stories and novels have been influenced by movies. “By the time you read this,” Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes begins, “I hope to be dead.” These are Peter Houghton’s words, the words that precede his high school shooting rampage. As prologue, Picoult presents these words in Peter’s handwriting—a fragment of his diary? A note to a girlfriend? We turn the page and, headed by a portentous, burned-in time stamp (“March 6, 2007”), we read, in a regular typeface:

In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn, color your hair, watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five ...

Clearly the point of view here has shifted, but the motive is consistent: to raise curiosity and impel readers to keep reading. It works.

In Nineteen Minutes, Picoult is surely competing with movies (and television), treating timely, sensational subjects with as much drama and dialogue as she can pack between covers. She succeeds not only because she’s a clever writer, but also because her thorough research gives us an authentic experience.

Norman Mailer’s use of interchapter flashbacks in The Naked and the Dead takes us into each of a platoon of soldiers’ pasts— and more specifically into their sex lives. This cinematic device would have been inconceivable before movies.

The use of flashback—also called analepsis—goes back much farther than movies, to the first millennium b.c.e. and the Mahabharata, a sacred epic poem (the longest ever written) whose multiple narratives unfold through an elaborate series of flashbacks and framing devices.

Trained by movies and television, readers have grown accustomed to flashbacks, orienting themselves with the dexterity of falling cats to even the most disorderly narratives. Some writers feel compelled to come up with new ways to disorient their readers. For most of us, though, trying to compete on any level with movies and television is a mistake. Movies and television have technology on their side. They have stars and multimillion-dollar budgets. They have passive audiences slumped in plush seats. They dazzle their viewers with special effects. We can’t, and shouldn’t have to.

Readers—at least the kind I write for—read because they love stories and the language itself. They don’t want pseudocinema; they don’t need special effects. What they demand from works of literature they don’t expect from movies, and vice versa.

Raising the question: What can writers give people that movies can’t? For an answer, see Meditation # 99.

69}BAIT & SWITCH SYNDROME:
DISAPPEARING SCENES

The seductive flashback tends to be overused and abused. When, a page or two into a story, I’m yanked out of the present action and into a flashback, I often feel cheated. I had invested in a set of characters and circumstances, only to see my investment nullified: I have to start investing all over again.

A novel opens with someone getting up, getting dressed, brushing his teeth. As he stands before the bathroom mirror, his mouth foamy with toothpaste, he recalls his date of the previous night. White space: The scene shifts. We’re in the Côte d’Azure lounge, where we spend the next eight pages with the protagonist on his date. What of the toothbrushing scene? Gone, never to be seen again. Though the loss may be insignificant, the reader can’t be blamed for wondering why the author wrote that banal opening at all, only to jettison it.

A good flashback increases and deepens my investment in the story, the one I’ve already begun. If it sweeps me out of the present action, it does so only temporarily, just long enough to add to my appreciation and understanding of the characters in their present situation.

Many novice writers use flashbacks more or less as a pilot uses his ejector seat, to bail out of a story that’s not working. Occasionally the ejector button parachutes us into a better story—but why open with a poor story to begin with? Why not start with the good one?

70}FRAMING DEVICES VS. FLASHBACKS

Many flashbacks aren’t really flashbacks at all, but stories embedded within other stories, or framing devices. Sometimes the author doesn’t realize he’s framing his story: He confounds the frame with the picture.

A student turns in a story about a Croatian soldier who has stepped on a booby trap. Instead of a story, however, we’re treated to a sermon about war and politics, framed by the device of having the soldier poised to blow himself to smithereens. But a framing device does not a story make; it only helps put an already existing story into a distinct context or perspective (sensationally, in this case).

The real story—the picture in the “frame”—might be the soldier’s own story before he puts his boot down on a mine. The implied narrative of all framing devices is something like, “all this has led our protagonist here, to this time and place and to this situation.” What events have led our hapless soldier to his present moment? Did he volunteer for combat? We’re told that he and a friend enlisted. What factors inspired him to enlist? Patriotism? Love? Coercion?

If the author were to line up the events that led his protagonist to this doomed moment, he’d have more than a sensational frame for a generalized treatment of war. The protagonist’s death can be given authentic power and purpose.

Like framing devices, flashbacks, too, should be motivated.

In a story about a young girl lamenting her father’s fall from grace (he has suffered a huge financial setback and taken to drink), she remembers him as he looks in an old photograph that she once saw of him—triggering a flashback.

But the memory feels unmotivated and merely digressive. Something should make Jessica remember that photograph.

Perhaps, while searching in the attic for a carton of Christmas tree ornaments, she stumbles on the photo in a shoebox of old photographs. Maybe she takes the photo and keeps it with her at all times, as a sort of talisman against the specter of her father as he appears to her in real life, slumped next to a bottle at the kitchen table. The photograph can play an active role in the story, motivating the flashback(s) it inspires.

TO SUMMARIZE: Flashbacks should be necessary, motivated, and distinguished from framing devices, which should themselves serve some end more noble than novelty or cleverness.