How to Write a Flashback

March 11, 2018 by Randy Ingermanson 14 Comments

How do you write a flashback without confusing your reader? Aren’t flashbacks bad? Don’t they screw up your story? Or can they make your story better?

Alexa posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

How can I write a flashback scene of my protagonist without the reader getting lost?Thanks in advance

Randy sez: Knowing how to write a flashback is crucial for every novelist. But knowing why to write a flashback may be even more important.

Aren’t Flashbacks Bad?

Some people say that flashbacks are bad and you shouldn’t write them. It’s worth asking why anyone would say that.

A flashback is a scene that you show in your story in real-time, but which happened in the past. The fact that it’s shown in real-time is good. You’re not showing it in narrative summary or exposition. You’re playing it out like a movie in your reader’s head.

So where’s the harm? Why would anyone complain about that?

The only real issue is that a flashback is part of the back-story of your novel. So you’re stopping your front-story cold so you can tell some other story that happened in the past.

That’s a problem if your reader doesn’t yet care about the front-story. Then you run the risk of boring your reader. She might close your book. She might never pick it up again. Then she loses out on finishing your story. And you lose out on a reader.

But if your reader does care about the front-story, it’s a whole different game. When your reader cares about the front-story, she’s willing to stay with you through a bit of back-story, as long as it’s directly relevant to the front-story.

And back-story is often very relevant to your front-story. Your characters don’t just plop into the world on page 1 without any history. They’ve spent their whole lives preparing to live this story you’re telling. They’ve learned things. They’ve built up a personality. And they’ve been damaged by other people.

Any of those could be relevant to your front-story.

A flashback gives you, the author, the opportunity to let your reader experience that back-story in the same way that your character can experience it at any time—as a memory.

So a flashback is good, and it’s often the very best way to inject that back-story into your reader’s brain.

But you just want to be careful to make sure your reader is truly hooked on the front-story before you spring a flashback on her. A common rule of thumb is to not show any backstory in the first fifty pages of your novel, although you can violate that rule if you’re good enough.

So How Do You Write That Flashback?

A flashback has three parts:

The segue out of the present and into the past
The backstory scene itself
The segue out of the backstory and into the present

Those two segues are the key to solving the problem Alexa asked about. You’ll confuse your reader for sure if you just switch straight to the backstory with no explanation.

You have a lot of options on how to do that segue. In the Harry Potter books, for example, Harry experiences a number of flashbacks involving other characters when he looks into the Pensieve, a magical device that holds people’s memories. The Pensieve is the link on the way into the flashback and on the way back out. That was a very effective way to do it.

The more usual way to do it is to have the character begin remembering something. Then have a scene break and switch to showing the memory as a flashback. At the end of the flashback, have another scene break and return to the character.

As an example, here’s how Ken Follett starts a flashback in The Man From St. Petersburg, a historical suspense novel about a Russian anarchist in the summer of 1914 who’s been sent to London to kill a Russian envoy. He knows that the envoy is negotiating an alliance between England and Russia that will drag Mother Russia into the coming war, and he wants to prevent it.

Our hero is Feliks, and we meet him about twenty pages into the novel. He’s on a train to London, admiring the view. Feliks has loads of attitude, and we pick up that attitude quickly. And then we segue smoothly into a flashback from a few weeks earlier:

And in Geneva, he had made the decision which brought him to England. He recalled the meeting. He had almost missed it…

There’s a scene break, and then the flashback begins with the phrase: He almost missed the meeting.

The flashback tells about a meeting of anarchists who’ve learned that Prince Orlov has been sent to England to negotiate an alliance that will get millions of Russian peasants killed in a stupid and senseless war. The meeting goes on for quite a while, with all sorts of suggestions. At the end of it, Feliks tells the group he knows how to prevent the war. He’s going to London and he’s going to kill Orlov.

The scene ends, and in the next chapter, Feliks is in London. Ken Follett doesn’t even need to segue back to the present, because the end of the chapter signals the end of the flashback. There’s no confusion.

The key phrase is the two-sentence transition just before the flashback: He recalled the meeting. He had almost missed it…

Those two sentences, plus the scene break, tell the reader to expect a flashback.

This flashback is very recent and it’s critical to the story. It explains why Feliks has come to London. And it radically reorients the story…

The first twenty pages of the novel have introduced us to Lord Walden, the Englishman who will be hosting Prince Orlov and negotiating for the English. So up till the point where we meet Feliks, we’ve had a rather conventional story about a dull political negotiation. Once we meet Feliks and see his flashback, we have a much more interesting story, because we see that this dull political negotiation is about to get millions of innocent people killed. And the only man who can stop it is a Russian anarchist. That’s a nice twist and it makes a great story. It becomes an even better story when you learn that Feliks knows the wife of Lord Walden. Or rather, he knew her when she was a young and wild Russian aristocrat growing up in St. Petersburg. He knew her very, very well, until the night he was arrested and she was married off to an Englishman. All of which the reader will learn through a series of vivid flashbacks.

So if you need a flashback, it’s simple: Write a sentence or two of transition, then do a scene break, then write the flashback, and then do another scene break. If you need another short transition to get back into the present, write one.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

Who Decides if a Writer has Talent?

March 5, 2018 by Randy Ingermanson 1 Comment

in Career Management, Craft, Fiction Writing, Writing Conferences

Ever wondered if you’ve got any talent for writing fiction? Do you angst on that so much, it prevents you from writing? Is there a way to decide once and for all whether you have talent?

Wendy posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Who decides if you have talent?

I’m an avid reader and love to write, but I that means nothing if the people who are reading my short stories are just stroking my ego just so I’ll stroke theirs. “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” I have read so many very bad to mediocre, and only a few truly talented, self-published authors. It causes me to wonder where do I fit inside the scale I mentioned above, and am I one of those who only thinkd they can write because their peers and critics are telling them they can. I’m quite serious, it’s not like I have no confidence, it’s more like… understanding there is a possibility I’m also egotistical to think I’m all that and a bag of chips, and should self-publish. Which now days seems to be the norm, and is fast becoming a trend, for anyone thinking they have something everyone has a need to hear. Thank you for your time.

Randy sez: This is a tough question and it’s one most writers deal with at some point in their lives. Early on in my writing career, I had a lot of angst over whether I was any good at writing fiction. That’s normal.

Does Talent Exist?

Some authors believe there’s no such thing as talent; they think all that exists is skill. For them, everybody starts out not knowing how to write. Then as a writer learns the craft, eventually she has enough skills to get published.

My own thinking is that talent seems to exist in every other field I can think of, so it probably exists in writing. There are people who have great genes for long-distance running, and people who don’t. There are people who have great genes for math, and people who don’t. Pick just about anything that requires skill and you’ll find that some people are genetically gifted to learn that skill, and some people aren’t.

I suspect that part of the genetic gift of writing fiction is having the desire to write. So if you want to write fiction, that’s some sort of evidence that you might have a talent for it. (It’s not proof, but it does carry some weight.)

Talent is Not Skill

But nobody, no matter how talented, is born skilled. They’re born with the ability to become skilled. They don’t actually become skilled until they work at it, and that takes time.

Even if you’re not amazingly talented, you can still develop skills by working at your writing.

So if you want my advice, I’d say to do the things you love doing. If you love writing, then write. If you love playing the guitar, play the guitar. If you love playing basketball, play basketball. You may or may not get obscenely rich from any of these things. The odds are long on that, but it can happen, and you might as well take a shot.

In any event, money isn’t everything, so if writing fiction makes you happy, then why wouldn’t you want to write fiction?

And anyway, writing talent might not actually be measurable.

But writing skill is.

Who Can Tell If You Have Writing Skill?

If you want to get your level of writing skill evaluated, that’s easy. Go to a writing conference and get your work critiqued by a few writers. Many conferences give you a chance to meet one-on-one with a professional writer for fifteen minutes or so. You may think fifteen minutes isn’t enough time for someone to judge your writing. Sure it is, if you don’t spend the whole time talking. If you just give the writer a few pages of your work.

Most professional writers (or editors or agents) can tell in about three paragraphs what your level of skill is. They may, out of politeness, keep reading for a whole five pages, but they know pretty quickly. Even if they don’t read your category of fiction or understand your category, they can still tell good writing from bad. And they can tell great writing from good.

It may be a bit of a trick to get them to tell you the unvarnished truth. Anyone who’s ever worked at a critique table knows how easily crushed a writer is, so they may be hesitant to say, “This piece of writing is awful.”

They will not be hesitant at all to say, “This piece of writing is amazing,” if it really is amazing.

Most writing is neither dreadful nor amazing. I’ve looked at hundreds of writing samples at conferences over the years, and most of it has been pretty average. (It would be kind of strange if most of it was far above average, right?)

How To Get a Truthful Evaluation

It might help to read my article on this web site titled, “Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Author!” which talks about the journey all published authors go through. Everyone starts out as a “freshman,” with lots of enthusiam but no real skill. Writers who persist will eventually move up to being “sophomores,” and then after more work, they’ll become “juniors,” and if they continue learning the craft, eventually they’ll become “seniors.” And then, when they least expect it, they graduate. I don’t know of any exceptions to this writer’s journey.

So if you ask a professional writer or an agent or an editor for a critique, you might also ask them to tell you if they think you’re a freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior. Even if they haven’t read my article, they’ll instantly get what you’re asking. And when you phrase the question that way, it takes the pressure off them.

It’s easy for them to say, “You’re a freshman, but here are three things you could do to become a sophomore.” That’s way less painful than saying, “Your writing is terrible.” And it’s much more helpful to you.

Writing conferences cost money, and you don’t absolutely have to go to one to find somebody who can give you a critique. Conferences are the easiest place to do that, and they’ll typically have dozens of competent people who could tell you where you stand. And conferences are geared to doing that, so it’s an easy environment to ask. (Most writers and agents and editors are busy and can’t simply do evaluations on demand—otherwise, they’d never get anything done. But at conferences, that’s the reason they came—to spend a few days doing nothing but helping writers.)

In the meantime, focus on learning the skills of fiction writing, and don’t sweat too much the question of talent. If you look at my Randy Recommends page on this site, you’ll find links to a number of books that I believe are helpful to writers in learning the skill of fiction writing.

Have fun!

Writing a Novel in First Person

January 31, 2018 by Randy Ingermanson 4 Comments

in Craft, Fiction Writing

Today I’ll answer two different readers who’ve asked questions on writing a novel in first person.

Crystal’s Question

Crystal posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hi, I am currently trying to write a first person chapter book and it’s going well, but I feel like I’m using “I” too much when I’m writing. Is it okay to use “I” over and over again?

Randy sez: Yes, that’s pretty much your only option.

Read a good novel written in first person. For example, The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. The protagonist uses “I” all over the place. Did you notice? Neither did I. The pronoun “I” is pretty much invisible. Use it whenever you need it. If you don’t need it, don’t use it.

Deb’s Question

Deb posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

If I am writing in 1st person for my main protagonist, what do I do when that person isn’t in a particular chapter. Thank you.

Randy sez: That’s a problem, but only if it you let it be a problem. In scenes where your protagonist is missing, you’ll have to choose a different character to be your point-of-view character. (Because every scene needs a POV character.) The question is really how you handle those other POV characters—should you write them in first-person or third-person? You don’t want to confuse your reader.

Most novels are written in third person. Most of them have multiple characters who serve as POV characters in different scenes. Nobody gets confused by this.

So what prevents you from having more than one first-person POV character in different scenes of your novel?

Nothing.

If you do this, you need some way to let the reader know who the POV character is for each scene. An easy way to do that is to make a subtitle for each scene showing the name of the POV character. For example, “Luke” or “Leia” or “Darth Vader.” Center this in its own line and italicize it if that looks better to you. Then the reader knows who “I” is for every scene.

Or you can write in first-person in scenes where your protagonist is the POV character, and you can switch to third-person in scenes having other POV characters. Diana Gabaldon did that in her novel Dragonfly in Amber, and nobody got confused.

Writing a Novel With Too Many Options

January 26, 2018 by Randy Ingermanson 1 Comment

in Craft, Fiction Writing

How do you write a novel when you feel like you have too many options and you don’t know which direction to take?

Julia posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hey Randy, thanks a lot for the Snowflake Method, you are an angel sent from above! I have finally understood the importance of story structure and am eager to apply it to my WIP. However, I’ve been having a lot of trouble with stage 2 because to sumarize the main events in 5 sentences I first need to know what those events are. And unfortunally I suffer from a terrible issue called too many options. I think I might have writer’s commitment issues. I found this is a common trait in my writing, even my undergraduate thesis suffered from it (thankfully I managed to finish that!). Have you got any advice for that? It would save my life.

Randy sez: Thanks, Julia, I’m not often called an angel, and have sometimes been called the opposite, so I appreciate that.

The problem you’re having is a good problem to have—too many options. It means you’ve got a lot of creativity going, and now you’re having trouble settling down and making a decision.

A Review of Three-Act Structure

And you’re stuck on Step 2 of the Snowflake Method. Let’s review that step, just to bring all my blog readers onto the same page. The Snowflake Method is a 10-step method for getting your first draft down on paper. Step 1 is to write a single sentence that summarizes your story.

Step 2 is to expand that sentence out to a full paragraph with five sentences that sketch out the Three-Act Structure of your story, as follows:

Sentence 1 gives a high-level overview of your lead character and your story world.
Sentence 2 tells what happens in your first act, ending with a major disaster that will force your lead character to commmit to the story.
Sentence 3 tells what happens in the first half of the second act, ending with a second major disaster that forces your lead character to completely rethink their approach.
Sentence 4 tells what happens in the second half of the second act, ending with a third major disaster that forces your lead character to commit to ending the story.
Sentence 5 tells what happens in the third act—there will be a final showdown and either a victory or a defeat for the lead character.

That’s a lot to expect of one paragraph! It’ll be a long paragraph, for sure, and bristling with ideas.

Breaking The Logjam of Too Many Options

Julia, your problem is that you’ve got too many ideas to get them all into a single paragraph.

That’s OK, really. I generally say that this paragraph should take about one hour to write. So what I’d recommend is that you just write up several paragraphs, each with one possibility for your Three-Act Structure. None of these are etched in stone. They’re just possibilities. You can make up as many as you want. Five or ten, if you’ve got that many possibilities in your head. The first one might take an hour, but after that, the others will probably take ten minutes.

Once you’ve got them all down on paper, let them stew in your mind for a bit. Give yourself a day or two to think about them.

Then choose one to take to the next step in the Snowflake Method. This is not a forever commitment, so choose the one that you think is strongest and run with it for a couple of more steps to see how it flies. If it flies well, then you’re on your way.

If it doesn’t fly so well, you can always come back to Step 2 and pick another path.

The beauty of this approach is that you might waste a few hours going down a wrong path, but you won’t waste five hundred hours writing the full manuscript for a story you’re eventually going to reject.

And also you won’t waste days and days staring at the blank screen, paralyzed by indecision. The Snowflake Method gives you the freedom to try things quickly and fail quickly.

How It Worked Out

I emailed the above suggestion to Julia awhile back. She emailed back not long after to say that she spent a few days and broke the logjam by doing the following:

She wrote down a long list of all the events she thought should happen in the story. (This is Step 8 in the Snowflake Method).
Then she pulled out the most important of these events (about 20) and wrote them on Post-It notes.
Finally, she put the Post-It notes all on a big sheet of paper with three acts marked on it and moved them around until the story seemed right.

That works. And that’s the right way to do it for Julia. Different people have different ways of solving the problem. Whatever works for you is whatever works for you.

As you can see, Julia didn’t actually use my suggestion. She took my core idea (get something down on paper) and riffed in a different direction. And that got her to the solution. Yay!

The important thing is to keep moving forward and to get things down on paper. Once it’s on paper, you have a permanent record. And you can make a copy and revise it. You can do that as many times as you want until you get it the way you want it. That’s what the Snowflake Method is all about.

How To Be More Original

January 18, 2018 by Randy Ingermanson 8 Comments

in Books, Craft, Fiction Writing

As a novelist, it’s hard to be original. How do you learn to be more original, when it feels like your writing is too much like the books you’ve been reading?

H.B. posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I’ve been reading lots of YA recently (hunger games, divergent etc) and recently started writing my own novel. I am only a teenager, but I write in the hopes that I will edit my work and publish it when I’m older. Anyway the book I’m writing at the moment seems too close to other books I’m reading – it has attributes that are very similar to novels in the same genre but I’m not coping on purpose, it just happens as I’m writing! What should I do?

Randy sez: There’s an old saying that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I suspect that the problem is that you’re reading books that are too similar to each other. You’ve read the Hunger Games series and the Divergent series, but those are quite similar books. Naturally, when you go to write your own novel, you’re going to produce something like the things you’ve been reading.

Solving the Problem

The solution is pretty simple, but it’s going to take some time.

Read more.

Read widely.

Read stuff you like.

Read stuff you don’t like.

The more you read, the more you’ll expand your horizon on what can be done as a novelist. That will keep you from getting into a rut.

Some Recommended Books

I’ve tried to read at least something in practically every major category, even categories that I don’t particularly like. Here is a random collection of books that have helped broaden my horizons. It’s a very small selection from my library, but it cuts across all the main categories:

The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien. The quintessential fantasy series for adults.
The Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling. The quintessential YA fantasy series.
Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card. An exciting science fiction novel about an earth-orbiting Battle School where pre-teen military cadets are groomed to save the earth from an alien invasion.
The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett. A massive historical novel set in 11^th century England about the building of a cathedral and the internal politics of a monastery. Most of Ken Follett’s fans think this is his best novel.
The Clan of the Cave Bear, by Jean Auel. A long historical novel set in ice-age Europe about a four-year-old human girl adopted by Neanderthals.
Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon. A time-travel romance novel set in 18^th century Scotland about a British nurse in 1945 who falls in love with a Scotsman after finding herself unexpectedly transported to 1743.
Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell. The quintessential historical romance novel, about a strong-willed self-absorbed young woman growing up during and after the Civil War.
The Chosen, by Chaim Potok. A literary novel about a pair of genius Jewish teen-age boys from rival religious communities who start out as enemies and become best friends.
The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. A dystopian futuristic novel about a young woman being used as a concubine in a world where most people are infertile.
The Godfather, by Mario Puzo. The quintessential Mafia novel about an organized crime family fighting for survival in the brutal New York underworld.
The Firm, by John Grisham. This was Grisham’s breakout novel about an ambitious young lawyer hired to work in a cushy law firm who discovers that his company is a front for a money laundering operation.
The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy. This was Clancy’s first novel about a Soviet sub commander who tries to deliver the latest submarine intact to the Americans at the height of the Cold War, with the entire Soviet navy in hot pursuit.
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John LeCarre. In 1961, a washed up British spy is approached by East German spies hoping to persuade him to defect. In my opinion, the best spy novel ever written.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle. The quintessential series of mystery stories and novels.
The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. A non-linear story about a man with a genetic defect that yanks him back and forth in time—and the woman who loves him.
Pride & Prejudice, by Jane Austen. A classic romance novel about a young English woman who has the audacity to want to marry for love, and the three very different young men who pursue her.
Vampire Academy, by Richelle Mead. A bestselling YA novel about a group of young vampires in a special academy where they learn how to defend themselves against the evil Strigoi.

I could go on much longer, but this is enough for now. Most of these are classics in their category, and I’ve read almost all of them several times. These cover most of the major categories of fiction. Most of them are not suitable for children, but I will note that most of my writer friends were reading books not suitable for children at a very early age. And so was I. People who are destined to be writers tend to grow up fast and read books that would horrify their parents.

How to Be More Original

My opinion is that every novelist needs to read thrillers. And romance novels. And fantasy. And science fiction. And classics. And dystopic novels. And YA. And horror. And historicals. And mysteries. And religious fiction.

You don’t have to read a lot of books in a category you don’t like. But you should read at least enough to prove that you really don’t like the category. The goal is to learn what’s out there, and what can be done with the written word. My list above is tilted a bit towards thrillers and historicals, because that’s what I like.

Reading in a wide variety of categories is the best inoculation I know against the dread disease of accidentally writing like your favorite author.