TheNextBigWriter Premium → 3 Tips for Writing Successful Flashbacks
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I have been contemplating my use of flashbacks in Hunter. While researching the use of flashbacks and mistakes that are often made, I ran across this article that was very helpful to me, and I hope will be the same for you. Mike
I have been contemplating my use of flashbacks in Hunter. While researching the use of flashbacks and mistakes that are often made, I ran across this article that was very helpful to me, and I hope will be the same for you. Mike
I guess . . . but the author wishes us to more or less hide the flashback within the present narrative and even in his samples that is still a clumsy shift in perspective -- except the last one, and a clever one, by John Irving he calls framing -- giving away the ending and then explaining the ending for the rest of the story.
There is also the technique of placing the far-future story in the present tense, and the merely future story in the past tense -- like Margaret Atwood did in Oryx and Crake, an awful book in theme and plot with silly, stereo-typed characters, but quite excellent in this and other writing techniques.
And there is the —, which in a way is a flashback in computer Unicode language, also called an m-dash. However, for this text function to work the computer string language must be translatable, using an agreed upon Unicode for all operating systems. Obviously Nany Kress, the author of the flashback piece, has an operating system out of the past or perhaps too far into the future. With the m-dash, Nancy is attempting to create a bit of chronological disassociation to another idea; in a sense a flash back or flash forward to another place, time, event or idea.
Anyway, the article reminds me of the time when I was ten years old and I encountered my first —....
Hey Mike, just having a bit of nerd fun, and thank you; a good, educational read.
-max
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TheNextBigWriter Premium → 3 Tips for Writing Successful Flashbacks
