5

There's No Such Thing as a Flashback -- It's a Flashpresent

When I was a teenager, I saw a documentary about Academy Award-winning screenwriter Waldo Salt called Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter's Journey that never left me. Salt's particular area of expertise was adapting novels for film, and to do so, you need to understand the differences between the two mediums. Nevertheless, one of the lessons he gave applies equally to film and novels: There is no such thing as a flashback -- it's a flashpresent. Another industry giant, Syd Field, explains what that means here, but basically, flashbacks deliver vital information and, when done correctly, should inform you about the character.

If you think of a flashback done badly, it's a mere plot device -- a data dump where the screen goes all hazy and some facts are delivered to you.

The kind that Wayne's World used to make fun of: "Doodoodoodoo doodoodoodoo ..."

The goal is to use the flashback less like a device and more like a memory. After all, there is no need for a flashback to be hokey. We all carry memories with us through our lives, and they come out when they're triggered by the things we're doing. That's what Salt's getting at. In order for a flashback to justify its existence, it needs to make sense to the action of the moment. If you use it that way, you're not only compressing action into a tighter story -- vital in both screenwriting and novel writing -- but letting the reader understand the character in a deeper way.

There's another secret perk of using flashbacks: If you do it the right way, as Salt suggests, then it forces you to have a deeper understanding of both the past and the present of your character. You will have to ask yourself why your character is thinking and feeling this, and you will create the through line of the character's life from that past moment to the present. When I got back the edits from my novel, the copy editor stumbled over the very first flashback of the book. He wrote, "This action feels like it's happening in the present." It was the best accidental compliment I've ever received.

4

Hide Plot Points With Humor

John Cleese, founding member of Monty Python, creator of arguably the greatest sitcom ever, Fawlty Towers, and writer and star of the classic A Fish Called Wanda, has taken to lecturing on the creative process recently, but the point that has always stuck with me came from an interview he did in the '80s about his goals for Fawlty Towers. Cleese explained that he wanted to stray from conventional sitcoms where they just drop the plot on you in the first five minutes. Think Saved by the Bell:

"Say, gang! Screech has crabs again! Let's hold a talent show to raise money for his pubic lice shampoo!"

3

Don't Drain the Well

When people think of Ernest Hemingway's writing advice, they usually stick to "write the truest sentence you know." That's good advice, especially if you're prone to a fanciful, but ultimately boring, imagination, but it's not the advice of his I value most. Here's my favorite bit of Hemingway guidance:

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

That's crucial. We've all heard the maxims that writers write and that Stephen King writes 1.2 million words a day on a specially fitted typewriter that allows him to use all 21 of his appendages to type words on paper that prints directly into bound hardcover books, but when do you stop writing? That's important, too, and I think what Hemingway is getting at is that novels are a lot like daisy chains.

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They smell good and are only made by young girls. Wait. No, that's not the point.

What I mean is, they're connected. One scene leads to the next to form a full story. More importantly, writing often comes best when you're about 85 percent sure of where you're going. Sometimes, if you see the scenes too clearly, the magic disappears and you (or at least I) feel like a mere reporter of events. But if you stop while there's still a little left -- if you don't record every known thing in your imagination, but keep thinking about it -- something happens. Something J.D. Salinger said comes true:

wikipedia
"Your dog wants you to kill John Lennon."
No, no, no. He never said that!

2

Don't Be Consumed With Being Original (The "Ice Ice Baby" Test)

I've never had writer's block for the same reason I've never had the lasagna at the Olive Garden: It just seems terrible and I don't want it. But from about 18 to 28, I did mercilessly reject a lot of my own ideas for not being original enough. It wasn't writer's block. If you pointed a gun at my head, I could have written those ideas, but I made a decision to only write what I liked. There's a difference. And it was a bad decision, because "not being original enough" is usually a bad reason for not liking something. There are countless important stories in the world that follow the same structure over and over, whether it's the Bible or Superman or Star Wars. Don't let similarities stifle you. Indeed, they're liberating.

Blake Snyder wrote a great, but sometimes maligned, screenwriting book called Save the Cat, which includes his beat sheet where he lays out the essential framework of a three-act play or movie. It works equally well for novels, and I used it for Notes from the Internet Apocalypse. Is that cheating? No. You can break the rules, you can do whatever you want, but you should find a certain comfort knowing that there is a structure that produces stories that work, whether they're Schindler's List or Legally Blonde. And there's another important realization: Despite identical structure, those movies aren't anything alike. There is plenty of opportunity for you to be you.

Who can forget that scene where Elle Woods liberated Dachau?

But how do you know when you're a plagiarist and when you're doing something that merely reflects other elements while retaining your own soul? I came to that realization later in my writing life with the help of J.K. Rowling. I mean, think about Harry Potter. Aren't the muggles like Roald Dahl characters, isn't some of the gross-out humor Pythonesque, isn't Ms. Umbridge's pen a heck of a lot like Kafka's torture device in In the Penal Colony, and isn't the quest to destroy horcruxes while resisting their corrupting influence noticeably reminiscent of Frodo's journey to destroy the Ring? Yes, yes to all, but Harry Potter is still an awful lot of fun filled with compelling storytelling. So how do you tell? Well, in an earlier article and a lecture, I laid out what I like to call the "Ice Ice Baby" Test:

1

Ask "What Do You Want Your Readers to Feel in the White?"

Of all the tips I learned on this list, this is the only one taught to me by a professor at an actual school. Still, it was an undergrad program, so I don't think that ruins the conceit of this article. At Cornell, I was lucky enough to have Professor Dan McCall as a writing instructor and thesis adviser. Unlike most writing teachers, Dan would read the students' short stories out loud to the class himself. He forced you to hear your own words, not as you polished them in your delivery, but how they existed on the page. By doing so, he showed you the sounds your writing made. He let you know what kind of mark your prose was leaving on the world.

So it makes sense that the piece of Dan McCall advice that I took with me most was that every writer should be aware of what they want the readers to feel "in the white." He was referring to the end of the piece, that white space between the last line and the bottom of the page. If a piece of writing is any good, you should be left feeling something there.

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Dan didn't explain what to do when the last line was all the way at the bottom of the page.

If all this advice did was make sure you ended your stories strongly, that would be enough. After all, who doesn't like a powerful ending? But much like good writing, this advice is a trick. You can't end strongly by worrying only about the last few sentences. It's like sticking a killer punchline onto a poorly told joke; it won't work. If you're really concerned about what your readers will feel in the white, then you have to make sure you're setting up an ending from the very beginning, and if you're doing that, well then you're worrying about every part of your book.

Dan died this past year, before I could tell him my first novel was going to be published, but not before I got permission to give one of my characters his name. The character's a clairvoyant with an encyclopedic knowledge of science, history, and pop culture, but he's not half as impressive as the real Dan McCall, a man who could redirect both you and your writing with just a raised eyebrow or a sarcastic laugh that somehow still comforted as it pointed you a better way toward home.

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