Stein on Writing (21 page)

The term
segue
is derived from music. It means to glide unobtrusively into something new. I prefer the segue into a flashback to the more direct method, moving from the present scene to a scene in the past inconspicuously.

Flashbacks normally decrease suspense, but they can be fashioned to increase suspense. For instance, in
The Best Revenge
there is a single scene that runs for three chapters. It is the fierce facing-off of the protagonist, Ben Riller, and the antagonist, Nick Manucci. To heighten the suspense of that confrontation, I inserted three flashbacks into the scene, remembered by Nick, designed to increase the suspense by postponing the outcome of the confrontation. Each of the flashbacks illuminates the long scene and adds to its meaning. And each is segued into and out of as surreptitiously as possible.

In the course of the same novel one learns a great deal more about the antagonist in flashbacks from his wife’s point of view. We find out what kind of lover Nick is, why she married him, and what happened to that marriage. An antagonist, characterized in depth, has come to life as a credible human being, a person who holds the reader’s interest, however inhumane his methods. Saul Bellow said that Nick Manucci, the villain, was the best character in the book. I believe Nick’s flashbacks and those of his wife contributed to that view.

If the ghost of Sinclair Lewis is within earshot, I say flashbacks done correctly can provide richness and depth to a novel as long as they don’t read like flashbacks, if they are active scenes slipped into and out of simply and quickly.

If you have a flashback in your manuscript or are contemplating writing one, ask yourself, does the flashback reinforce the story in an important way? Is it absolutely essential? If it’s not, you may not really need it.

Can the reader see what’s happening in your flashback? Can you give it the immediacy of a scene that takes place before the eye? If your flashback is not a scene, can you make it into an active scene as if it were in the present?

Take a close look at the opening of your flashback. Is it immediately interesting or compelling?

Is the reader’s experience of your story enhanced by the flashback or—however well written—does it still intrude?

Has the flashback helped characterize in depth, has it helped the reader feel what the character feels?

Is there any way of getting background information across
without
resorting to a flashback?

We now come to an ideal solution: moving flashback material into the foreground and eliminating the need for a flashback.

The example I’ll use brings forward childhood material since that is the most common occasion for writing a flashback:

“You were a lousy kid, Tommy, a brat from the word go.”

“Hey, man, if you got punished as often as I got punished—”

“Your old man was teaching you discipline.”

“By yanking my plate away before I’d had a mouthful?”

“He got through to you, didn’t he?”

“He starved me. What he got through to me was I was hungry and he wouldn’t let me eat. I hated him. I wished he’d die.”

“You got your wish, didn’t you?”

In this brief exchange in the present the reader gets the following information:

1. Tommy had a lousy childhood.
   
2. Whoever is talking to him thinks it was Tommy’s fault.
   
3. Tommy’s father withheld food from him as punishment.
   
4. The repeated punishments drove Tommy to hate his father and wish him dead.
   
5. The speaker is loading Tommy with guilt.
   

Note that all five points were conveyed in short order
without a flashback.
You’ve just seen how information can be conveyed in present dialogue in such a way that the reader is witnessing a dramatic scene that takes place in the present, thus eliminating the need for a flashback.

The example above is entirely in dialogue. Thoughts can accomplish the same purpose, as in the following example in which only one of the characters is speaking, yet all the points are made:

“What’s bothering you?” Al asked. “You’re not eating.”

Tommy poked his fork at the pork chop. He cut pieces off. He raised one toward his mouth, then suddenly put the fork down and shoved his plate away from him.

“Hey, kid, tell me what’s the matter,” Al said.

The matter, Tommy thought, was you didn’t have my father, I did. You didn’t have him yanking the plate away as punishment. You didn’t go to bed with pain in your gut.

“Hey,” Al said, “is it your old man’s death? Is that what’s bothering you?”

Tommy has said absolutely nothing. We’ve been privy to his thoughts. And we’ve got the background we need right in the foreground.

In conclusion, I don’t want to minimize the skill that’s needed to make flashbacks as involving for the reader’s experience as everything that happens in the present, However, I’ve never seen essential background material that couldn’t be made to work as scenes. And more of that background can become foreground than you may suspect. The time it takes to do it right is an investment in the reader’s experience.

The Keys to Credibility

Credibility is central to much of what the writer does. He creates a world in which the invented characters must seem as real as the people who surround us in life. What happens to them, however extraordinary—and it should be extraordinary—must be believable. The motivations of the characters should be credible. And that provides the occasion for the writer to meet his biggest enemy, himself.

The writer has a natural tendency to act as we all do in life—that is, we question the motivations of others more often than we do our own. When creating fiction, those characters are our selves and we cover for them. This leads to a variety of problems.

I have watched as a bestselling action novelist once again has a character throwing another character over the railing of a ship. Think a moment, how many people do you know who would be capable of lifting a hundred and fifty pounds or more up from the ground high enough to toss that entire weight over a railing? In action fiction, the willing reader suspends disbelief. If one guy throws another over the railing, the reader goes with it. If a writer’s concerned about the quality of his writing and needs to say that “Tiny picked him up bodily and threw him over the railing,” he will have planted earlier that Tiny is six foot three and a weightlifter.

In fiction, plays, and film,
planting
means preparing the ground for something that comes later, usually to make the later action credible. Planting is necessary when a later action might seem unconvincing to the reader. Not all actions require planting. For instance, if Todd trips Andrew and Andrew then punches Todd, Todd’s action does need planting, Andrew’s punch does not.

In fiction that has a higher aim, the credibility of every important action in the story is at risk unless the writer is confident that the motivation or ability of the character makes the action credible.

Some inadequate motivation is easy enough to fix. For instance, if a character suddenly gets up to go shopping for the convenience of the author because something is going to happen in a shopping mall, the events in the mall may not be credible unless the motivation for the character going to the mall is planted ahead of time. The planting can be simple enough through a touch of humor:

“I’m not going to go on a shopping spree ever again. After today.”

Or you simply need to get a character out of the house. Instead of an unmotivated walk, he could say.

“These new shoes are not going to get broken in if I sit around the house.”

Some actions are so bizarre that it may seem next to impossible to motivate them:

We had been married for three years when, one Sunday, Tom dressed, as usual, in a shirt and tie, slipped into his handsome jacket, put on his best cordovan shoes, and left the house without his pants.

What conclusion can the reader come to, that Tom suddenly went crazy? Or is this going to be a wacky comedy about an eccentric? Could Tom be so concerned abut something else that he forgot to put on his pants?

Readers are seldom interested in truly crazy people. It is hard to be moved by their actions because some seem so unmotivated. It is not credible that someone, otherwise all dressed up, would forget to put on pants before leaving the house. We are left with the possibility that this is going to be a farce in which actions are not required to meet any tests of credibility. If this were a story about an eccentric who behaves unpredictably, Tom’s strange conduct would require planting. If Thomas’s action is not to seem ludicrous, he would have had to have been characterized as someone who could do something as zany as going out dressed up without his pants. Readers will not readily accept the unlikely. Can this character’s action in going out without his pants be made to seem credible? Can Thomas’s aberrant act be prepared for so that it will seem credible when it happens?

Think of “planting” as preparing the ground in a garden:

Tom and I had been married for three years when, one Sunday, he dressed, as usual, in a shirt and tie, put on a handsome suit and his best cordovan shoes, but forgot to put on his socks.

I decided not to say anything, but the next Sunday he dressed in the same handsome suit, put on his socks before he put on his cordovan shoes, then tied his tie over his undershirt and left the house before I could catch him.

I said nothing. But the third Sunday, he remembered to put on a shirt before putting on his tie, then put on a handsome jacket, and left the house without his pants. I thought I’d better speak to him.

This revision is funnier, and more credible despite the zaniness of the action. Thomas’s forgetfulness was planted.

The worst mistake that a story writer can make is to have unconvincing motivation for actions that are central to the story. A married engineer with a well-paying job notices a momentarily unattended carriage in a supermarket and kidnaps the baby. What is the reader to think?

The reader has to guess. Is the engineer childless and desperate? Does his wife refuse to have a child? Still, kidnapping is a contemptible act for which the punishment is severe. What in the engineer’s background would have made it possible for him to pick a stranger’s child out of a carriage and take it away? How does the man’s wife react when she learns of the kidnapping? When he is apprehended, what excuse does he give? There are too many unanswered questions, which makes the reader feel that this comes across as a “made-up” story that the events described didn’t happen. Clearly, the kidnapping of a child is a major action that must seem motivated at the time that it takes place.

Coincidence is enchanting when it happens in life. A friend we haven’t seen for years walks out of the same darkened movie house as we do, we go for a coffee together, and have a gabby reunion. If this happened in a story, the skeptical reader would say that the author is responsible for the coincidence and that it isn’t believable.

Here is an example of how to diminish the appearance of coincidence:

Problem:
Sally and Howie are ex-lovers who have not entirely gotten over each other. The author has arranged for Sally to run into Howie in the shopping mall. The reader smells coincidence.

Solution:
The reader learns that Sally has been avoiding a particular store she and Howie used to shop in because she’s afraid of
meeting Howie there. But Sally wants something at that store—and no other store in the neighborhood—carries. Before entering the store’s revolving door, Sally peers through the window to make sure Howie isn’t in there. She goes in, finds what she wants, and hurries to the revolving door, a smile on her face, only to see Howie in the other compartment of the revolving door on his way in. They both register surprise, then laugh.

A coincidence still? Yes, but the way the author arranged it with detail—the special store, Sally peering in to avoid Howie, the revolving door—all help to make their coincidental meeting a true surprise.

There are many other ways of diminishing coincidence. For instance, a third character can arrange for Sally and Howie to meet “accidentally” at an event staged by the third character.

The most dangerous place for a coincidence to occur is at the climax of a story. The protagonist has his head on the chopping block. Suddenly the
deus ex machina,
the god in the machine, comes down for the rescue. Those devices fool no one. They exist for the author’s convenience because he can’t figure out a credible way of rescuing the protagonist.

It is so difficult for a writer to gain objectivity about his own work, and in no area more so than in judging coincidental matters. I’d like to offer a peculiar strategy that seems to work. You can sometimes get objectivity artificially by making a new title page and replacing your name as author with the name of an author whose work you admire especially. Then read your manuscript with that author’s eyes to see if you can catch any action that is insufficiently motivated or that smacks of coincidence.

If that doesn’t work for you, try preparing a new title page and replacing your name with the name of an author whose work you dislike. Go at the manuscript with a vengeance to root out unmotivated acts and coincidence. It’s astonishing what a change of perspective will do.

Above all, remember that the main actions of your work are like great flowering plants. Put the seed down well earlier and admire the harvest. Leave coincidence to the hacks and the god in his machine.