Writing

Craft Question: Backstory and Flashbacks in Novels

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

I’m reading Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex. If you know it, you can guess why I am thinking about backstory and flashbacks. If you have not, it is a novel about a Greek hermaphrodite coming of age in industrial Detroit. Its plotting is an eccentric web of history and characters, and evokes shades of John Irving.

Most of all, the first half of its 500-plus pages is family history, and I want to know how this hippopotamus of a tome manages to dance so lightly, so entertainingly, across fifty years of history and two continents with barely a nod to its hermaphroditic narrator.

The first-person narrator adds cohesiveness, yes. The lustful lead-up to an intermarriage between brother and sister is relevant, too, yes. Yet the tantalizing hints of the original hook—the mini-scenes in present-day Berlin, the narrator’s scant mention of his memories—are enough to lure us ahead but not leave us frustrated.

The struggle to insert backstory (and especially flashbacks) is an immense part of a writer’s task. It means you have to interrupt the escalation of tension in a story, and shift back to something that already happened; you have to stop the story clock. You have to reassure the reader that history is more important, for a moment, than the story at hand; you have to convince her that the story at hand will be somehow incomplete and unsatisfying on its own, and urgently needs the voice of history to fill its empty spaces.

And usually, the attempt fails.

Are you a writer? Do you have a talent for moving your narrator through time? What do you pay attention to when plotting these scenes, and how do you know that the shift works?

Caffeinated spiders weave tangled webs. Maybe backstory would be a non-issue if I quit coffee.

 

An open question about speculative fiction.

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

Click for a link to a high-res version of Ward Shelley's brilliant "The History of Science Fiction." I love this image so much that I hung it over my desk.

In an earlier post, I ventured a functional definition of speculative fiction. I said that a manuscript is “speculative” (i.e., fantasy, sci-fi, or anything in between) if it requires the writer to invent a rule or condition for their world that acts as a metaphor for the novel’s theme. In other words: If you make something up, that something has to offer the reader a clue to what the book is about. Otherwise it’s gratuitous.

Yet as I plan my next novel, I am reminded of Occam’s Razor, which says that the simplest explanation for anything is usually the truest one. The problem with my earlier definition is that it doesn’t always work; there are lots of books about dragons, fairies, and/or outer space that use speculative elements just for the fun of it. Some readers like to read about dragons, for instance, so a market exists for writers who enjoy telling dragon stories. Simple as that. There is no rule that says all dragon stories must be important social commentary.

So let me try a simpler definition. Where all fiction involves five basic elements–premise, theme, voice, character, plot, and style–speculative fiction also involves a sort of sidecar to premise: the concept.

So, if premise is what the story is about in a few simple sentences, the concept is the invented-but-believable element that separates the story world from reality. The concept could be anything: vampires and why they exist (Interview with a Vampire), a medieval world inhabited by dragons (The Dragonbone Chair), a future America in which fertile women are required to reproduce (The Handmaid’s Tale), or an alter-reality in which Irish immigrant spirits are at war with Native American spirits (Forests of the Heart). If your novel uses a concept, then it has a speculative element. Simple as that.

So, here’s my question. What is the difference between realist fiction and speculative fiction?

And a bonus question: Where is the line that separates books shelved in a store’s “general fiction” section and its “sci-fi and fantasy” section?

To love better.

Monday, November 7th, 2011

Flowers from E.

I’m 31 today. Every birthday, I write wishes for the coming year on a slip of paper and then stuff it inside a tiny metal owl on my desk. One of my wishes this year is to love better.

I mean love everything better. Not pick it apart as a corporate conspiracy or a self-replicating cultural mistake. Not rush to find the right word for it. As I research the next novel, I am more aware than ever that knowledge requires words, categories, differences, hierarchies. The problem, however, is that when used without perspective or care in politics, a little bit of knowledge does nothing but underscore the differences between people.

The very best emotion you can bring to the act of acquiring knowledge is curiosity. Any other emotion creates a bias. Art doesn’t like bias, either–though there is a fundamental difference between art and knowledge. You can’t jump straight from knowledge of a subject to an artistic rendering of it. Art happens when you shut your eyes and smear away the words, and quietly observe what impressions remain. Good art requires knowledge, but the quietness and listening… Those are acts of love. An attitude of love is a gateway to art.

For my birthday this year, my parents gave me a piece of art that I admired at San Antonio’s Uptown Art Stroll; I loved that it rendered the image of St. George–beloved from the holy icons of my childhood in the Orthodox Church–in a collage using found art and warm, earthy acrylics. The saintly meets the earthly here, and somehow, it speaks to this same mysterious gateway between  mind and  spirit.

Art from Mom: St. George by Jorge Garza

This year, I wish for lots of quietness and listening, those two loving midwives of the creative soul. I wish it for everybody. I also wish:

  • To look at art more often.
  • To resume Spanish.
  • To see my family as often, or more so.
  • To make the trips I have in mind.
  • To master the art of attitude adjustments. (See above.)

 

What else? I always wish for writing to go well. Loving better is a means to two ends: a happy day-to-day home life, and a happy year-to-year growth of my writing skills. Last week I spoke to a literary agent about what I can do better, and she advised that I keep asking myself, “Why speculative fiction?” My training is in realism, but my heart lies in the imaginative power of storytelling. This year, I want to get better at finding the gateway between knowledge and art.

In the same vein, here are a few lines from Jane Hirshfield’s new collection of poetry.

FRENCH HORN

For a few days only,

the plum tree outside the window

shoulders perfection.

No matter the plums will be small,

eaten only by squirrels and jays.

I feast on the one thing, they on another,

the shoaling bees on a third.

What in this unpleated world isn’t someone’s seduction?

Confessions of a bibliophile

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

http://www.urbanspoon.com/u/profile/31640/ERiC-AiXeLsyD.htmlThe winter of 2000 was my junior year in college. It was a nocturnal, cloistered, literary year, and I lived in a triangle between Carnegie Mellon’s English building, the 61C coffee shop on Murray Avenue, and Three Penny Books, a used bookstore next door to the cafe. Its owner was an insomniac who kept the store open well past last-call, and he drew most of his business from a late-night crowd of students and the neighborhood’s sleepless old men. On my way home from studying, if the bus schedule allowed, I’d peruse the sidewalk cart in the glow of the front window’s Christmas lights, or go inside and examine the serpentine trail of novels that rounded the baseboards.

Two years later, after a series of semi-connected events that included 9/11, graduation, a cross-country move to Oregon, and quitting a dead-end job, I started my book editing business. In honor of Three Penny Books, I called it The Threepenny Editor. And at Christmastime, I went back to Pittsburgh for a visit and had my first real conversation with the owner; I gave him my card and told him how much his store meant to me. In one of life’s sad synchronicities, he told me that he was closing the store in a few weeks; like so many booksellers, he was pulling up stakes and moving his shop online.

We became friends. We started a thing that didn’t go well. But when he dispatched the last of his inventory, he made a generous gift that ranked among one of the best I’ve received in my life: the Encyclopedia Britannica 11, a noiseless Remington portable typewriter, a 1936 Royal typewriter, and a bookshelf of Orientalist relics ranging from Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta to Albert Hourani’s A History of the Arab Peoples to N.M. Penzer’s The Harem.

Fast forward again, to five homes and four states later. These artifacts of Three Penny Books sit about six feet from my desk. They look nice but I usually don’t think about them. I have a business to run; and until my wife finishes medical school, I do all the cooking and housekeeping. Although people remember Sisyphus for struggling eternally with his boulder, he should have been glad not to have the task of cooking for two marathoners. I find that the mundane has a way of fogging up days at a time, and I wonder what my twenty-year-old self would think about living in San Antonio and being known among friends mainly for the quality of her stuffed mushrooms.

Literary ecumenicalism is stamped all over my memory of that bookstore, twisted into its front-window Christmas lights, inseparable from memories of college and coffee and walking home with a messenger bag full of books at midnight in a rainy Pittsburgh winter.

And I realized this made me sad. So yesterday, I turned off the computer. I watered the garden. And then, purely for the hell of it, I pulled N.M. Penzer’s The Harem off the shelf. I discovered that the illustrations among its broad, yellowed pages fold out into maps of the sultan’s palace, and that all male heirs to the throne were educated and imprisoned in a royal school called The Cage. But mostly, the book evoked Pittsburgh winters and being twenty and so absolutely excited about a brilliant, unknown future that I could afford to take my optimism about it for granted.

You know what I love about books? As easily as a map unfolds from the leaves of a forgotten volume, the right one at the right time can relocate one’s sense of curiosity and optimism. The uncharted world of a new manuscript is one of the few pristine frontiers left to explore. So today, on this first day of fall, I’m putting aside the spiritual catatonia that always descends between novels, and resolving to outline my next project by the end of October.

Writing guide giveaway

Thursday, September 8th, 2011

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As part of a month-long social media course, I’m running an unscientific study on where readers hang out on the ‘net. What’s in it for you? Well, here’s your chance to win one of five free copies of The Editor’s Lexicon: Essential Writing Terms for Novelists.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8265072-the-editor-s-lexicon

Head on over to the giveaway page on GoodReads, and click on the “Enter to Win” button. If you’re feeling generous, interact in some way with its profile page. Talk about your writing, how my editorial advice has helped you, or how you’ve been climbing the walls waiting for a chance to learn what it means to have “talking heads syndrome,” commit “info-dumps,” or add “beats” to dialogue.

The contest starts on Saturday, Sept. 10 and closes as 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 21. Good luck!

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