Craft 6: On Flashbacks and Time Jumps

[harmony_bites]

Stephen King says the three elements of story are: description, dialogue, but first and foremost, narration that--"moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z"--he distinguishes this from plot. The problem I see most often with fanficcers in handling this is "walking to the problem" (see below) and ways of handling flashback.

Comments

[harmony_bites]

Now you're making me feel bad for my big ol' scene o' italics in Where the Magic Is

Italics are hard to read :-(

But really, a story as good as that, you hardly notice these things unless as a beta you put them under a microscope.

I really am a beginning prose writer.

And I still have plenty to learn trust me--though I think I have gotten better. I was looking at one of my old Trek stories the other day--someone told me they were actually rec'ing it on crack_van. I was sorely tempted to edit it--I didn't because I look at my old stories as my benchmark, my baby pictures--but I wasn't crazy about how I handled narrative believe me.

And I love a good flashback too. In Trek I was particularly fond of the frame (touched on in the Kress article). You know, you start in a particular time or place, set things up as if one character is telling the story to the other, go back in time telling the meat of the story, then return at the end to the current time and place. Like POV, experimenting with this is a lot of the fun of fanfic.

Hee, in script format you say FLASHBACK, as in something like "EXT. RUNNING TRACK -- DAY -- FLASHBACK."

Which is probably where the horrible flashback grimlins I've seen in HP fic comes from. Strangely enough, I don't remember them in Trek (Italics and badly used flashback yes, indicating flashback by saying "flashback" or the equivalent, No. Which is funny--Trek being the script-based medium, HP being the prose-based one.

[argosy]

I think it's just bad writing in HP, not familiarity w/screenwriting technique. Not a lot of people read scripts (in their original form, I mean), including screenwriters.

[harmony_bites]

Hmmm. Maybe. Its just we had bad godawful writers in Trek, and I don't remember this there. The worst ficcer I've ever read was in Trek. I'm tempted to name her--even link to a story--zero chance she'd ever come across this post, but it still feels mean. It was common across the fandom to write MSTs of her stories that would get circulated via email.

Maybe its not so much script-writing as film-watching? You often see a scene of flashback introduced with titles saying "five years ago"