When to leave the present, in what register, and what to bring back
The Craft Behind the Story (Second Edition) — Chapter 7. Part II: The Joins.
In brief. Any passage that leaves a novel’s present for an earlier point in its story, whether a clause, a paragraph or a dramatised scene, costs the reader something before the past has delivered anything: she must hold a suspended question, build a second situation and file it against the first. So every such passage starts in debt, and the debt is repaid only if the present has changed by the time the narrative returns to it. The cost is not fixed. It falls when the reader has already asked for the past, rises when the passage goes far back for a brief moment, and depends above all on where in the present it is placed. The tools are a choice between telling the past and dramatising it, settled by a one-sentence compression check; fourteen registers in which the past can be delivered; six domains of purpose; the trigger and the return; and ten diagnostic questions. Use them on a draft whose flashbacks readers skim, or whose past arrives as information nobody asked for.
What you can do after this chapter
- Decide, by writing one sentence, whether a piece of past material should be told, dramatised or cut.
- Measure how far back a passage goes and how much time it covers, and say whether it fills a gap or repeats what the reader has.
- Name what a passage of the past buys, and find the past moment that buys several things at once.
- Choose a trigger, and write a return that leaves the present changed.
- Audit every departure into the past in a manuscript on one sheet, and move the ones that are in the wrong place.
Key terms
Cutaway, backstory and flashback; the register of the past; the first narrative; anachrony, analepsis and prolepsis; reach and extent; external, internal, completing and repeating analepsis; ellipsis and paralipsis; iterative narration; the interest deficit; suspense, curiosity and surprise; the situation model and the contextual frame; belatedness and rememory; the one-sentence compression check; the fourteen registers and substitution testing; the trigger, the return and the changed question; the flashback budget; explanation and illumination; reader knowledge and the proposed structural domain; the cutaway audit. Each is defined at first use and collected in the consolidated glossary.
Contents
The first files say what a cutaway is and why it costs what it does, the middle files what it can buy and how to choose its form, and the last are for use at the desk.
- The Problem
A well-written memory at the wrong moment, and the chapter’s claim - Definitions
The cutaway, its two registers and four scales, the first narrative, adjacent terms - How It Works
The reader’s cost of going back, Genette’s measures, Sternberg’s curiosity, the past that is the story, and the dates of the convention - The Taxonomy
Five domains a cutaway can serve, and a proposed sixth: the structural domain - The Mechanism
The fork and the compression check, fourteen registers, triggers, returns, and where the multiplying work lives - Diagnostic Tests
Ten questions on one page, and how to read their failures together - Failure Patterns
Five recurrent failures, each with a published work that commits it and succeeds - Worked Analyses
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Sense of an Ending, Where the Crawdads Sing, Lost and Arrival, and the household revision case - Checklist and Exercises
The revision checklist and five exercises for your own draft - Coda
The books for which the debt runs the other way
A writer in revision can start at the compression check and the diagnostic tests; the short coda, which says which books the tests are not for, is best read early.
The full treatment
The Reference layer holds the complete chapter, Backstory and Flashback: the theory and the history of the flashback at length, each domain’s carriers, the fourteen registers with their exemplars, twelve failure patterns, eight further close readings, the cutaway in other forms and in translation, seminar questions, an assessment rubric and the sources.
See also: The Transition (Chapter 5), on crossing the gap; The Prologue (Chapter 10), on such material placed before the reader has invested anything; Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture (Chapter 8), on the past as a strand of the whole book.