The "springboard" flashback

For a long time, I've noticed that there's this very specific type of flashback that gets used in story structure a lot--for lack of a better term, I'll call it the "springboard" flashback, or the SBF.

Plain ol' ordinary flashbacks are used pretty sparingly, and for good reason--they're boring. If we're aware that something happened in the past, it automatically has a kind of who cares? feel to us. The SBF is a more interesting kind of flashback though, because the character becomes aware of the importance of the flashback at the same time as the reader--and that awareness, in turn, affects the character's actions in the front story. Sorry if that came across as complicated--I've got an example to help.

It's the novel, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, by Peter Cameron. An SBF is woven through the first half of this book, in the form of a painful memory recounted by 1st-person narrator, James Sveck.

James is a witty, articulate high school senior and savvy Manhattan-ite, but he turns into a massive tangle of social anxiety around people his own age. He feels different in some fundamental way, which he says became clear to him during the "The American Classroom" (AC)--a corny school government project that takes him to Washington, DC, along with teenagers from all over the US.

The front story (the real-time action) takes place in the summer following the AC and follows James' attempts to withdraw from the world--he announces to his parents that he will not be attending Brown in the fall like he'd planned; he looks into running away and buying a cheap house in the Midwest instead; and he schemes to get the attention of the only person he regards as his "friend"--a sophisticated gay man named John who manages James' mother's art gallery. Alarmed by James' increasingly erratic behavior, James' parents insist that he talk to a psychiatrist, Dr. Adler, and it's through those office visits that James relives his "horrible experience" at the AC, generally via flashback.

I won't ruin all the delicious details of the "horrible experience" for those who want to read it, but little by little, the flashbacks tell the full story of a mental breakdown. Through this telling, the reader becomes aware of why James aggressively withdraws from everyone in the front story--and the effect makes it feel like James is becoming more aware, too, even if it takes him a while to admit it. In fact, it's the final telling of the breakdown to Dr. Adler that crystallizes James' crisis, both for himself and for the reader. In it, he recalls how he ended up at the National Gallery, staring at a series of paintings portraying the four stages of life in the form of a male figure sailing on a boat: for example, the male figure transforms from a youth sailing smoothly along, to a man facing raging waves, to an old man about to sail off the painting into a quiet, dark sea, accompanied by an angel. James explains that he was upset by these images because:

It's a real painting! Old Age by Thomas Cole, 1842

"... I realized I wanted to be in the last painting, Old Age. I wanted to be in the boat floating into the darkness. I wanted to skip the Manhood boat. The man in that boat looked terrified, and I couldn't understand what the point was: why crash through those treacherous rapids along a river that only flowed into darkness, death? I wanted to be in the boat with the old man, with all the danger behind, with the angel near me, guiding me toward death. I wanted to die."

This moment reveals James' greatest fear--of declaring his manhood and moving forward. The effect of this revelation is to catapult both the reader and James into the major confrontation of the front story--James' hidden feelings for John, his mother's gallery manager. Right after James delivers the final scene of his breakdown to Dr. Adler, he makes a romantically confused advance on John and is forced to put all his cards out on the table--including his sexuality. This leads to the final dramatic crisis in which James changes and grows into the next stage of life that he was so afraid of.

The SBF is a really interesting way to advance storytelling--it has a unique tension that comes from the feeling that you, the reader, are "catching up" with the past and its significance to the present at exactly the same time as the main character. Plus, the "catching up" in itself becomes a sort of "springboard"--one that touches off a turning point for the main character and offers a new direction. The overall experience feels a lot more like real life, and that in itself can make a reader stay tuned in.

Bazinga! More learning to write by watching TV

Happened to be flipping through last week's edition of New York magazine and there was a great article on the TV sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, and why it's so popular. One of the reasons given was--Bazinga!--the central character, the emotionally stunted but brilliant physicist, Sheldon Cooper. Here was the explanation:

"There's a character in so many classic sitcoms that's just a big monster. He takes up a lot of room, and everybody has to deal with him," says [Phoef] Sutton, [producer and writer on Cheers]. "Roseanne, Jackie Gleason, Sgt. Bilko"--and Big Bang's Sheldon. "Many times, the best characters are the worst people on the planet. Sheldon is constantly insulting the people that he loves and we just accept it gleefully, because he doesn't understand. He's an innocent," says Evan Smith, professor of television, radio, and film at Syracuse University.

Jim Parsons, aka Sheldon,
in May 5 New York Magazine

We could probably add a million more examples from TV to this list: Archie Bunker, Al Bundy, Alf--and those are just the A's. In fact, when you think about it, most TV comedy centers around the know-it-all, the wise-ass big mouth, or the bungling overachiever. Actually, if you draw that out to drama, some of our favorite characters are the almost-monsters, too, or sometimes even the complete monsters, a la Breaking Bad. The key ingredient seems to be a character who will easily fall into trouble over and over again, whether it's because of a fatal flaw or an Asberger's syndrome-like ability to alienate. All of it is good drama--and even better entertainment.

By the light of the future

A lot has been written about the flashback, but another cool device is the flash forward.

Just happened to read a couple good examples this weekend in the novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and thought I'd put them together. [Spoiler alert! Plot will be given away!]

While the flashback is most often about filling in backstory or providing crucial setup info, the flash forward seems to be about lending perspective and poignancy.

Splendid Suns is set in Kabul, Afghanistan, and centers around two main female characters, Mariam and Laila. In this scene, Laila's love interest, Tariq, has just revealed that he and his family are moving to Pakistan, to try to avoid the horrors of ongoing civil war. They make love for the first and last time, before Tariq leaves her forever. Afterwards, Laila tries to remember every detail of their last moments together, before we get a sudden flash forward into the very distant future, and a glimpse of how Laila will carry that memory with her:

This seems to have the effect, (1) of making this last encounter all the more poignant, by adding the perspective via the distant future, and (2) setting us up to believe that this parting is indeed forever, by making us feel that this future is quite distant, when (unknown to the reader) it is only a few years ahead, and not indicative of how Laila's entire future--in fact, as we'll see in a second, Tariq will return and undermine this assumption.

The second example comes later in the novel when--ta da!--Tariq shows up after years of separation. By this time, Laila has been forced to marry a brutal man named Rasheed, by whom she has a young son named Zalmai. Tariq shows up at Laila's home when Rasheed is at work, probably because he guesses--rightly--that Rasheed would violently force him out if he were home. Laila and Tariq's reunion comes at great risk, and the risk is shown to great effect by interspersing Laila and Tariq's real-time conversation with mini flashes forward into the future, in which Zalmai tattles on Laila to his father, Rasheed. Here's an example of one such cross cut between the present and the future. In the first few paragraphs, before the time break, Laila makes a bittersweet joke with Tariq about the "volumes" of letters she tried to send him in his absence. Cleverly, this reminds the audience of all the obstacles that have blocked the lovers' communications and connections, only to be interrupted by the next passage--Zalmai's revelation of his mother's secret meeting--which will prove to be yet another obstacle to their reunion.

The result of this intercutting (which happens several times) is extreme tension that ups the suspense level, and again, lends perspective to the present moment--while we've been rooting for Laila and Tariq, we have to acknowledge that there will be some grim consequences to their love, both for them and for Laila's son, Zalmai.

Quotes from: Hosseini, Khaled. A Thousand Splendid Suns. Riverhead Books: New York, NY; 2007.
pp168, 301