About Writing. Samuel R. Delany
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sentences at most.
Try to think about a single past event concertedly for more than ten seconds, without the present intruding strongly. Unless you are talking about a specific past event with another person, who is stabilizing your attention with questions and comments (or, indeed, unless you are writing about it, so that your own recorded language helps stabilize your thought), it’s almost impossible. Indeed, what’s wrong with most flashback scenes in most contemporary fiction is that they are simply unrealistic: by that I mean the scene where, on Friday night, Jenny sits in front of her vanity putting on her makeup, in the course of which she thinks back over the entire progression of her relationship with Steve—for the next six pages!—whom she is going to meet later that evening; or the scene where Alan is walking down the street Monday morning, during which he runs over the last three months’ growing hostility with his foreman, Jeff—for eight pages!—whom, when he arrives at work, he will confront to demand a raise. Nine times out of ten, both these stories simply begin at the wrong place. The first really starts with Jenny’s meeting Steve. The second begins the first time Jeff’s hostility manifests itself to Alan.
The “subjectivity of time” that writers and philosophers have been going on about for the last hundred years or so has to do with whether or not time passes quickly or slowly—not whether it passes chronologically. Of course conscious and unconscious memories constantly bombard our passage through the present. The web of unconscious memories and associations is what makes the present meaningful, decipherable, readable. That web is why a frying pan on a stove, a book on a shelf, and a broom leaning in the corner register as familiar objects and not as strange and menacing pieces of unknown super-science technology from a thousand years in the future. Spend some time observing how these memories arrive, how long they stay, how they add, expand, subvert, or create present meaning before you plunge into another flashback. It may save you time and preserve believability as well as free you from a bunch of stodgy fictive conventions.
I want to be clear—because several readers have misunderstood me in earlier versions of this same argument. What I’m arguing against here is not flashbacks in themselves. Even less am I against a conscientious decision to tell a story in something other than chronological order. (To repeat: I enjoy experimental fiction. For me to come out against nonlinear storytelling would simply be a contradiction.) What I object to is the scene whose only reason is to serve as the frame for an anterior scene because the writer has been too lazy to think through carefully how that anterior scene might begin and end if it were presented on its own, and so borrows the beginning and ending of the frame scene, which—equally—has not been chosen because anything of narrative import actually happens in it. What I’m reminding you is that flashbacks themselves began as a narrative experiment: If you’re going to experiment, one that has a reason will always win out over one without any thought behind it, one we simply indulge because, today, that’s the way everyone else does it.
Here is a rule of thumb that can forestall a lot of temporal clutter in your storytelling. Consider the scene in which the flashback occurs. Ask yourself, “Has anything important happened in the scene before the flashback starts? Has any memorable incident taken place? Have we seen any important change? Has the character done anything more than sit around (or walk around) and think?” If the answer to all these questions is no (and thus the only purpose of the present scene is to allow the character to remember the past incident in the flashback proper), consider omitting the frame and telling the flashback scene (after deciding on its true beginning and a satisfying conclusion) in the order that it occurred (often it’s the first scene—or one of the first—in the story) in terms of the rest of the narrative’s incidents.
The fictive excuse for the flashback is that it is a product of memory. The reason for fiction, however, is that it provides the explanatory force of history. This may seem like an overly grand statement. But give it a little thought.
We live our lives in chronological order.
When we remember them, however, our mental movement is almost entirely associational.
Listen to people who are not trying to solve a particular problem reminisce with one another. One good meal leads to another. One sadness leads to another sadness, till suddenly it becomes too much and the conversation leaps to pleasure or silliness or gossip. It’s only when human beings want to solve a problem or figure out the causality behind something that they carefully try to reconstruct chronological order.
If you’ve ever done it with someone else, you know how hard it can be.
Why did we lose the war? Because before we marched off to fight we didn’t start out with good weapons and well-trained men. Why was last year’s crop so good when the crop before that was so poor? Because the river flooded and left a deposit of silt over the land that promoted rich growth—while just before the year of the poor crop no flooding occurred at all. Chronological causality is how history begins, and that can only be supplied by chronological order. Only the concomitant cross-checking and stabilizing by notation and the pressure to be accurate and exact that two or more people remember in dialogue with one another creates history. What one person remembers by himself, while it may be a contributing element to history, is precisely not-history until it enters into such a dialogue. Chronology is our first historical mode.
Fiction is an intellectually imaginative act committed on the materials of memory that tries for the form of history.
That’s why a political climate pushing the individual to see her- or himself as autonomous and self-sufficient is, by definition, a climate unsupportive of rich and satisfying fiction. (This is not the same as an individual writer in her or his work pushing against a climate of conformity and security to assert her or his individuality.) A climate that discourages research and open discussion is usually pretty distrustful of good fiction as well.
However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or a story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory—not on the order of actual occurrence. (History is an even higher level of abstraction.) It looks like the writer is telling you a story. What the writer is actually doing, however, is using words to evoke a series of micromemories from your own experience that inmix,* join, and connect in your mind in an order the writer controls, so that, in effect, you have a sustained memory of something that never happened to you.
That false memory is what a story is.
Among other things, the writer’s art comprises various techniques to make that unreal memory as clear and vivid as possible. That clarity, that vividness, is entirely dependent on the order and selection of her or his words. Again, one might say that the fiction writer is trying to create a false memory with the force of history. The problem with the flashback is, again, that we don’t have too many memories of memories that we recognize as such—or, when we have them, rarely are they the most vivid among our memories. Thus, the flashback is a tricky technique. Think about its problems if you’re going to use it. When you find yourself telling your story out of chronological order, ask yourself if it adds anything truly necessary or important to the telling, or is it just laziness or bad habit, a failure to think through the tale logically to (and from) a beginning.
Here, now, are the places I differ from Forster. First, I, too, am the reader who says, “Yes—oh dear, yes—the novel tells a story.” I too very much fear the second reader. (“I like a story. Very bad taste on my part, but I like a story. You can take your art, you can take your literature, you can take your music, but give me a good story. And I like a story to be a story, mind, and my wife’s the same way.”) But while I fear him, unlike Forster, I don’t detest him. For while I believe (one) that the second reader is profoundly mistaken and needs to be the focus of most of today’s educational energy and (two) that he is the audience that most corrupts both critical and commercial approaches to the popular arts, I also feel that such audience members are educable, in a way that Forster probably didn’t. Today, this reader’s haunts are not golf courses but rather the active fandoms of TV, comic books, science fiction, and other venues particularly appreciative of paraliterature or popular culture. The fact is (which puts me close to Forster once more), I recognize that without some story—temporal, developmental, logical—most