I noticed recently something that doesn’t work for me as a reader that I didn’t think about as a writer: flashbacks or other devices that rearrange story time. An example, first chapter is X years before inciting incident, in order to set up a character with a given history. The rest for the story is in present time and barely needed that first chapter/prologue/lazy writer stuff.
What’s so wrong with telling the story in forward-moving chronology? To me, it’s one more way I won’t loose the reader. Or as the reader, I won’t be lost.
Oh yeah, I understand showing backstory in flashback is a show, instead of tell, but aren’t there other ways? Better ways?
I finished Empire Falls recently. Good book, except for one chapter. It presented all flashback scenes with italics text. That gets annoying after one sentence but I didn’t have to guess what was going on the next time I saw it.
Empire Falls is a three generation story where a chunk of history isn’t known to the present day main character. So the backstory-flashback-italics scenes reveal the mystery one section at a time. Since the characters involved were dead except for one, you couldn’t use dialogue as a device. And letters are so boring. So it came down to the main character’s memory refreshed by an old newspaper clipping . The flashback put context around it to give us reasons and emotions involved.
But somehow even that feels like a cheat. So what devices can be used to illuminate backstory other than flashback?
I would love to know what works for you. Maybe you like to read flashback. Let me know.
