Time
The time covered by the action of a story should be short, and preferably continuous. Generally speaking, a day or two, a week, or at most two weeks is enough. We should focus on a single incident in the life of the central character, and it should take place in as few episodes as possible. More time can be brought in through the use of flashbacks, but trying to cover a longer period in the action of the story can lead to problems maintaining suspense and continuity.
If you want to use phrases like “one month later” or “one year later”, this is a sign that there is a time scale issue. Often the solution is to open the story at a later stage than you originally planned and indicate what happened earlier in the form of a flashback.
Memories
A flashback is a section of a story in which time is temporarily interrupted as we look back in time. Like any other aspect of the story, it is governed by point of view and therefore represents the memory of the central character.
Flashbacks should only be used to bring up material that is relevant and essential to the story, and cannot be brought up in any other way. For example, we might have a story about a woman who had a boyfriend as a teenager, then she lost contact with him, and then five years later she received a letter from him inviting her to come visit him. How would we organize the time scale here?
The way not to do it would be to start with your first meeting with the guy, show how the friendship developed and how they parted ways, and then say “Five years later.” . ‘, and he continues the story with her going to visit him. This would be a rambling episodic plot with little to no suspense to grab the reader’s attention.
Much better would be to open the story with the woman on the train on the way to the meeting, and show the past in flashback, then, when the train reaches its destination, bring the story back to the present. . Trips are opportune scenarios for flashbacks, because they break the continuity of the place in the same way that memory breaks the continuity of time, they evoke the idea of ​​connections that are established and they are occasions in which, with little else to do, we tend to fall in memories and dreams.
A trigger is often useful to set off a flashback, and a letter is an ideal trigger. So we can start our story with Janet sitting on the train, looking out the window at the countryside. She is excited and worried about meeting John again. will he/she have changed? Will they still have the same feelings for each other? She takes her letter from her bag and begins to read and remember. . . and we are in a flashback as he relives the events of five years ago. Then the train pulls into the station, snapping Janet out of her reverie, and we continue the story in the present.
In this way we will have opened the story on a note of anticipation and suspense, and have established a structure in which the immediate action can take place over a short, continuous period of time.
Always prepare for a flashback by establishing something that is happening in the present that you can return to when the flashback is over. The example of a train ride is given above, but it can be almost anything that gives the central character time to sit and reminisce for a few minutes. You can make yourself a cup of coffee, sit down, drift into a dream about something that happened ten years ago, and then come back to the present and realize that your coffee has gone cold.
The pluperfect tense (‘had’) is often needed to introduce a flashback, but long passages in the pluperfect are awkward to read and can lose the reader’s attention because they are implicitly digressing away from the action. If the flashback is going to be long, it’s usually pretty easy to go back to the simple past tense after the introduction. Keep an eye out for how it’s done in published stories.
several days later
Phrases like ‘three days later’, ‘one week later’ should be avoided, although they may fit comfortably on the time scale of a short story. The problem with them is that they imply that the author is telling us facts, instead of dramatizing them from the central character’s point of view. (see Dramatization’)
Suppose Janet doesn’t hear from John for three days, and then she gets a “phone call from him.” Instead of ending the first section of the story with a space in the text (a blank space indicates a passage of time), she then opens the next section ‘Three days later’. . . We can open the next section with Janet answering the phone and saying, “Hello John. Where the hell have you been for the last three days?”
The idea here, as in all areas of story writing, is to avoid giving information directly to the reader. The information is conveyed dramatically for the reader to grasp for themselves.
As the days passed. As the weeks went by
Phrases like this give the reader the idea that nothing of great interest happened for a long time. They are usually easy to avoid, similar to the example above. Instead of saying, ‘As the days went by, I felt more and more despondent, and I realized that I was making Janet nervous.’ We can have: “What’s wrong John?” Janet said. “You’ve done nothing but complain for the past five days.” Instead of: ‘As the weeks went by, we fell more and more into a boring routine.’ We might have something like: ‘Walking through the travel agents one morning, I realized that Janet and I needed a vacation. We had been stuck in the same old routine for weeks, it was about time we went away for a few days. That way, information about the passage of time is not provided directly, but is passed on unobtrusively as we focus our attention on the next important action.
Copyright: Ian Mackean
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