want to know what happens next. These are the only two criticisms that can be made on the story that is a story … When we isolate the story like this and hold it out on the forceps—wriggling and interminable, the naked worm of time—it presents an aspect both unlovely and dull. But we have much to learn from it. (25–28)
And we have much to learn from Forster’s description of it, as well. Paradoxically, story itself does not have a beginning, middle, and end (though any particular story must have these in order to be satisfying): story itself, however, is “interminable” and (incidentally) chronological, “the naked worm of time.” The famous “beginning” and “end” (of the “beginning,” “middle,” and “end” triad) are simply narrative strategies for mounting the endless train of narrative and strategies for dismounting. When writers try structurally to harmonize the beginning and ending strategies with what is going on in the mid-game, we approach the problems grouped under the rubric “narrative art.”
Within his ellipses (the parts I have elided with the traditional three dots), Forster talked about the age, strength, and power of story, for which he had much respect. So do I. (She-herazade of The Thousand Nights and a Night is the heroine of the passages I’ve omitted. Look them up.) But in terms of the problems before us, that is not to the point. Indeed, what is to the point is that, in most of the narratives we are presented with today, be they sitcoms, TV miniseries, movies, or even news accounts, the stories we get are mostly bad. With some extraordinary exceptions throughout the history of all these fields, most comic books, TV series, and action movies don’t have good stories. Neither do most published novels, and for the same reason: the logic that must hold them together and produce the readerly curiosity about what will happen is replaced by “interesting situations” (or an “interesting character”), which don’t relate logically or developmentally to what comes before or after. That is to say, they are wildly illogical. We cannot follow their development, even—or especially—if we try. If we look at them closely, they don’t make much sense. The general population, day in and day out, is not used to getting good stories. This has two social results.
First (on the downside), it probably accounts for why there is so little political sophistication among the general populace. Political awareness requires that people become used to getting rich, full, complex, logical, and causative accounts of what is going on in the world and, when they don’t, regularly demanding them. But with television and most films and books, they get little chance.
Second (on the upside), it produces a relatively small but growing audience interested in and hungry for experimental work. Paradoxically, most experimental work is simpler than the traditional “good story.” As far back as 1935, in his introduction to his selected poems, Robinson Jeffers called the techniques of modernism “originality by amputation.” Formally, it’s still a pretty good characterization—which is probably why normative fiction (and figurative painting) persists. What it leaves out, however, is that the nature of the experiment is rarely a negative one. It’s a positive one. E. E. Cummings (1894–1963) began his lines with lower-case letters throughout his career—as has Lucille Clifton (b. 1936) throughout hers. But the experiment is only secondarily about not beginning your lines with upper-case letters. It’s about the effect gained by beginning your lines with lower-case letters. It is a matter of exercising the attention to focus on smaller elements that, in a “good story,” would only be perceived in concert with many others. The long-term effect of experimental work is the heightening of the microcritical abilities among readers, so that, among other things, we get better at criticizing those “good stories” that turn out to be, in reality, not so good after all.
I do not believe the only purpose of the contemporary, the experimental, or the avant-garde is to increase our appreciation of the traditional. Both have rich and distinct effects, pleasures, and areas of meaning. But as the legacy of high modernism (through which most of us come to the contemporary and the avant-garde) makes clear, the normative and the experimental relate; they nourish each other.
What distinguishes story from a random chain of chronological events that all happen to the same character, or group of characters, is causal and developmental logic. This logic alone is what makes one want to find out what happens next. Most beginning writers are, however, unaware of how fragile the desire to know what comes next actually is—or how easily it’s subverted.
Turning readers’ attention from the future to the past with a flashback will almost always slay that desire, unless that flashback answers a clear question set up in the previous scene—and answers it clearly and quickly.
In my creative writing classes today rarely do I get a short story of more than six, eight, fifteen pages that doesn’t have at least one flashback in it. Rarely does it work. Understand, I have no problem with realistic flashbacks—but in life, flashbacks are just that: flashes. They last between half a second and three seconds, ten at the outside. Thus, in texts, they are covered in a phrase or two, a sentence, three sentences, or five 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
