Our “Dear John and Zina” video….
Today’s question comes from John Holbrooks (Personal Canon Formation) and Zina Gomez-Liss (The Beauty Of Things)
John asks: How do I handle time jumps in narrative (tense and voice) in complex structures? Building on John’s question, Zina asks: In long narrative poetry, I often get told that whenever I do a flashback it’s problematic. What to do?
Dear John & Zina,
The short answer is confidence, consistency and motive. Readers will go anywhere with you if they trust you, they’ll accept anything, and those parameters, once met, will open up a world of devices at your fingertips. Change of tense, person, voice, even font, whether it’s forward or backward, from a temporary aside midsentence to whole chapters dedicated to a different time frame, there are no rules as long it’s not confusing; and that being the only rule in narrative structure anyway, confidence, consistency and motive are your three soldiers in this battle. Stick with them and you’ll win. I’m reading Wolf Hall at the moment, and Mantel is a perfect example of a writer working in harmony with all three. She opts for the baldness of “New Year 1529,” when jumping forward. No messing, bang, we’re in. Her confidence says this is where we are, and you’re coming with me. She does this consistently, using a repetitive calendar of seasonal landings which we quickly get used to, while her time jumps backwards are done with equal lack of apology, using only a change in tense from present to immediate past to give her reader their bearings. And her motive? It’s historical fiction. There’s a lot of ground to cover. Kundera pulls the same trick in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being which jumps all over the place, pulling us back and forth across lives and scenes, years in disorder, events foretold then written about later while consistently using the immediate past tense. His motive is resolved in the narrative structure he’s chosen, a sense of time being circular, a looping where lives collide. The structure, as with all great novels, is doing as much heavy lifting plot wise, as the prose contained within it.
I want to zero on motive, the other two being self-explanatory. When I began writing fiction, although my leading tense was the immediate past, I’d often jump back in time and hide in the past perfect to tell an event so as to avoid having to feel it; so much easier to write a scene that has already happened, rather than writing it as it happens. When a backward time jump presents itself and you want to use a tense change to signal it, I’d ask yourself if this choice is adding to the emotional drive or avoiding it.
In terms of voice, you might want to look at Ben Myers’ The Gallows Pole, for an author who does this successfully, but on that note, be aware that his added use of a font change comes with risk. You’ve got to be pretty sure you’re not cheating if you opt for the use of italics as he does, and by cheating, I mean using a device that is easy, rather than simple. He gets away with it on motive, but without that it can feel a bit like lazy problem solving, so check your motive again and again and again.
So far, so fiction but what about narrative poetry, and non-fiction? I’d like to see an example, Zina, of how you’re doing it at the moment, so as to understand why you’re getting that note. For my own experience in memoir, I would frequently break cover and speak directly to the reader, move from 1st to 2nd person without explanation, write Buckle up people, we’re going back in time or something like that. What is your reason for flashbacks within the body of a poem? What does the poem gain from them? It may be that they don’t work because you don’t need them, that, frightening as it is to be in the heat of the moment, that’s where you need to be to tell the story. Or, if the flashbacks are the meat in the sandwich, have you tried getting rid of the scaffold that surrounds them and writing them as the poem itslef? I would advise you try that and get back to us with how it goes. My first novel was constructed of the now of one day in 1964 with the flashback of 12 years between the wars and I solved the problem of needing to stay in the fire while traveling back and forth through time by using a jump in tense only as a tunnel. Once there, the tense was the leading tense, allowing me and the reader to feel that we were in it, and not one removed in remembering.
Hope this helps,
Love
Eleanor
Here’s a link to Mary’s answer…..
p.s.: Mary has a full course that she introduces here—the link is for you to take a gander—it’s free….
If you missed our launch post, take a look at here : Write it! and This Writing Life.
Thank you so much for answering our questions. I just started reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road which flashes back a lot while still masterfully keeping pace with the harrowing danger in the present tense. Incredible exposition is done in the flashbacks and the father’s storytelling to the son.
In the case of moving back and forth in time, I suppose there isn’t much difference between prose and verse. It’s just the form that is changed—but not the effect or method.
Thanks so much, Eleanor—so helpful. I’ll be referring back to this post often, as well as to Mary’s. Your notes on tense are particularly interesting. I’m currently fiddling with a narrative with two main timelines: 2024 present and 1984 in memory. But I’m thinking of inverting the tenses: putting the present into past tense and the memory into present tense—in order to convey the emotional power of the memory, which also ties in with Mary’s note on emotional intensity. As you say, consistency and confidence are crucial—establishing parameters.