Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Common use of backstory and flashback
The collective book of essays/stories
Long-form genres

As you’ve learned earlier, when you start a new story, you need to get readers into the conflict as soon as possible. But you also need to bring them up to speed on what’s happened with the characters up to that point. This is usually done through backstory or flashbacks.

One nice aspect of collections is that you can use separate pieces or sections to accomplish what backstory and flashback typically do in something like a novel. A narrative needs to have forward momentum, meaning it needs to unfold at a steady pace. Flashbacks (and sometimes backstory) stop that momentum. However, if one story in a short story collection constitutes something from before the book’s main time period, then you have a self-contained narrative that also offers information on the more current events the other stories relate.

Flashbacks and backstories that are pieces of story or essay collections take the readers somewhere else and get them involved in a different narrative that hopefully will help the other stories make more sense. Given this dynamic, their use in collections is less likely to frustrate readers who sometimes feel they’re being pulled in too many directions at once when flashbacks and backstories are employed in novels or memoirs.

In general, it’s still smoother for the readers if backstory can be conveyed in a shorter manner than a flashback. This means if you have a piece that goes back in time in your collection, you should try to make it shorter than the others unless you have a compelling reason not to. Especially impatient readers might still skip ahead to the next present-day piece in a collection, but they’ll do so at their peril, as you’ve chosen to place that earlier time period piece where you have for a reason.

If it’s not especially important to the narrative flow, flashbacks and backstories can fall in various pieces without the readers even noticing. I would say this is true in my memoir because I believe its various themes take precedence over issue of different time periods. By way of example, I include the book’s table of contents. I’ve added dates to show when the different nonfiction pieces actually took place:

Part I: Beginnings and Vestiges of Lessons Learned

Prologue, or Lesson Plan for the Self (2011)

My Two High School Dream Girls (1992 and present)

The Skeleton Woman (1982)

Part II: Players, Coaches, and the Empowerment of Others

Home Court Advantage (1987)

The Men Beyond the Fields (1988)

Coaches (varies)

Part III: Passion, Folly, and Coming of Age

Satyr (1988)

Wrath of Achilles (1991 and present)

Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House (1991)

Use Your Illusion (Girls of Spring) (1992)

Part IV: Mortality and How We Choose to Keep on Going

Eyes Like Mountains (2011)

Epilogue, or Reviewing for the Final Exam (2012)

WRITING PROMPT

Earlier I asked you to identify significant events from your life and record them in your journal. Now go back to that section and try ordering the incidents from your life into a table of contents that’s thematically based rather than chronological.