Writer to writer: From think to ink - Gail Carson Levine 2014
Looking back
Aspects of story
The Queen of Hearts—let’s call her Queenie—in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland specializes in shouting, “Off with his head!” Or her head. The reader is never told why.
If we want to spin our own tale from the original and the reason for the decapitations becomes important, then we need a way to reveal it.
The backstory and the flashback are two possibilities, both of which have come up on the blog. For example, MNM wrote, “I’ve been working on a story that is written in first person and I’m having issues with putting in the background or writing flashbacks.”
The advantage of both backstory and flashback is that they add complexity and give our story a sense of depth, a layered feeling. Fascinating! the reader thinks.
The disadvantage is that we have to pull the reader out of the ongoing tale into the past. Then, once we’ve gotten her there, we labor to excite her interest, but we don’t want her to fall so much in love with the past that she’s unhappy about leaving. And when we do return to the present, reentry can be bumpy since she has to get immersed all over again.
Still, we can do it. We just have to set things up. Let’s start with a flashback and see how we can accomplish it smoothly.
Suppose Queenie likes to behead both people, like Alice, and live playing cards because of a childhood tragedy. Her father, Daddy Card, the late King of Hearts, was assassinated, stabbed in the neck, eek! The assassin was never found, but the chief constable and Queenie are convinced he or she is still at court. We want the reader to understand Queenie and sympathize with her, so we decide to show what happened.
Here’s how we might work it. (What follows is my creation. Lewis Carroll, who may be spinning in his grave, had nothing to do with it.) Queenie is in her bedchamber when a Nine of Clubs, a servant, brings in her mail, among which is a letter in a pale purple envelope. See how we go into the flashback:
She stared at the envelope on her dressing table. Her heart pounded. Daddy Card liked to write lengthy letters to family and friends on pale purple stationery—not this exact tint, but close. Hands trembling, she picked up the tiny silver dagger she used as a letter opener, and thought, Twelve years ago next month.
That day she had been in this room, too, opening replies to invitations to her eleventh birthday party. She had issued eighty-nine invitations, and eighty-nine children had accepted. As she’d been mounding the responses in a triumphant pile, feet had thudded in the corridor outside. She hardly heeded—the servants were always rushing about. Then came a soft knock, her lady-in-waiting’s shy tap, but an instant later the woman entered without permission.
Notice that I started with had been and had issued, but switched to simple past in the sentence She hardly heeded—the servants were always rushing about. That sentence marks the complete shift to the earlier time.
The flashback continues. We see the shaken maid delivering the terrible news. Whatever ensues comes next: weeping, rushing out of the room, going to Mommy Card. Finally we bring Queenie back to her bedchamber and start the return transition:
She sat dully at her dressing table and stared without comprehension at the party replies. Oh, she finally remembered, the girl she used to be was going to have a celebration. For the first time, on that sad, long-ago day, she had collected her hair in a bun at the back of her neck, in the style of a grown woman. Then she had scattered the party responses onto the floor.
The mauve envelope in her hand now was unrelated to a party. There was no party. She hated parties. Who would be stupid enough to choose this color?
And we’re back. I repeated the tense switch on the return with the sentence For the first time, on that sad, long-ago day, she had collected her hair in a bun at the back of her neck. Then she had scattered the party responses onto the floor. Two techniques make the transition smooth: the tense shift and an action that bridges the gap in time, in this case opening the mail.
But suppose we don’t want to interrupt the story and we still want to provide the history. What are our other choices?
We can start our story at an earlier time, with the death of Daddy Card, continue to a scene or two from Queenie’s later childhood, maybe including the first time she issues her execution cry. Then we jump forward to the present, in which most of the story takes place.
Or suppose Queenie always touches her throat before calling for an execution. If her husband, Kingie, the King of Hearts, who thoroughly understands his wife, manages to put his arm around her quickly enough, she relaxes and doesn’t give the order. A newcomer to court can observe this and ask a friend to explain. In a short bit of dialogue the backstory of the father’s assassination can be revealed.
Or, if we’re writing from Queenie’s POV, the reason for the beheadings can be revealed in thoughts, as in Ten years coming up in a month. I was nicer before Daddy Card’s assassination.
Then we go back to the action. Five pages later, she might think something else, like Dr. Two of Spades says I lost my father at a girl’s most sensitive moment, no matter how he died. What a fool he is.
She makes a weighing gesture with her hands and thinks, Disease . . . assassination. Disease . . . assassination. Not the same.
More action. Later on she can finish the backstory by thinking, I probably killed the assassin long ago, but as long as I’m not sure, as long as he or she could still be playing croquet, I’ll keep the executions coming.
If we’re writing from another character’s POV, that character can be present for one of Queenie’s execution orders and think about the past in a sentence or two.
Or the reader can do without the backstory. Everyone knows Queenie orders people’s heads off. It’s one of the facts of her reign. People avoid playing croquet with her and are terrified when they have to. If she’s an important character, we can show her touching her throat, loving Kingie, seeming relieved when her husband pardons people. She’ll come off as a complex character. Excellent.
Suppose we need the backstory of the whole card kingdom, not merely of Queenie’s personal tragedy. Let’s suppose Alice has a mission in Wonderland. In order to have a chance at success, she has to understand the place. One way would be to have her find a tome about it in her parents’ library, and we can put a page from the book right in the story. We can have her stop in the middle to gasp or to get a glass of water, because when we break up the backstory with action in the present, we avoid suspending the forward tale for very long. For suspense, we can have her leave the room for the water and find the book gone when she comes back. She knows part of the story and she has to find out the rest, which moves the backstory into the front story. She can ask a historian, and we can include their conversation in our narrative.
Generally, we don’t want to start a backstory or a flashback in the middle of an exciting moment. Notice that we began Queenie’s flashback in her bedchamber, where not much is going on.
Writing time!
• Write the backstory that explains the history of the card monarchy. Were they people who were transformed into cards? Or has it always been this way? Who was the first ruler?
• Try your hand at interrupted action. The White Rabbit descends into his hole and dashes along the tunnel below. Move into a flashback that explains his hurry. In Lewis Carroll’s story, he and Alice separate and the story follows her. Stick with him and invent what happens after the flashback.
• Make up a backstory for a character in a book you love.
• Ina is a writer. Whenever she meets people, she makes up their backstories and sometimes she forgets they aren’t true. She’s having dinner at her new best friend’s house and meeting his family for the first time and inventing secret pasts for each of them. Write the scene and make the imagined backstories get her into trouble.
Have fun, and save what you write!