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Advanced Techniques: Flashbacks
by Sandy Tritt
http://tritt.wirefire.com
Flashbacks interrupt the current action of the story to show a scene
from the past. As such, we must always weigh the advantages against the
disadvantages. Are the benefits we receive (a glimpse into a character’s
past) worth leaving our characters dangling in time while we go into the
past? If so, don’t hesitate to use a flashback. If not, continue with
your story line and find other ways, such as exposition, discussion,
etc. to entwine the past with the present.
If you choose to use a flashback, you must tip the reader that you are
leaving the present. This can be done with a transition statement such
as, “John remembered the day his father died.” Then, use past perfect
(“had”) two or three times to complete the clue that we are entering
real time in the past. And you are in the past. Act out your scene with
action and dialogue, and when you are finished, clue the reader that you
are returning to the present by using past perfect once or twice, and,
if necessary, another transition sentence (“But that was then and this
was now, and John had to let the past stay in the past.”). Here is an
example:
Danny remembered more about his mother’s death than he’d ever told
anyone. The day she had died, she had called each of her sons to her
bedside individually.
“Pour me a cup of fresh water, please,” she said, her voice thick with
the Polish accent that decorated her words when she was tired or sick.
Danny filled the cup, careful not to splash it on the bedside table.
“Now, hand me my lipstick.”
====
“Be good,” she finally whispered, her voice raspy.
He went to the door, started out, then stopped and turned around. His
mother tapped several tiny white pills from the lipstick case and shoved
them into her mouth. She had gulped water, then dumped more pills into
her palm and swallowed them. Three more times, she had repeated the
process.
Even now, Danny felt responsible for her death. He looked at his father
and swallowed hard . . .
Note that once we entered the flashback, we stopped using past perfect
(“had”) and just acted out the story. Otherwise, the “hads” weigh down
the prose and suck the action out of the words.
(c) copyright 2002 by Sandy Tritt. All rights reserved,
except for those listed here. November be reproduced for educational purposes
(such as for writer's workshops), as long as this copyright notice and the url: http://tritt.wirefire.com are distributed with the pages. For use in
conferences or other uses not mentioned here, please contact Sandy Tritt
at tritt@wvadventures.net
for permission and additional resources at no or limited charge.
Keep writing!
Sandy
Tritt
Inspiration
for Writers
tritt@wvadventures.net
Critiquing Special
Critiques by Sandy
Tritt
-
Unlike most editors, I consider my role
to be a mentor or a coach. Instead of just telling you what is wrong, I
explain how to correct the problem, and I work with you to teach you how
to write effective prose. More than 50% of my business is repeat
business, and I relish establishing long-term relationships with other
writers.
-
Treat you with respect and compassion.
All criticism will be of the "constructive" sort. My purpose is to
improve your writing, not to destroy your confidence.
-
Mark your manuscript, correcting
grammatical and spelling errors and suggesting alternative wording where
appropriate, line-by-line.
-
Highlight areas that are especially
well-written, so you will know where your strengths are.
-
Where appropriate, offer suggestions for
plot development, character development or other areas that could be
strengthened.
-
Return a two-to-four page written
analysis of your work. This will include evaluation of: plot, setting,
characterization, dialogue, special effects (flash forwards, flashbacks,
etc.), voice, point of view and any other areas particular to your work.
-
If appropriate, recommend reading or
resources to strengthen your areas of weakness.
-
Answer any questions you have via
email.
-
Provide my telephone number for a
personal follow-up, if you desire.
For Sandy's success stories, see
http://tritt.wirefire.com/Manuscript_Critique.html
Write Sandy at
tritt@wvadventures.net
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Interview with David Davidar, Publisher
- Penguin Canada
Interview by Sharif Khan
Mr. David Davidar began his career in journalism and is founder of
Penguin Books India. Currently, he is Publisher of Penguin Canada and
also is author of the novel, “The House of Blue Mangoes.”
How did you first get started in the publishing business?
Twenty years ago I was working in Bombay and there was a colleague I
knew who had done a publishing course at Harvard. And she said, “Why
don’t you go there and check it out?” So I came to the States, and I did
the course, and at the course was Peter Mayer, Chairman of Penguin
world-wide. He said, “Look you’re from India ?” (I said “yeah”). He said
he was thinking of starting a company in India and asked me, “Would you
like to run it?”
I was then twenty-six years old, I’d never done a publishing company in
my life, I had little or no idea, but when you’re twenty-six years old
sometimes you’re foolishly confident about your abilities, so I said
“yes.” I went to Delhi where the office was going to be and I had never
been there before, starting from Cambridge , Massachusetts to Delhi –
and there was nothing there. There were exactly 3 employees in the first
year of operations and they invested ten thousand US dollars in the
company in 1986. And that was it…Now Penguin India is Asia ’s largest
English publishing company and has done over 10 million dollars in
sales. It was quite an interesting experience and I had a ball! It kept
growing and growing. It’s so fascinating…Now every multinational is in
India . Penguin was the first.
What project are you particularly proud of as a publisher?
The fact of having created this company (Penguin India ). We publish 200
books a year in India in the English language now. We’ve started
publishing in 4 or 5 languages other than English (the first time
Penguin has published in any other languages) and will be 25 years old
in five years. Its just been a win-win situation because when we
started, it coincided with the boom in Indians becoming global
superstars like Vikram Seth, Arundathi Roy, and Upamanyu Chaterji, etc.,
etc., etc…The whole lot…so it is the #1 company by a long stretch and so
that is my greatest pride because I started out as an editor but am now
trying to develop companies and just the fact of helping create Penguin
India has been enormously satisfying.
Can you tell us about the BUSINESS of publishing? (I think for most
people it’s a mystery veiled in secrecy and delusions of grandeur).
There is the myth that if you write a novel you’ll become rich, famous,
attractive to women, or whatever the case may be, but I think that’s
largely a myth. Very few books break out in a way such as God of Small
Things and A Suitable Boy did because its only 1% who get to
superstardom because they won a big prize or it’s an amazing book and
enough readers caught on to the fact. But think of the odds…There are
about 100,000 books published every year. How on earth are you going to
get each of those books to a reader’s attention! Let’s say you walk into
a bookstore, you face the first novel that appears and you have no idea
what it’s about. There is so much competing for your attention. Most
novels sell only about 400 or 500 copies. If it’s a good seller it will
sell 5000 copies if it won an award and got great reviews. It is only
superstars that sell more and superstars are very few and every one
knows who they are. The question we need to ask is why are there so few
superstars? Why isn’t every writer published famous? There isn’t enough
attention available for these writers. So that TV time, radio time,
bookstore sales, all mitigate against every writer getting in.
Two or three industries suffer from the same thing, movie and TV, and
music being closest to the book industry. Think of the tens of thousands
of artists who’ve produced CDs and nobody’s heard of them, and nobody
will hear of them because that is the way the system works. So what
happens say if you’ve written a book and you approach a publisher? Well
normally you approach the publishing house through a literary agent
because they are the top filter, and a top agent comes to me and says
this is a wonderful book…I’ll say I’ll read it. But if you approach me
directly you probably won’t get through many of the sieves…there are
assistants, there are people in the mailroom, and there are book
manuscripts at the back because of overflow…everyone thinks they can
write a book!
Finding a good agent is becoming increasingly tough because they too are
inundated with manuscripts as well. The agent comes to us generating
interest in a book and we have special editors, one specializes in
Canadian writers; she says okay or no, I like it or don’t like it. The
book is brought to a meeting where she says she wants to pay this kind
of money. You have a price on this book say $35 dollars, so the author
will get a percentage royalty on every book sold. For a 10% royalty you
will get $3.5 dollars on every copy sold. So what we will do, is advance
the author, through his or her agent x amount of money, say $35,000
dollars because we expect to sell 5,000 or 6,000 hardback and 10,000
copies in paperback, so we figure its worth about $35,000. So it’s not
an outright gift…it’s an advance against royalties. Then hopefully the
book is published and lives up to expectations and earns out and the
response is we’re happy, the author is happy, and the agent is happy…but
in 90% of the cases it doesn’t earn out the advance and so you’re in
trouble. Of the 100 books published in Canada , I expect 20 books to
support the rest.
Where do you see the Canadian publishing industry heading? How does it
compare with what’s happening in the Indian publishing industry?
Canada has certain problems and certain advantages like many markets in
the world. I’ll deal with the problem first. It’s a small market. It’s
35 million of which 5 million are French speakers, so you can’t do much
with that size of market. Whereas America is 200 million plus, UK is
over 60 million, Australia is really small, about 20 million. So tens of
thousands of books are jostling for attention in this country. Plus you
have the major superstore Indigo Chapters which controls over 50% of
market, so if they don’t support a book it’s dead in the water. And
there is immense pressure on them as well because there are so many
books pouring in. So these are the problems people have to deal with
including the fact that there are lots of writers, agents, lots of
publishing houses, everyone competing for that elusive customer.
Fortunately, Canadians read quite a lot, but they don’t read enough to
make everyone prosperous. It is probably very difficult for a writer to
break out in a major way unless you are someone like Yan Martel, Michael
Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, Margaret Attwood, etc., these are people
already established and are stars because they’ve built up over period
of time. Beyond that, it’s very tough to break through.
On the positive side, because of the way Canada has been encouraging
immigration for the last 30 years, you have the whole world sitting
here, and so Canada’s stories are quite fresh; whereas writing about
one’s experiences living in Mississauga that’s where a lot of these
books get bogged down because if your domestic experience is not
interesting, how will you make your book interesting? Your life is
interesting to friends, family, and about a 100 people who know you.
That is were most first novels fail because they are so
autobiographical, instead of trying to sell a story. Why would people
want to read a book unless they’re interested in your life?
The interesting thing here is you have people from Somalia , Kosovo ,
Taiwan , India , and they’re all writing books about their own
experiences and that’s what makes it interesting. So I think Canada has
a great future about the stories its writers are starting to tell. And
it is a very good domestic market for its size because per capita people
read a lot more here than other countries.
I was once asked at the Canada Book Expo, where I was giving a
presentation, what advice can I give aspiring writers. My reply is they
should always take risks. There’s no point in writing a small, safe,
book…it just disappears. Take risk! What do you have to lose? Stretch
yourself, write a big, huge, ambitious book! And those are the books
that always leave a mark because there’s so few around.
The Indian publishing scene in 20 years will be the second or third
largest in the world overtaking Canada and Australia ; I’m talking about
English language publishing. I’ve heard there are about 300 million
Indians using some form of English, so they’ve already taken over the US
and UK, but for the publishing industry you need to use English as first
language or frequently because otherwise you’re not going to go to the
bookstore to buy a book. You might go to a street fair, but you’re not
my market. That’s going to take a while.
I think today there are 7 to 8 million Indians who use English
effortlessly, so that’s about the size of New Zealand, but because you
have next generation teenagers and young people learning English at the
speed of light, they are going to join the market in another 5 to 10
years; this generation will continue to be the market, and there’s going
to be bit of the previous generation also in the market, so from about 7
to 8 million India will go to 30 to 40 million in the space of 15 to 20
years which means it’s just going to explode. It’s already the fastest
growing market in the world and it’s a huge market. Penguin India is
fortunate, we came in the beginning so we got in on the ground floor;
all we need is to reap the benefits of our earlier labor because this
market is growing, while the Canadian market is pretty much static.
However, it is growing through some immigration. That is why Canada
needs to look out for itself constantly and build its strengths to the
world if it’s going to keep its economy and lifestyle going.
(continued in next column)
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A “born free” perspective on the
language question
by Tinashe Mushakavanhu
(Zimbabwe)
I am part of the new generation of
African writers who do not have to
choose the language to use in their
craft. I am not ashamed to say that
I am English and I was born English.
Writing in my native Shona chokes my
creative inspiration.
Growing up in
post-colonial Zimbabwe, I was
exposed more to English traditions
and norms than to Shona. It was
English, English, English all the
time, every where. It was not a
matter of choice for my parents
either but it was just the way life
was going. The education system was
transmitted in English. Zimbabwe had
just gained her independence from
the yoke of colonialism and her
children were so eager to embrace
everything they had been denied by
the English, especially their
mannerisms and their language.
In the early
eighties I was dosed with English
films and cartoons as there were
more English programmes on TV and
sadly its still the case today. At
home, we were encouraged to converse
more in English than in Shona. Shona
was a middle-class disgrace, hence
it was more common to hear us young
children mixing both Shona and
English, creating a hybrid language
commonly referred to as
ChiShonglish.
My mother
particularly gave me the love for
English literature. She used to read
to us, my young siblings and me,
English bedtime stories that I
remember to this day. I don’t ever
remember listening to a Shona
bedtime story. They were all in
English and I enjoyed them.
I can confess
that I know Shona as much to
converse with other people. If I
have to read a Shona novel, I sleep
before finishing its second page. I
cannot go deeper for I will get lost
in the mazy and complicated
structures of the Shona language.
And at school my other worst subject
besides mathematics was Shona. I had
to struggle with it. Passing it was
mere luck.
Many years
later I have begun to see myself as
a writer in English. Ngugi
wa’Thiongo would probably wave his
book, Decolonizing the Mind,
in my face. But do I have to be
decolonized from my own upbringing
to have a language especially when I
was born within the backyard of one
dominant language?
The problem of
us young African writers using
so-called foreign languages as our
medium of creative expression has
been discussed exhaustively over the
past decades. It should also be
taken into account that by the time
an individual has assimilated
sufficient English to be able to
convey his innermost feelings, he
would have made it more or less his
own.
No wonder most
of us young writers coming out of
Africa choose English. It is because
we have a more articulate command of
English than our own native
languages and thus find it easier to
communicate in English. Whether this
is good for Africa’s future is a
matter for debate, but it is quite
certain that English is here to
stay. We should only hope that it
will eventually be a Zimbabwean
English, fully reflective of our
cultural peculiarities and natural
speech habits as a Zimbabwean
people, rather than just as an
imitation of Anglo-Saxon English.
Chenjerai Hove’s Bones and
Shimmer Chinodya’s Harvest of
Thorns were excellent literary
attempts at localising English to
express local experiences.
Am I to blame
for taking to English as a duck
takes to water? Instead of
completely doing away with the
colonial educational system, our
black educators decided to maintain
the old linguistic structures at
independence. The language policy
did not change. English retained its
dominance and subsequently adopted
as the official code of
communication and learning. Shona
and Ndebele assumed inferior
positions. I went to school for 17
straight years and English has been
my medium of learning. Even our
mighty Shona is taught in English.
Can I still be blamed for being
Englished?
But can an
African, writing in English, convey
his authentic voice and spirit? Will
his immersion in the English
language simply not mean a further
dose of the cultural bleaching? Will
it not result in a species of
schizoid culture, some kind of
modern bastardy?
This
conceptualization of the language
question is not only myopic but also
inappropriately chucked out of its
colonial context. Such criticism
misses the points as much as it is
eloquent and learned, remember we’re
in the new millennium and the only
language that can universally
address the feelings of our
generation of Africans is English.
I was given the
English language at birth, can I not
be proud to be a Zimbabwean and
African writer in English.
Should you
have any comments or suggestions
feel free to write to
tinsmush@yahoo.com
Interview,
continued
Who are your
heroes?
I started out with heroes and along
the way you lose the need to have
heroes. I greatly admire my mentor,
Peter Mayer, former Chairman of
Penguin, Sunny Mehta, who runs
Knopf…I greatly admire writers like
Vikram Seth, Arundathi Roy,
Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry…but at
some point in your life you stop
having heroes. You figure everyone
does their best, some people have
luck on their side, some people have
some advantages, but everyone’s a
hero.
What makes them heroes in your mind?
They are exceptionally talented, and
they have arrived…You know, I was
reading a poem by Rudyard Kipling
which goes, “If you can fill the
unforgiving minute with sixty
seconds' worth of distance run,
yours is the Earth and everything
that's in it…” Which means you do
your best every single moment you
can, and if you happen to have the
talent as well, then you get to a
stage where you are slightly set
apart from your peers because you
have done things that it is not
possible for them to do.
So for example, you have great
artists, like the South African
writer Coetzee; they’ve written
novels that’s not possible for
average novelists to write because
of their level of skill and level of
perception. Why do you read a novel
today? You have so many sources to
choose from. The reason I think you
read a novel today is because the
greatest novels give you more truth
than non-fiction. Non-fiction is
information, non-fiction is
argument…The Economist will give you
insights, but what fiction gives you
is insights into the human
condition, the great fiction, not
the hundred thousand novels that are
published every year. There are very
few books like Disgrace or A
Suitable Boy or 100 Years of
Solitude, my personal favorites,
which raise the bar. If you can’t do
that, why bother? So that’s why they
are my heroes.
In terms of publishing, Sunny and
Peter have pushed the boundaries of
the publishing business and tried to
innovate. Anyone who pushes the
boundaries needs to be admired.
Whether you are a business person,
an athlete, or whatever, you need to
push the boundaries instead of
merely existing. Pearson, the
company that owns Penguin, its
vision is you need to be “Brave,
Imaginative, and Decent.” Which are
interesting words that carry a lot
of meaning, and is what I look for
in people. There’s lots of people
that don’t get opportunities, lots
of people face much competition,
maybe their home situation isn’t so
great, maybe their work situation
isn’t so great, so their kind of
stuck…but I think people make their
own destiny don’t they? Yeah, I
admire people, but if you ask me
whether I have heroes today –
probably not.
Do you have a dream or vision that
guides the course of your life?
The thing about vision is it needs
to be renewed every day. Because at
the end of the day, what does a
person want to do? You have a set
path which clarifies itself as you
go along. You have a set path – this
is what I do, this is what I’m good
at, and how can I use this to
influence events and people within
my ambit? And I think narrowly
defined within my job description,
my vision for Penguin India was to
give India a world-class publishing
company. I think that vision has
been achieved. My vision of Penguin
Canada is to make it the best
company of its size anywhere in the
world.
You only have one chance, make the
best of it!
Sharif Khan (http://www.herosoul.com;
sharif@herosoul.com) is a freelance
writer, motivational speaker, coach,
and author of Psychology of the Hero
Soul, an inspirational book on
awakening the hero within and
developing people’s leadership
potential. He provides inspirational
keynotes and leadership seminars and
also helps organizations develop
empowering content through his
writing services. To contact Sharif
directly, call (416) 417-1259
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Publishing New Writers,
July, 2006 (no. 707)
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