For Thursday, 11/19: Past and Present

Read Chapter 75 in What If? : "Transitions: Or White Space Does Not a Transition Make."

Then, write a short-short story or a scene that uses flashbacks in a way that deepens our understanding of a present situation or helps to define a character. The main story is happening now, but we see glimpses of something that happened in the past, something that brought your characters to this moment or that shapes how they react to the present.

When we think of flashback, most of us think of cinematic flashback: there's a cut or a fade, and suddenly we're in the middle of a completely different scene that plays out as if in real time (except maybe it's in sepia tones.) You can use this technique in fiction--for example, a space on the page or a heading--but you can also use short narrative flashbacks that may only be a few sentences. These are usually introduced with a transition phrase: "He remembered," "Once, they had...," "When she was five years old...", etc. Try experimenting with both kinds of flashbacks.

I passed out a story of mine, "How the Light Walks," for an example, because it uses several different types of flashback. Here is an excerpt from it with the flashback moments in bold and the transitional phrases in bold and italic.

* * *

We sat on the living room couch, shedding white doughnut sugar. My mother hated when I ate on the couch, but she was at work. “So,” said Ashley. “Any new guys yet?”
Six months between boyfriends was a long time for Ashley. So was six weeks. I shook my head.
“Is it like a San Francisco thing? They’re all gay there? You’re so pretty,” she said.
I made a face. “It doesn’t help when your nickname is Kiss of Death.”
She let that one fall into the side pocket, the way she always did. There were places our friendship didn’t go.
“You should wear your hair up more,” Ashley said. She told me about a store at the mall that had cheap hair clips. She looked at the Christmas cards my mother had on the coffee table. I saw her eyebrows go up when she saw the signature on the one with Santa in a Cadillac convertible, cruising a palm-lined boulevard.
“So how’s evil Stepmom?” she asked.
“She’s okay,” I said. I didn’t hate Lucille. That was my mother’s job. I didn’t even hate my father. I think he was trying to make up for things, in his way. When I started Berkeley he gave me a Corolla, a lease someone returned to the dealership almost new. It was what we talked about. “How’s that car running?” he would ask me every time I saw him.
My mother always said Lucille, with a sarcastic emphasis on the second syllable, like a Little Richard song. She said Lucille was a trailer trash name if she ever heard one. She imagined my father leading a glamorous, if tacky, life in the sun with his younger wife. But to me there was something sad about my father’s life now, his vitamins and running and granola bars. He tried hard but he wasn’t there anymore. Even when he was there he wasn’t there.
Because my father didn’t die shoveling snow. They took him to the hospital. He had a bypass. He lived. He had what he called a spiritual awakening and my mother called, sourly, a midlife crisis. He said when the paramedics were bending over him, strapping him to the stretcher, he thought of Lucille, and he knew: whatever life he had left he wanted to spend with her.
And so my father left us. He got better and he left, left for California where there was no snow and he would never again sink to his knees in a cold December driveway.
I didn’t see him for four years. He called my mother sometimes. They fought about money. She would hold the phone away from her mouth and ask me, “Do you want to talk to your father?” I always said no.
He visited for Christmas the year I turned fourteen. He and Lucille stayed at my grandmother’s house. She had forgiven him for getting divorced and marrying outside the church, because Lucille had given him a baby. Lucille sat there in the recliner, my grandmother’s seat of honor, holding their three-month-old son, looking sanctified.
My father had lost forty pounds and wore gel in his hair. “So, Pumpkin, how’s school?” he asked.
“As hideous as ever,” I said.
“You getting good marks still?”
“I just got a part in the spring play,” I said.
“Oh, look!” My father said. “Look, Mom, see how he curls his fingers up when he yawns?”
I didn’t say anything else.
For Christmas that year my father gave me a telescope and a book about the sky. “I remembered you always wanted to be an astronomer,” he said.
He was right. I’d wanted to be an astronomer when I was in the fourth grade. But it had been a long time since I’d thought about the stars.

* * *