TECH: Flashbacks can be fun

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Writers Digest, October 2004, page 20 and 21 have an article by James Scott Bell concerning the use of flashbacks.

James recommends that we start by asking whether we really need to use a flashback scene. Is it really the best way to provide the story information at this point? Remember, you're making the reader go back in time, and that's always a little bit disorienting. Lots of people use flashbacks to provide motivation or explain why characters are acting a certain way, but you can often do that with a little bit of information in the present moment. If you're going to do a flashback, it needs to work as a scene. It needs to be immediate and confrontational, with some real dramatic action, not just a camouflaged information dump.

Getting into and out of the flashback with a natural flow can be tricky. James suggests using a strong sensory detail in the present scene that triggers the memory of the point of view character. Sensory detail, a sentence or two setting the time of the flashback, and then write it as a dramatic scene. How do you get out of this? Return to the sensory detail. Pretty simple, right?

James also warns against using "had" (is that past perfect? Only the grammarians know for sure! :-) You might use one or two to get into the flashback scene, but then stick with plain old past tense.

James suggests that one alternative to doing a flashback scene is a back flash. What he means by this is a bit of dialogue or point-of-view character's thoughts that drops some information about the past into the present-moment scene. Dialogue is a good way to reveal something, with someone remembering the shocking information from the past, the dark secret, and revealing it at a tense moment. The character's thoughts are similar, but take us even closer into the POV character. You can also use the character's thoughts as a transition into a full flashback scene, of course. He remembered how it had been . . .

You might want to think about an exercise on flashbacks. One is to take a scene that you are writing or even borrow one from a story or novel, and write in the transition into a flashback, a flashback scene, and the transition back into the present tense. You might also like to try taking a flashback and converting it into some back flashes.

It's interesting that one of the differences I notice in the Japanese samurai dramas and mysteries is that the mysteries often have people talking about what happened before, but as a foreign speaker of the language, it is very easy for me to get lost in the talking heads. The samurai dramas, on the other hand, do full flashback scenes a lot. Whenever anyone says "I remember" or "That was the day" we're about to do a full flashback scene, and actually DO it all and see it. Much easier for the foreign speaker to follow.

In any case, think about what you need to make your writing the best possible.
And then, well, write!

FILL: Silly Season

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one of the public channel shows had this information in it, and I thought it was interesting enough that I wrote it down. I'm not sure who might be interested though, so what the heck, I'll share with you and you can do whatever you want with it.

Okay, the first chunk of stuff concerned the concept of anchoring. Not your boat, this is mental anchoring. For example, apparently business people have found that there are several ways to show you that they are giving you a better price. You can simply say 30% off, you can list the discount price and then the old price, or you can list the old price and then the discount price. It turns out that showing you the high price first (the anchor) and then the discount price works best - people say "Oh, it's much cheaper." So the first thing we encounter is the anchor, used for comparison and a basis for thought.

Another example concerned an array of three shoes with slightly different prices. Which one should you put in the display window? Again, for retail purposes, put the high-priced item where the customer sees it first -- then the middle and low priced items will be seen as good buys.

They even had a very odd little experiment. People were given a chance to spin a roulette wheel with an array of values from 200 to 2000. Just for fun, while waiting. Then they were shown into another room, where someone asked them for a market survey to suggest a price for a pair of scissors. No apparent connection, but . . . with a large sample, they can show that people who spin 200 to 1000 end up suggesting an average price about 900, while those who get 1200 to 2000 propose a price about 1600.

So that's anchoring. The tendency for people to use a recent encounter as a comparison point or basis for decisions.

Now the next little bit of trivia concerned the old story of the ant and the grasshopper. Immediate or delayed gratification in more technical terms. Someone has done some brain imaging while asking people questions. The questions are rather simple. The first question is would you rather have $100 in one year or $110 in one year and one day? The second question is superficially similar, would you rather have $100 today or $110 tomorrow? However, brain imaging shows that these two questions are processed in very different parts of the brain.

They pointed out that this has to do with behavior in response to limited time sales. Buy it now apparently appeals to that grasshopper part of the brain, the immediate gratification processor, which tends to get engaged when we're excited and wants it now, not later! They also tied this into sales ads connected with sporting events - buy it now works best for those, since the customer is already excited.

Anchors and immediate gratification. Set the context for us to buy, and tell us it's only available for a limited time, only the first seven callers - and watch the phones ring!

EXERCISE: Is this the party to whom I am talking?

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First posted 24 May 2007

Hi, ho.

Over on Baen's Bar, one of the authors tossed out the following exercise as a primer. Simple, really.

1. Invent a character
2. This character finds and calls a phone number (I believe their exercise specified that the number was found on a wall in a bar, but I'll let you put the number wherever you like. I would recommend making it somewhat unusual, such as a number on the wall, perhaps in a personal ad, or whatever :-)
3. Write it up. Put us in the scene, make that phone call, and then? What happens? Who answers, what do they want, where do we go next?

Go ahead. Wrong number, right number but wrong person, or whatever you like.

Write!