“There’s something we need to talk about…”

Note: This post is the fifty-first installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 50. You can read the previous installments here.

Suspense is usually the most linear of genres, but a lot of thrillers include exactly one flashback. You know the one I mean: it comes near the end, just after the big twist, to explain precisely how you were fooled. In a heist movie, it frequently involves the revelation that the plan you thought the protagonists were following was actually something else entirely, and in films that are heavily dependent on fridge logic, it can reveal that much of the movie you believed you were watching was really an elaborate mislead. At its best, as with the unforgettable flashback that occurs two-thirds of the way through Vertigo, it can singlehandedly justify the whole concept of flashbacks in general; at its worst, in a movie like Now You See Me, it can leave you asking why you bothered taking any interest in the plot at all. And these reveals seem to be becoming more common, as the need to find new variations on old surprises has caused such plots to become ever more convoluted and implausible. (We’re at a point now where a single flashback scene isn’t enough: we’re treated to entire flashback montages, replaying what seems like half of the movie from a different point of view. When handled well, as in The Illusionist, this sort of thing can be delightful, but it can also leave a viewer feeling that the film hasn’t played fair with its obligation to mislead us with what it shows, rather than what it omits.)

This sort of flashback is obviously designed to save a surprise for the end of the movie, which is where we’ve been conditioned to expect it—even if some violence has to be done to the fabric of the narrative to put the reveal in the last ten minutes, instead of where it naturally occurred. This isn’t a new strategy. Jack Woodford, the pulp writer whose instructional book Trial and Error was carefully studied by Robert A. Heinlein, thought that all stories should end with a punch ending, and he offered a very useful tip on how to artificially create one:

A good way to do this is to go ahead and end it with the usual driveling collection of super-climaxes, anti-climaxes and what not that amateurs end stories with, and then go over it, find where the punch ending is, rework the ending so that the anti-climaxes, if there is anything in them at all that really needs to be told, come before the final crux ending.

This is why so many stories contrive to withhold crucial information until the point where it carries the most impact, even if it doesn’t quite play fair. (You frequently see this in the early novels of Frederick Forsyth, like The Odessa File or The Dogs of War, which leave out a key element of the protagonist’s motivation, only to reveal it at the climax or on the very last page. It’s such a good trick that you can almost forgive Forsyth for reusing it three or four times.)

Another advantage to delaying the explanatory scene for as long as possible is that it turns an implausible twist into a fait accompli. I’ve noted before that if there’s a particularly weak point in the story on which the credibility of the plot depends, the best strategy for dealing with it is to act as if has already happened, and to insert any necessary justifications after you’ve presented the situation as blandly as possible. Readers or audiences are more likely to accept a farfetched plot development after it has already been taken for granted. If they had been allowed to watch it unfold from scratch, during the fragile early stages, they would have been more likely to object. (My favorite example is how in the two great American drag comedies, Some Like it Hot and Tootsie, we never see the main characters make the decision to pose as women—we cut to them already in makeup and heels, which mostly prevents us from raising any of the obvious objections.) This explains why the expository flashback, while often ludicrously detailed, rarely shows us the one scene that we really want to see: the conversation in which one character had to explain to the rest what he wanted them to do, and why. Even a classic twist ending like the one in The Sting falls apart when we imagine the characters putting it into words. The act of speaking the plan aloud would only destroy its magic.

I put these principles to good use in Chapter 50 of Eternal Empire, which rewinds the plot slightly to replay a crucial scene in its entirety. Structuring it as a flashback was clearly meant to preserve the surprise, but also to downplay its less plausible angles. For the story to work, Maddy had to reveal herself to Tarkovsky, justify her good intentions, and propose a complicated counterplot, all in the course of a single conversation. I think that the chapter does a decent job of pulling it off, but placing the discussion here, after the effects of the decision have already been revealed, relieves it of some of the weight. The reader is already invested in the premise, simply by reading the events of the preceding chapters, and I hoped that this would carry us past any gaps in the logic. But it’s worth noting that I never actually show the crux of the conversation, in which Maddy spells out the plan she has in mind. Asking a character to fake his death for the sake of some elaborate charade is a scene that can’t possibly play well—which might be why we almost never see it, even though a similar twist seems to lie at the bottom of half of the surprise endings ever written. We don’t hear Maddy telling Tarkovsky what she wants him to do; we just see the results. It’s a form of selective omission that goes a long way toward making it all acceptable. But as the reader will soon discover, the plan hasn’t gone quite as well as they think…

“Three years earlier…”

Note: This post is the twenty-seventh installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 26. You can read the previous installments here.

Of all the tidbits of writing advice I’ve picked up over the years, one I never tire of quoting comes courtesy of the legendary pulp novelist Jack Woodford. In his classic book Trial and Error—which manages to be both a useful writer’s manual and a gem of self-promotion—Woodford says:

The trouble with most first short stories is that they have their beginnings buried in their middles. Take up the thousand word short story you have written and read down until you come to the first dialogue or objective action.

Now, start reading all over again, beginning the story as though that first bit of action or dialogue were the start of the story. Read along for two or three hundred words while the action and dialogue continue, until you come to the point where you have again resorted to expository writing—that is, to telling the reader something, rather than to portraying the material in narrative or dramatic form. At this point, insert all of that material which went before the first action or dialogue. Write an additional sentence or two of transition, in between the dialogue and action section and the expository section. Retype the story, with the middle at the beginning, the beginning at the middle, and the ending where it was in the first place. Now you need no longer wail, “But I don’t know how to start a story!”

To my eye, this is what a writing tip should be: practical, immediately applicable, and just a little mechanical. Putting it into practice is a matter of copying and pasting. If it works, great; if not, it’s easy to reverse it. But what strikes me the most about it now is that although Woodford is talking about how to start a story, when you generalize it, it’s really a rule about flashbacks. I’ve always seen flashbacks as a dangerous tool: they interrupt what ought to be a continuous flow of action, whether internal or external, and offer the temptation to spend time on backstory, rather than revealing character through action. But they also have their uses. As Woodford notes, you usually want to get the story moving in the very first sentence, and a flashback can be used, paradoxically, to enable narrative momentum by placing the exposition at a point where the plot can sustain it. When you follow Woodford’s approach, you find that the flashback naturally appears during an organic pause, where the plot has to regroup to take a breather anyway. All stories, if they aren’t going to exhaust the reader, need a few stretches of relative flatness to balance out the high points, and it’s valuable real estate. If you find that you really need a flashback—if only because the backstory would be more vivid or interesting if clustered in a single unit, rather than dispersed—then it probably belongs at a moment when the story can afford to slow down.

And like most useful writing tools, a flashback can be perform a double duty, inserting a moment of delay where it increases the suspense. Elsewhere, I’ve used the movie Snowpiercer as an example: just before the protagonist is about to reach the end of his violent quest, he pauses, lights a cigarette, and tells us a little about himself for the first time. Anywhere else, and the speech would have seemed like a misstep; here, it both postpones the climax at a point of maximum tension and reminds us of the stakes involved at just the right moment. Snowpiercer may be the most relentlessly linear action movie I’ve ever seen—it tracks the hero’s progress from one train compartment to another, so that his movement through physical space exactly parallels the structure of the story—and it cleverly places what amounts to a flashback at the only spot where it wouldn’t interrupt the plot’s forward motion. But even more loosely constructed stories can benefit from its example. Not every narrative needs to move singlemindledly from A to B, and in certain exceptional works, like The English Patient or Citizen Kane, the movement between past and present and back again can almost become a character in itself. But chronological order is the baseline from which we depart only with good reason. And those departures work best when they occur in places where the rhythm allows for a regathering.

The flashback that opens Part II of Eternal Empire is an interesting case, because it was written long after the rest of the novel was complete. My editor had suggested clarifying the relationship between Maddy and Ilya, which otherwise depends mostly on the reader’s knowledge of The Icon Thief, and I realized that she had a good point: much of the action of the novel’s second half hinges on the evolving understanding between these two characters. It also gave me a chance to revisit a piece of the story that the previous books had left unexplored. And because the novel was already so tightly structured, it made sense to stick it here. Last week, I noted that I usually start any writing project with three or four big twists in mind, and I’ll outline the book so that each of these occur at the end of a section. As a result, the beginning of the next section benefits from the residual momentum that the previous climax has generated. Inserting the flashback here put it at a point where I could trust that the reader, having come this far, would at least make it through the next few pages, and it provided a useful way of delaying the resolution of the previous scene, which ended with the hood coming down over Maddy’s head. It wasn’t part of my original conception, but once it was there, it seemed to strengthen, rather than weaken, the surrounding material. And when we catch up with Maddy again, waiting in the back of the car for whatever is coming next, we know exactly what brought her there…

Mr. Leonard and Mrs. Post

When I was in my early twenties and fresh out of college, I bought a copy of Emily Post’s Etiquette and read through it cover to cover. I wasn’t just looking for tips on how to improve my own table manners, although I was interested in seeing if there was anything important I’d somehow missed, and I’ve never forgotten her advice on how to discreetly spit out an olive pit. What fascinated me more about the book, and which took me through more than seven hundred pages of advice on place settings, forms of address, and wedding seating arrangements, was the idea of etiquette itself. Etiquette begins as behavior, as millions of human beings collide in unpredictable ways, and over time, certain habits start to seem more elegant or desirable than others. At first, the process is collective and organic, learned by example, observation, and trial and error; later, someone writes it down, and we learn it by the book. It might seem stodgy or restrictive, but ideally, it’s a set of best practices, a guide to what has worked for people in similar situations in the past, all set down in one convenient place.

As unlikely as it might seem, I’ve been thinking about this a lot since the death of Elmore Leonard. Whenever a writer of his stature dies, it brings forth the usual tributes, and in Leonard’s case, nearly every obituary or discussion of his legacy mentions the ten rules of writing that he contributed years ago to the New York Times. There are hundreds of such lists out there—even I’m guilty of writing one—but Leonard’s collection of maxims has displayed unusual staying power, and I suspect that it’s familiar even to those who haven’t read a word of his fiction. The list resonates, first, because it’s full of excellent, pragmatic advice (“Keep your exclamation points under control,” “Never open a book with weather”) and because it embodies Leonard’s own virtues of humor, directness, and experience. Like the rules of etiquette, these are tools that have been discovered and refined over time, learned through practical use, and finally distilled into a set of guidelines to benefit others who are just starting out. And if you don’t like Leonard’s rules, there are plenty of other good lists to follow.

The proliferation of books on writing, from the sublime Paris Review interviews to guides by the likes of Janet Evanovich, means that it’s possible to spend as much time reading other writers’ thoughts on craft as on creating your own work. That wasn’t always the case: when Jack Woodford’s book Trial and Error—the spiritual ancestor of many of the popular writing guides we see on shelves today—was first published in 1933, there wasn’t much out there like it. And although much of the advice in these books is very good, there’s a limit to how far it can take us. I went through a period where I devoured every book on writing I could find, searching for tricks or tips, but these days, I’m more likely to find new ideas by reading about other forms of craft, like theater, coding, or the visual arts. I’m a little burnt out on writing handbooks, not because they aren’t useful, but because such rules are less valuable as guidelines, imposed from the top down, than as a way of clarifying the discoveries that every author makes on his or her own. Almost everyone eventually learns not to open a book, or even a chapter, with the weather, but the reasoning behind it—that’s better just to get on with the story—is something you only learn with time.

The rules of writing are a lot like the rules of life: they only find meaning once you’ve intuited them yourself. Although it rarely hurts, reading philosophy doesn’t automatically make us good citizens, any more than reading Emily Post can transform you into a natural socialite. A philosophical insight, or a rule of good behavior, only attains its full meaning after you’ve deduced it from your own life and assimilated it into your experience. Part of this is just because of the way we think—we’re more likely to believe in something after we’ve lived through it firsthand rather than reading it in the pages of a book—and also because such rules rise or fall on their specific applications. “Love your enemies” is just a luminous phrase until we’ve been forced to apply it to a particular enemy with a face and name we’d prefer to hate, just as “show, don’t tell” only assumes its full power after we’ve relearned it in a thousand different situations. And like the best rules of ethics and life, once we’ve figured them out for ourselves, they become obvious, even invisible, until they only seem to remind us of what we already know.

Transformed by print

Somewhere in his useful and opinionated book Trial and Error, the legendary pulp writer Jack Woodford says that if you feel that your work isn’t as good as the fiction you see in stores, there’s a simple test to see if this is actually true. Take a page from a recent novel you admire—or one that has seen big sales or critical praise—and type the whole thing out unchanged. When you see the words in your own typewriter or computer screen, stripped of their superficial prettiness, they suddenly seem a lot less impressive. There’s something about professional typesetting that elevates even the sloppiest prose: it attains a kind of dignity and solidity that can be hard to see in its unpublished form. It isn’t just a story now; it’s an art object. And restoring it to the malleable, unpolished medium of a manuscript page often reveals how arbitrary the author’s choices really were, just as we tend to be hard on our own work because our rough drafts don’t look as nice as the stories we see in print.

There’s something undeniably mysterious about how visual cues affect the way we think about the words we’re reading, whether they’re our own or others. Daniel Kahneman has written about how we tend to read texts more critically when they’re printed in unattractive fonts, and Errol Morris recently ran an online experiment to test this by asking readers for their opinions about a short written statement, without revealing that some saw it in Baskerville and others in Comic Sans. (Significantly more of those who read it in Baskerville thought the argument was persuasive, while those who saw it in Comic Sans were less impressed, presumably because they were too busy clawing out their eyes.) Kindle, as in so many other respects, is the great leveler: it strips books of their protective sheen and forces us to evaluate them on their own merits. And I’d be curious to see a study on how the average review varies between those who read a novel in print and those who saw it in electronic form.

This is is also why I can’t bear to read my own manuscripts in anything other than Times New Roman, which is the font in which they were originally composed. When I’m writing a story, I’m primarily thinking about the content, yes, but I’m also consciously shaping how the text appears on the screen. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve acquired a lot of odd tics and aversions from years spent staring at my own words on a computer monitor, and I’ve evolved just as many strategies for coping. I don’t like the look of a ragged right margin, for instance, so all my manuscripts are justified and hyphenated, at least until they go out to readers. I generally prefer it when the concluding line of a paragraph ends somewhere on the left half of the page, and I’ll often rewrite the text accordingly. And I like my short lines of dialogue to be exactly one page width long. All this disappears, of course, the second the manuscript is typeset, but as a way of maintaining my sanity throughout the writing process, these rituals play an important role.

And I don’t seem to mind their absence when I finally see my work in print, which introduces another level of detachment: these words don’t look like mine anymore, but someone else’s. (There are occasional happy exceptions: by sheer accident, the line widths in The Year’s Best Science Fiction Vol. 29 happen to exactly match the ones I use at home, so “The Boneless One” looks pretty much like it did on my computer, down to the shape of the paragraphs.) Last week, I finally received an advance copy of my novel Eternal Empire, hot off the presses, and I was struck by how little it felt like a book I’d written. Part of this is because it’s been almost a year since I finished the first draft, I’ve been working on unrelated projects since then, and a lot has happened in the meantime. But there’s also something about the cold permanence of the printed page that keeps me at arm’s length from my work. Once a story can no longer be changed, it ceases to be quite as alive as it once was. It’s still special. But it’s no longer a part of you.

Jack Woodford on how to start a story

The trouble with most first short stories is that they have their beginnings buried in their middles. Take up the thousand word short story you have written and read down until you come to the first dialogue or objective action.

Now, start reading all over again, beginning the story as though that first bit of action or dialogue were the start of the story. Read along for two or three hundred words while the action and dialogue continue, until you come to the point where you have again resorted to expository writing—that is, to telling the reader something, rather than to portraying the material in narrative or dramatic form. At this point, insert all of that material which went before the first action or dialogue. Write an additional sentence or two of transition, in between the dialogue and action section and the expository section. Retype the story, with the middle at the beginning, the beginning at the middle, and the ending where it was in the first place. Now you need no longer wail, “But I don’t know how to start a story!” Even if you never learn how you can always get a good start by, after you have written into the story, arbitrarily yanking out a good beginning somewhere and putting it at the start of the story.

—Jack Woodford, Trial and Error