Dear John and Zina

Mary and Eleanor answer John and Zina’s questions

Today’s question comes from John Holbrooks (Personal Canon Formation) and Zina Gomez-Liss (The Beauty Of Things)

We’re working on sound and lighting (I look a bit ghostly in this one): figuring as we go.

John and Zina’s questions:

John asks: How do I handle time jumps in narrative
(tense and voice) in complex structures?
Building on John's question, Zina asks:
In long narrative poetry,
I often get told that whenever I do a flashback
it's problematic.
What to do?

Dear John and Zina,

I think your questions build on each other: The complexity of handling how time moves in narrative and flashbacks in both poetry and prose.

What I’ve learned includes how I handle summary or backstory (same term for when the narrator is doing the work) and the way flashbacks get ordered. I get more specific for each of you:

Of course, the jump can be done in a straightforward way, as Chekhov does in his story “The Darling”:

“Three months afterwards [my bold] Olenka was returning home from mass, downhearted and in deep mourning. Beside her walked a man also returning from church, Vasily Pustovalov, the manager of the merchant Babakayev's lumber-yard. He was wearing a straw hat, a white vest with a gold chain, and looked more like landowner than a business man.”

Here’s an example from the much anthologized “Conversation With My Father” by Grace Paley: They’re arguing about how her stories get written, or should be, while her father is dying:

“That’s true,” I said. “Actually that’s the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they’re extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they’re just average with a good education. Sometimes the other way around, the person’s a kind of dumb innocent, but he outwits you and you can’t even think of an ending good enough.”“What do you do then?” he asked. He had been a doctor for a couple of decades and then an artist for a couple of decades and he’s still interested in details, craft, technique.

I bolded how Paley gives us background and timing: Her father’s place and time in the present action—and she does so in one brief sentence about him.

Another key way: Give the character the privilege of interior monologue (what he’s thinking), often linked to the character’s dialogue.

Here’s an example in the interior monologue of the main character, Richard, from John Updike’s “Gesturing”:

“And what did you tell him your name was? Richard asked, in this pause of her story. In her pause and dark-blue stare, he saw re-created her hesitation when challenged by the clerk. Also, she has been, before her marriage, a second-grade teacher ….”

Updike is using both what he’s thinking and one line of backstory (her marriage, second-grade teacher).

Before I turn to Zina, John, you mention Hilary Mantel’s trilogy: Look, for example, at how Mantel builds empathy for Thomas Cromwell, no easy task considering who he was historically, in Bring Up the Bodies. Mantel moves the reader through time in the direct way.

And, she does so with this biggy: She uses interior monologue for Thomas:

“There was an occasion – in Bruges was it?- when he has broken down a door. He wasn’t in the habit of breaking doors … He thinks, I wasn’t thirty then. I was a youth.”

I’ll come back to you, John.

Zina,

A poem I use in Chapter Fifteen of my course is Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” ⬅️link to the poem only.

As the poem turns at the close:

“Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.”

That last detail seems small but is powerful.

For our purposes, let’s call that one detail a flashback. The order is not chronological for that detail.

“Privilege of Being” by Robert Hass, a long poem (I refer to the poem in this chapter of my memoir). Here’s a portion in the middle of the poem:

and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,

Again, I argue that chronology—though this occurs after the first reference to love-making—again is not working on a timeline of exact chronology. The difference here is harder to discern than my first example—but you get my drift, I hope.

I argue this is also the case for the remarkable villanelle “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop.

Similarly, John, in Bringing Up the Bodies, one of Mantel’s last interior monologues for Thomas at the close of the novel is his memory of his children, Grace and Anne, who died long before what is about to happen to Anne Boleyn, who has a daughter. It’s quite a moving passage.

“He thinks about his daughter Grace… Then after Johane is shocked by what Thomas says and asks, “‘Whatever put that into your head? Put it right again.’” –Thomas is thinking this: “He tries to do that. But he cannot escape the feeling that Grace has slipped further from him. ….”

The key for my examples, in poetry and prose, is that the cast back to the past, however recent, as in Hayden’s poem, is not in chronological order but rather in the order of emotional intensity for both the character, the speaker, and the reader.

Transitions are key for all the examples for time changes—even the word “now” can help—and we have to focus on that tough but key aspect in the editing stage—if we didn’t get them right during invention.

All of us need to remember this: Invention must come first and can’t be overwhelmed by the self-criticism that thinking about craft produces. See this chapter for how I emphasize this point. (I hate the word lesson—darn it! that I used it)

As to tense, that will follow intuitively (trust yourself) and I can help with specific q.’s in comments.

I’ll talk about “voice”—a complex issue—in another post because this is a super big and important q. and I have bunches to say about it, but I did get to it in the video.

Let’s hope we get another question on “voice”.

And I didn’t want this post to get too long …

Here’s a link to Eleanor’s answer.

 My p.s.: I have a full course that I introduce here—the link is for you to take a gander—it’s free…. https://marytabor.substack.com/p/write-it-how-to-get-started

If you missed our launch post, take a look at This Writing Life.

Ask us a question in Comments or on Notes (be sure to tag us both).

Love,

Coming next: Coming next: a q from substack.com/@renegvolpi