In Defence of Flashback

I know that some writers – and editors – view the use of flashback with some misgivings, objecting to it because the reader is made to look back at events which have already happened and therefore knows there is a positive outcome (your heroine is still alive and compos mentis) meaning that the narrative tension is diminished.
I'm currently plotting a novel and I'm definitely going to tell some of it in flashback, for a number of different reasons.

• Looking back at something which has happened enables the writer to put a spin on events. They don't just happen sequentially, they can be viewed through the lens of the present, which gives you the potential to examine them more obliquely and add layers of subtlety. It's rather like lighting a scene for effect – do you use soft, rosie tones or go for a cool, blue hue? What you might possibly lose in tension, you certainly make up for in atmosphere.
• I don't believe that suspense is necessarily diminished. The reader knows that the protagonist has got from point A in the story to point B, but they have no idea of the route taken, the pitfalls, or the high points. In a novel written sequentially you don't know whether the heroine will make it to point B, but generally speaking they do, so it seems to me that nothing is lost.
• Writing in flashback can allow you to use an unreliable narrator, which is another way of adding tension to your work, as the reader gradually comes to see that the account given by your central character may not necessarily be accurate and unbiased.
• Using flashback enables you to exploit the full potential of dramatic irony, where the reader knows more than the characters do, thus giving a different kind of tension to the story.

It also has to be said that a number of writers have used flashback to dazzling effect. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking that Wuthering Heights opens with the ghost of Cathy outside the window and Heathcliff in terrible distress calling out to her. Emily Brontë then goes on to describe the course of their ill-starred relationship, but knowing from the outset that it ended tragically means the narrative is shot through, not just with dramatic irony, but a delicious kind of poignancy as well.
And one of the most famous opening lines in modern fiction is Last night I dreamt  I went to Manderley again...I don't suppose anybody had the effrontery to tell Daphne du Maurier to avoid writing in flashback.

Writing a Synopsis

You see?  There are just the beginnings, a glimmer, of the size and shape of my shed; an intimation of the height of the structure and the amount of space it will take up, as well as an impression of how it will sit in the garden, of its location.

It's a little bit like the synopsis of a story. A good synopsis will set out what the story is about, who the main characters are, what genre the book will fall into, and its target audience.  If you are contemplating writing one, you may want to sketch out the number of chapters (the struts holding up my walls) and summarise the major scenes in each one.  Even if you don't show the synopsis to anybody else, it will be a useful document for you to file away, because it provides a benchmark for your starting point; you can look back at it three months into your writing, six months, a year,and see how your ideas are developing, how your vision has changed.

So, if you have had ideas swimming around in your head for a few days now, try sketching out a synopsis yourself : notes on character (not just how they are at the outset, but how the action of the story will work upon them to bring about change); the skeleton of a plot.  It might help crystallise your thoughts a little and make you think who (other than yourself) you are writing for.

Later, much later, when you are ready to show your work to potential publishers, your synopsis will provide a useful hook to hang your submission on.

Structure -- Keep It Simple

Yesterday I was reflecting on the fact that overwritten prose is no substitute for truth in writing - it's a law which I think applies on the macro as well as the micro scale.  Just as an overblown phrase or paragraph can be used to compensate for a lack of clarity in thought, so a structure that is too tricksy can be used to disguise a fundamental weakness in the story you are telling.

You can tie yourself into complicated knots: say that you find it difficult to generate intimacy and intensity in the third person, so you switch to the first, then you find that you need more than one viewpoint in order to convey your plot, so you introduce several other first person narratives, then you find that it's all too confusing and consign half of what you've written to the back story because you're not sure what else to do with it.  By the time you've reached this point you've lost sight of your original vision and your book is in tatters. Your time would have been better spent addressing your original difficulty,  finding where the fault lines lie and testing them out, rather than over-elaborating everything to avoid the issue.

Another brick in the wall

Structure is something I really struggle with, to me it is the hardest thing of all.  It's a bit like trying to put a tent up in a high wind, you just get one bit staked down and then the wind gusts and another bit goes billowing off beyond your reach. I find it relatively easy to come up with an interesting situation and from that it can be quite fun to tease out a plot.  But how do you tell it?  In what order?  That's the killer question.  Do you begin at the beginning and follow a clear, neat line to the end? Do you start halfway through and look back and then forward? Do you have one omniscient  narrator who can see into the heart of every character, or do you opt for a single point of view?

As you can see, I have lots of questions (this is just a very small sample) but questions are good, questions mean that you are thinking. Answers can be a little harder to come by, but I suspect that to a degree it is a case of trial and error.  When you set out, stories have their own impetus, they will be told and they tend to come spilling out every which way, so it can be a fine line between re-structuring something and going for some rather tight editing. That's why beginnings are always such a headache, because you have to re-jig things until you hit your stride. Making radical changes to the structure further on in your narrative can be difficult, because the longer your story gets, the more there is to haul around and the more unwieldy the material becomes.  Post It notes and index cards can be worth their weight in gold in these situations. If you're really struggling with something, it can be an idea to throw the whole thing up into the air and (metaphorically) see how the pages fall.

Sometimes it can help to think laterally.  If you want an exercise that may help you shed some light, write three scenes which are linked thematically, not necessarily by plot, and see where that leads you...

....to another door!