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Originally Posted by gmw
On the back-story options, I'd break Flashback into two. There are the, normally longer, traditional flashbacks "Joe remembered when <some lengthy description of the past>", but there are also more subtle ones: "This always happened to Joe.", "Joe taught him how to do this years ago", or, "See the scars." I used a variation of the latter in my current project to reinforce hints at a violent background for a character without having to describe it. In my experience these latter are flashbacks of opportunity, you find places where these tiny snippets fit naturally into the narrative or dialogue, and a surprising amount of background information can be imparted without being explicit. (Of course, you have to know your characters fairly well, including the background events, in order to see the opportunities when they arise.)
Arguments can make good places for revealing bits of back-story, people always bring up old stuff in an argument.  |
Yes--but this is character development. You're conveying information about a character, in various ways. As in, "[t]his always happened to Joe," for example. I don't think that these are the same as backstory or flashbacks.
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But I got the impression that skb is not really talking about the traditional back-story situation here, but within the story - the overlap between points of views. In an omniscient narrative this isn't a problem, but where you are trying to keep each POV entirely within the head of a single character it can be an issue. ... So it's more like flash-sideways.
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Well...if you're right, yes, that's different, but, that wasn't my take on it.
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I have a car chase scene near the start of the book I'm currently editing, and all three POVs are involved. There is lots of confusion for all the characters and at first I had quite a lot of overlap between each POV - because I needed those to keep it all clear in my head as I was writing it. On second draft most of these got cut back so the switching POVs told a continuous series of events, with no more than a sentence or so linking them to keep the context clear (one POV scene ends with gun shots, the next starts with them, sort of thing).
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I can certainly see that--I'm also the sort of writer who pares during editing. Once to get 1800 words I loved, I nuked 60,000 (yes, 60K) that I didn't. That's an extreme case, but that's my process, generally, as well.
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But in the middle of the book there is a much quieter situation where all three POVs are secretly watching the other. Here, so far, I've had to allow for more overlap. Because it's not a climax, I've had to keep the POV scenes longer than they were with the car chase, and this doesn't allow a neat sequence of events. ... Or that's the way it sits at the moment. I'm still trying to decide whether I should rewrite a few scenes to reduce the overlap.
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I don't know, maybe it's the type of book that I read, but multiple POVs are pretty common, so...I guess I'm accustomed to them. Reading one now, as it happens--pulp, but, one I have enjoyed (in a series).
Hitch