Many people define a “real writer” as one who’s published. I’ve always had trouble with this definition because, as far as I’m concerned, one has to become a real writer before publishing’s even on the radar.

A real writer thrives, not from raw talent alone, or a list of publishing credits, but from an inner-directed mindset.

As a real writer you:

Refrain From Self-Sabotaging Thoughts
Such as:

My novel’s still unpublished.
I should be doing something more productive like cleaning the kitchen or doing the laundry.
My story sucks.
It should be easier than this.
I’ll never write like him/her.
I’m just not that talented.

Such thoughts are a form of self-censure. Although we are not our thoughts, we believe them as fact. And what we believe we manifest. So next time, instead of describing yourself as an unpublished writer, instead of regarding yourself unworthy even to call yourself a writer, present yourself straight up. Say, “I’m a writer.” Or, “I’m writing my memoir.” Our thoughts and what we manifest are entirely our choice.

Focus On What Your Work Needs
Your work needs for you to dive in deeper, to listen to what your story is telling you about what it wants to become. It needs for you to explore not only what you’re writing about, but why. Real writers don’t wallow in self doubt. They don’t spend time hoping everyone will love their story. They don’t agonize over what their mother might think. They don’t even worry about whether or not they’ll publish. They’re too busy writing.

Don’t Let the Invisible Hand of the Market Shape Your Work
Sometimes writers will craft a story with a certain publication or audience in mind, restricting it to a certain word count or topic. Or they’ll write a memoir because they believe it will sell better than a work of fiction. Here’s the thing: whenever we write to fulfill others’ expectations, we create our most mediocre work. Remember why you write in the first place – to discover what you didn’t know you knew –about life, about others, about yourself and your place in the world. Follow your curiosity and obsessions, the memories and life mysteries that refuse to let you go. Trust in the universality of those concerns. Your audience will find you.

Embrace Failure
Your story, novel of memoir might not be its best version of itself in its current stage of development. That’s okay. Keep at it. You’ll get there. The results you have right now are in no way a reflection of your potential, which is boundless. Even if you’ve written an unsuccessful story or novel, learn from it. Here’s your chance to grow. As Samuel Beckett said, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Know That Writing is Rewriting
Raymond Carver wrote as many as twenty or thirty drafts of a story before he considered it done. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote several versions of The Great Gatsby before it became a masterpiece. A great piece of fiction or non-fiction is layered and complex. There’s a profusion of things to concern yourself with and the mind can only focus on so many of those concerns at any given time. Rewriting allows you to deepen, refine and crystallize your raw material. And when you know how to navigate it – a topic I’ll be addressing later – rewriting is immensely gratifying. And a helluva lot of fun.

Love the Journey, Not Just the Destination
If your primary gaze is on the endgame, be it publication, adoration, fame, or commercial success, you not only deprive yourself of the exquisite pleasures of writing, you shortchange the necessary stages you need to grow. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to publish or to get paid for your work. But if you live for the day-to-day, moment-to-moment act of writing itself, rather than just those apexes along the way, your work and your relationship to your work will be all the richer, all the more rewarding. You’re also more likely to get published.

Nurture Your Genius
There’s a misconception that, in order to be brilliant at something, you need to be blessed with innate remarkable talent. Not so, according to Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers: The Story of Success. Gladwell, who studied the most successful musicians, composers, artists and athletes in history, reports that the difference between success and non-success, between genius and mediocrity is 10,000 hours. That’s right. Anyone from Jimi Hendrix to Bill Gates to Hemingway who has succeeded has done so on the back of at least 10,000 hours.

Talent only takes you so far. I think it’s irrelevant in terms of your work’s potential. In order to master your craft, to write the best book you possibly can, you need to log in an enormous amount of time and practice. You don’t get to cut a deal. Brilliance isn’t something you’re born with, it’s cultivated.

What have I left out? What winning attitudes do you bring to your writing practice? Leave a comment here and let me know.

In narrative, we catch characters in the middle of things but each story has its own history. A flashback moves back in time, catching us up on the significant events that happened before the story’s opening. It can fill in essential backstory, influence the way we view the present, or illuminate a character’s desires and motivations.

But when writers overuse flashback, readers grow impatient, losing interest in, or even forgetting, what’s happening in the now of the story. Yes, we should explore our story’s past. But at some point in revision, we need to reign the past in, selecting and shaping only those episodes that are crucial to understanding the present.

An effective flashback can:

Deepen Our Understanding Of A Character
In his classic novel Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates brings us back to a particular day in Frank Wheeler’s childhood when he accompanied his father to work. As he steps inside his father’s world, young Frank experiences a range of sensations: thrill in the bustle of New York City and the novelty of wearing his first suit and tie, a “shiver of wonder” as he gazes up at the building where his father works, pleasure in seeing his own dignified reflection in the barber shop window, dread as he rides the elevator that gives “no sense of flight, but only of confinement and nausea” and repulsion as he eats lunch with his father’s overweight boss whose mouth is “clinging and trembling with spittle.”

This flashback is significant because it contains the conflicting emotions that plague Frank Wheeler as the novel presses forward. It dramatizes the evolving struggle between his desire to break free from the job he despises and his impulse to stay.

Lend Later Scenes Dramatic Power
Early in Revolutionary Road, Frank Wheeler recalls a time his wife had told him about a particular morning at school “…when a menstrual flow of unusual suddenness and volume had taken her by surprise in the middle of a class.” He imagines how she must have run from the room “with a red stain the size of a maple leaf on the seat of her white linen skirt.”

This flashback is reflected back to us at the novel’s end when April Wheeler induces an abortion. And while Yates spares us the gory details of the abortion itself, the earlier image of blood flow, of the red stain spreading on her white skirt, resonates in our mindscape.

Bear The Story’s Meaning
Most of Said Sayrafiezadeh’s non-fiction story “The Afflicted” takes place in the present as the narrator and his girlfriend wait in the hospital ER for her wounded finger to be sutured. But the emotional movement happens as he confronts his painful childhood.

While observing a five-year-old boy who “appears far too comfortable and familiar with being in the emergency waiting room,” he leaps years back in time to a day when he was knocked unconscious after falling off his tricycle. “My father had left home long ago,” he tell us, “but my nine-year-old sister was still living with us and when I came to, she was sitting beside me.”

Having established his father’s absence early on, each visit into the past then gathers meaning, bringing us closer and closer to the emotional core. Three pages later, he gives us this:

The Andy Griffith Show is on television now. When I was child, it came on right before suppertime and I would watch it imagining that I was Opie, and that Andy was my dad, and that we lived in Mayberry and went fishing together. And then my real-life mother would break this reverie by calling me to dinner, and I would sit down with her at our fatherless table and eat a pathetic meal of frozen peas and carrots and Uncle Ben’s rice. I would spread the concoction evenly over my plate and pretend it was a pie. Then I would eat a slice of it and reshape it again, filling in the missing wedge.

The narrator’s past attempt to reshape his imaginary pie, to fill in the missing wedge, reflects the emotional void that haunts him in the present. This need to reconcile the deficits of his childhood with the yearning of his adult self is illuminated at the story’s end, when past and present converge:

I take my girlfriend’s good hand as the doctor prepares to sew. One day maybe, sometime in the future, if all works out okay, I will ask my girlfriend to marry me, and I will one day find myself sitting beside her in a hospital room, holding her hand as she prepares to deliver our baby. I will surmount the misery of my childhood and become the father I never had. I will invent it out of thin air.

Launch From The Present Moment By A Significant And Related Incident Or Image
In “The Afflicted” it is the wounded little boy in the emergency waiting room and later, a classic TV sitcom about a father and son. In Revolutionary Road it is a walk down an empty school corridor after April’s failed performance in an amateur play, and the hint of their troubled marriage.

Ideally, the image or episode in the flashback then launches itself back into the present story, adding drama and weight to the narrative. After lingering on the school day in April’s past, here’s how Yates returns us to the present:

Her face must have looked almost exactly the way it did now, as they opened this other fire-exit door and walked out across these other school grounds not many miles from Rye, and her way of walking must have been similar too.

When a story uses flashback effectively, the past and the present speak to each other, answering each other’s narrative questions and posing new ones.

These are my thoughts on a few ways to get the greatest payoff from flashback. What are yours?

Looking forward to your insights.