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.

Recently an aspiring novelist told me she would never feel successful unless she published a bestseller.

I replied that book sales have little, if anything, to do with literary achievement. After all, if making the bestseller list is the chief barometer of a writer’s success then Jackie Collins and Victoria Gotti are outrageously successful. I have yet to meet anyone who aspires to write like them.

But this writer insisted on validation. If she didn’t publish, it could only mean that years of work on her novel had been wasted — that she had failed.

Comments like these both sadden and frustrate me because they entirely disregard the writer’s experience of doing the work. They only concern results.

The way I see it, there’s a difference between wanting to be a writer and truly wanting to write. If you’re a real and serious writer, you’re dedicated to the work for the sheer joy of doing it. If you publish, great. If not, well, maybe in due time. In the interim you have this wonderful thing you love to do every day. Real writers are enthralled with the process. They write to uncover life’s hidden truths, to discover things they didn’t know they knew–about themselves, about people, about life.

To paraphrase something Jane Smiley once said, if you deeply immerse yourself in your work, if you fall in love with your craft, you will gain two major boons: first, your work will get better, and so will be more likely to get published. Second, your relationship to the work itself and to the process will become so strong that you will care less and less about whether it ever gets published.

I’m not saying that getting published isn’t a great achievement. It certainly is. But a work of fiction or memoir will fail or succeed on its own terms. Whether it sells, or how well it sells, has little correlation to quality. In the end it’s your satisfaction with the work that determines its success.

That’s my take on success. What’s yours?

The human body is the best picture of the human soul. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

It’s a scientific fact: body language speaks volumes about what’s truly in our hearts and minds. Postures, facial expressions, mannerisms, gestures, movements, the way someone holds his arms, what his eyes focus on — all these things, no matter how subtle, divulge what a person may be feeling at any given moment.

Some believe that talking is our primary mode of communication. But experts have found that we make more evaluations about a person based on what we see than on what we hear. Researchers say that 93% of all communication is non-verbal. That’s right, only 7% of communication is based on what we say.

Whether we are conscious of it or not, we are constantly decoding the visual signals of the people we encounter every day. We don’t need words to tell us whether someone is happy, anxious, defensive, hostile, affectionate, relaxed, self-conscious or sad. We’re able to intuit these feelings from an involuntary display of physical expressions.

How perfectly this works in literature that seeks to dramatize characters rather than tell about them. Yet a common mistake among beginning writers is to rely on emotional labels that merely report how characters feel. Some examples:

Sophie was terrified.
David felt enormous grief.
John stared angrily.
I felt elated.

Such labels tell us virtually nothing about these characters’ emotions. And it reduces the prose to its least interpretative level. That’s because while the reader can intellectualize concepts such as terror, grief, anger and happiness, he cannot feel them. By showing how emotions and attitudes manifest in the body, you allow readers to participate. Rather than being told about your characters, the reader is forced to see.

Deborah Eisenberg, in her story “Mermaids,” deploys a deft command of body language to convey her characters’ emotions as well as the tensions between family members. She describes the adolescent  girl who turned to her father with a look “as if she were gazing at something on the other side of a person”, who stared at him “as red waves came up into her face.” And her father who then “looked down at the table as if it were an old, old. enemy.” She describes the teenage boy who, when asked by his father how his day went, “raised his serious dark eyes and then lowered them again” before responding.

Such non-verbal cues tell us so much more than merely saying that Janey felt a mix of rage, resentment and shame, that Mr. Lasky disapproved of his children, or that his son felt intimidated by him.

For writers who wish to disclose their characters’ inner world, it’s worth exploring the nuances of body language.

Try this. Go through one of your stories or chapters and look for moments where you want to transmit emotion. Eliminate any emotional labels or shortcuts that contain the word “feel” (e.g. I felt humiliated), or adverbs (as in, “He stared at his mother defiantly.”) Now without naming the emotion, convey your character’s feelings through non-verbal signals such as facial expressions, gestures, eye and body movements, postures and so on. Avoid stock expressions like “his heart sank” or “her hands trembled.” Go for something precise, concrete, and original. Allow your reader to be simultaneously outside and inside your character.

Tell me what you discover.

Memoir is character-based non-fiction. As obvious as this might sound, what’s often missing in an early draft of memoir is the narrator’s engagement with his or her own story. Observers by nature, writers sometimes tell their story as witness rather than participant.

To write compelling memoir, you need to turn yourself into a character. This requires some of the same techniques fiction writers use to create characters who readers believe in. In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner distinguishes between flat and round characters — predictable stereotypes versus those who are complex, full of contradictions, and revealed in their human frailties.

So how do you become a character in your memoir?

Dramatize Yourself
First, you need to have or cultivate some distance from yourself. Imagine you’re viewing yourself from above. Observe how you come across in the world around you. Revel in your quirks, idiosyncrasies, inconsistencies — those small differences that seem to set you apart from others. Strip away the inessentials and focus on those features in your personality that lead to the most intense contradictions or ambivalence.

Assume a Persona
In the most successful first-person stories, the I takes on a persona that is separate from the author, much like an actor takes on a role. In fiction writing parlance, narrative persona is the personality assumed by the narrator–a personality summoned from some aspect of the writer. But even when you’re writing memoir, you are essentially pulling another part of yourself to tell the story. Assuming a persona helps you achieve the distance you need to become a multi-dimensional, believable character.

Reveal Your Flaws
Often writers of memoir want readers to like them. Nothing wrong with that. But in our desire to be liked we sometimes portray ourselves as good, flawless people to whom bad things happen. In other words, flat and predictable. Readers don’t need to like you, they just need to understand and connect with your humanity. That means disclosing your imperfections.

Self implication is often what’s needed. Kathryn Harrison’s memoir The Kiss recounts the sexual affair she had as a young woman with her long lost father. Harrison never shies away from her complicity in the affair. But because she conveys her mother’s emotional withdrawal throughout the story, she allows us to understand the emotional vacuum that made the affair possible.

What is your own part in your story? Your own self-deceived, desperate or frightened part?

Move Beyond the Literal Story
Avoid writing merely about surface events, i.e. this happened, then this happened, then this…and so on. Vivian Gornick says that every piece of literature has a situation and a story. The situation is what happens. But the story is the emotional journey, the author’s own struggle in making deeper and deeper sense of what that event meant. Your task is to excavate those surface events and move towards clarified meaning or self-knowledge. The Kiss focuses on the author’s obsessive affair with her father. But what accumulates beneath the surface is her struggle to reconcile her complicated relationship with her mother.

Let Your Mind Ramble on the Page
Among the great pleasures of reading memoir is to experience the evolution of the narrator’s thinking, to follow a live, open mind thinking on the page. To access this movement of thought in your memoir, observe your own mind at work. We’re always responding internally. We allow our mind to wander away from the subject at hand through retrospection, introspection, projection, digression, fantasy, speculation and so on. We explore questions and confusions. We ask not only ‘what is?’ but ‘what if?’

The Evolving Question
The anxiety of inquiry is what drives the memoir. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking revolves around her husband’s sudden death from heart attack. The internal impetus driving the story is her attempt to grasp and come to terms with, not only her husband’s absence, but the mystery of death itself.

What’s the essential question your memoir asks? Why are you examining this part of your past? Why now? What were you thinking or feeling, not only during the experience, but while you were writing? Why does this story matter?

Recently I stumbled across an article offering advice about how to go from initial idea to story. This author’s prescription for creating compelling fiction? First, outline. Know your beginning, middle, and end. Create character sketches with a list of physical features and personality traits. Next, map out the story’s events. Think of your story as a race, with your protagonist wanting to get to the finish line. Now choose a setting. Got it? Now you’re ready to write.

While I wholeheartedly disagree with this advice, I understand the desire to plot out a narrative, however loosely, before writing the first draft. Let’s face it — first drafts can be scary; all this meandering, getting lost in a maze of possibilities, images and associations, detouring through what feel like unwieldy episodes and characters. An outline provides a blueprint. It’s safe, known territory. It would seem then that knowing where our narrative is going before we write should produce our best stories.

Not so.

Why? Because writing is largely an unconscious process. We never know what we’re going to say until we start writing. Even if you do have an idea at the outset of where your story is headed, it helps to stay open to what your story is telling you about what it’s trying to become. Maybe a minor character takes on a life of his or her own, spinning the story in a completely unexpected direction. Or you discover after several revisions that you’re really probing your relationship with your mother, not your father. If you coerce your characters into doing things that merely satisfy plot, if you pour your story into a preconceived template, the result is likely to be relatively shallow prose that’s not satisfying to you or your readers.

I’m not saying to abandon structure. Structure is essential. It shapes our prose so that a reader can receive it. But premature focus on it can stifle your voice. It can disturb the intuitive flow, the discovery or sublime truth that both reader and writer seemingly arrive at together. As Robert Frost famously said, “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

I suggest that rather than begin with an outline, write exploratory drafts. Dive in. Don’t know where you’re going. Structure is an evolving process. As you dive deeper and deeper into your material, as you inhabit your story and your characters through successive re-envisioning, you begin to see patterns and connections; you see a shape emerge. That’s when structure becomes useful.

Writing is a discovery of what we didn’t know was in us. This freefall approach might feel scary at first, but ultimately your voice will let loose. And your work will be richer and more rewarding. Narrative voice and, by extension, our stories, can only flourish if we stay open and, to a certain degree, lose control.

We’ve all faced it at one time or another. We sit down to write, hell bent on churning out pages of vivid, moving prose. Then instead of being set on fire, we feel like a dried up speck of dust. With no soul.

Writer’s block is no fun and while some assert that it’s just a palatable term for laziness, a failure of imagination or lack of true calling, I would argue that it’s more complex. Having faced it myself, I know all too well how it feels to sit down with the drive and intention to write meaningful prose, only to face the unbearable void.

But I believe writer’s block arises from misconceptions about writing and the creative process. When it comes to our work, we set up the most relentless barriers.

Here are some ways to break through:

Banish misconceptions such as:
It ought to be easier than this.
Why is this taking me so long?
Why can’t I write like so and so?
Why doesn’t everybody love everything I write?
Why can’t I publish everything I write?
Why is this so damn hard?

Writing is hard. By that I don’t mean it’s torturous and punishing, but hard in the best sense of the word, that is, the challenges it provokes bring cumulative rewards. Only by making mistakes - and lots of them - will you gain the nutrients from having worked on your story, allowing it to become its truest and finest version of itself. Once you accept that writing isn’t easy — that it requires a balance of patience and perseverance — you create the conditions that help you grow and develop.

Focus on the work, not your ego. It’s not productive to obsess about whether or not you’re talented, what people in your writers’ group might think of you, or whether or not you’ll ever publish. If you focus on what the work needs rather than on what you need from the work, you might find it becomes a whole lot easier.

Give up perfection. It doesn’t exist. Do set high standards for yourself, but don’t let unrelenting standards of perfection strangle your voice. You have to give yourself permission to write badly because it’s only through writing bad stuff that you get to the gold.

Don’t wait for the muse to arrive. You are your own muse. The trick is to show up and be receptive to the ideas, images, memories and so forth that are there swimming around you so that you can allow some of it to swim in. That’s not to say that every time you sit down to write the words will flow. Undoubtedly, there will be days when the words barely eke out. But most often, the act of writing alone awakens the muse to come out and play.

Don’t fixate on structure prematurely. Structure is the shape we give our experience and our imagination so that a reader can receive it. And while structure is important, I really believe that too much fixation on it in the early stages can impede creativity. Why? Because our best ideas come while we are writing. We don’t know what we’re going to say when we sit down to write. We need to access the voice inside us that tells us what we don’t already know.

Play. Whenever you get stuck, limber up. Play with language. Write down every word you can think of that starts with the letter K. Word cluster around an object, image or memory. Freewrite. Dive in. See where your subconscious leads you. Let go of results.

Tap into your obsessions. This is where the world of your stories resides. Who or what most perplexes you? What continues to have you in its grip? What memories refuse to let go? What are you most ashamed of? Write about the thing you’re most afraid of — the thing you wouldn’t dare tell anyone. Go ahead — write it now.

Remember, nobody has to read it.

Writers often ask me this. And while I don’t believe the desire and dedication to write can be taught, I’m convinced that writing can be strengthened, nourished and deepened by an awareness of craft. This is true of any art form. Great dancers, for instance, train with merciless rigor, making multiple pirouettes, leaps and leg extensions look light and effortless. Writing is no different. Becoming a great writer requires consistent practice.

Many argue that you either have talent or you don’t. But I think there’s a misconception here, that talent makes writing easy. It doesn’t. Take my word on this: every piece of literature you admire has been written over and over and over — over a long period of time — and with tremendous confusion and doubt.

Some go so far as to belittle craft, proposing that it restricts a writer’s authentic voice. Yet, as a writer and teacher, experience has shown me time and again that when writers practice their craft, their work soars. Knowledge of craft doesn’t restrict a writer’s voice. It liberates it.

The writing impulse wants to spin out. It doesn’t want to be contained. So there is a necessary anarchy to the writing process. But after the initial rush of an early draft, the words on the page need to be shaped into something the reader understands and will want to read. Craft can help crystallize and navigate that inchoate fog of ideas, associations, memories, emotions and images — the infinite possibilities that language presents to us.

By craft, I don’t mean familiar mantras such as ’show don’t tell,’ or ‘write what you know.’ Sometimes it’s better to show and sometimes it’s better to tell; you don’t limit yourself arbitrarily to doing one or the other. As for ‘write what you know,’ this often shackles the imagination. I think it’s far more fascinating to write towards what you don’t know.

Aside from the act of writing itself, perhaps the best way to learn to write great prose is to read great stories by great authors. To open yourself up to the wide range of narrative choices available to you. I believe that at least forty-percent of learning to write comes from reading like a writer, that is, with a concentrated focus on elements such as language, characterization, subtext, the use of dialogue to slip exposition sideways, and the various ways of conveying the passage of time.

I’ve found that when writers gain awareness of such craft elements, they’re grateful. They discover the freedom that comes with form.