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new one? One principle would be to provide a break whenever
there s an important change in locale. I don t mean just from apart-
ment to car to lake. Within the apartment, there have probably
been changes of locale also from living room to bedroom to
balcony. Don t be extreme. Don t use a new short unit if someone
is merely walking from the bedroom to the living room. But
suppose it s a dramatic moment. Suppose your character hides an
incriminating document in the bedroom, takes a breath, and
returns to the living room to convince a police officer that
nothing suspicious is going on.That might be a good time to start
a new short unit. It s as if the narrative itself has taken a breath.That
principle works for me because by temperament I write short
scenes, but if your approach is different, you should still be able to
find natural shifts in your narrative that invite frequent breaks. Note
how James M.Cain uses this method in his classic,The Postman Always
Rings Twice his scenes are amazingly short.Flip the pages.The white
spaces that are a consequence of this technique jump at you.
There s one structural unit that beginning writers are fond of
but that should be approached with severe caution: flashbacks.
The very name indicates the problem. By definition, flashbacks
impede the forward movement of the story. In all my books, I
used flashbacks only a few times, the longest of which (fifty
pages) is in The Brotherhood of the Rose when I finally reveal how
the two betrayed heroes were raised in a military-style
orphanage. I agonized over that flashback.Took it out. Put it back
in. Took it out. Put it back in. It wasn t in the version of the
manuscript that I sent to my editor. Only when he phoned me
and said that he liked the book but that something was strange
about the middle, as if a big chunk were missing, did I send him
those pages. He insisted that they be added, and in retrospect I
think he was right the orphanage section is the bedrock of the
novel. Please, be scrupulous. Unless your book is about the
The Tactics of Structure 69
nature of time and/or memory, as in Faulkner s Absalom,Absalom!,
flashbacks are a dangerous interruptive strategy.Whenever you re
tempted to use one, try to find every reason in the world not to
include it. More than any other part of a book s structure, a flash-
back needs absolute justification.
No news there. But what about short disguised flashbacks, a
paragraph long, the kind where a scene begins strongly, only to be
interrupted with an explanation of how the scene came to take
place? Robert shoved the door open so hard that it banged
against the wall. A tense confrontation ensues. Suddenly, the
author worries that the scene s abrupt opening will confuse the
reader, so a belated transition is inserted.
Ever since Robert had wakened an hour earlier, the only thing
he d thought about was telling his lawyer what he thought of him.
He d dressed in a frenzy. He d raced out to get a taxi, his fury
mounting when he was forced to rush two blocks before he
found one. Sitting on the torn back seat, frustrated by seemingly
countless traffic jams, he d become even angrier. When the taxi
had finally reached the brownstone, he had charged out, so
consumed by rage that he hadn t even noticed the shower that
drenched him. But now he felt the blessed release of grabbing his
lawyer s suit coat and slamming him against a wall.
The scene then continues. Let s chart the sequence, using the
elements of the triangle I discussed earlier: AB, BC, and CD. In a
disguised flashback, the scene begins with rising action in the
middle: BC. It then reverts to beginning exposition: AB. Finally
CC
D
BB
A
70 THE SUCCESSFUL NOVELIST
the scene is allowed to conclude: CD. Viewed in this way, the
scene s construction is obviously jumbled and unsatisfying.
Nonetheless, I m amazed how often beginning writers use that
pattern. Once or twice is occasionally necessary. But for some
writers, the device is as contagious as the flu. In chapter after
chapter, BC is followed by AB and then jumps to CD. The
repeated flawed structure causes the book to stumble. When
editing your fiction, be on the lookout for scenes interrupted by a
sudden string of verbs involving had.
How do we avoid the problem? Two ways. First, this kind of
flashback is usually a tacit admission by the novelist that the AB in
this scene isn t an interesting way to begin so it got crammed into
the middle. My response is, if it wasn t going to be interesting at
the start of the scene, it certainly won t be interesting when it
interrupts the main point. Unless the interruption is absolutely
necessary for clarity, get rid of it. Let the reader connect the scenes
for you.The second solution is to recognize that if your book has
a lot of disguised flashbacks in a static situation (a character
remembering the past while driving to meet someone, a character
sitting in an airport, recalling conversations with someone who s
about to get off a plane, or a character dreaming about the past),
your plot has become tangled. If past events are so important to
the story, rearrange the plot and start the book with them.
Concentrate fiercely to give your plot a forward motion.You must
have a powerfully necessary reason for turning it backward.
The most important structural decision you need to make
involves choosing the incident with which you begin the story.
Naturally, you want to use a strong event that will grab the reader s
attention.But if you re not careful,you ll select a climactic event that
actually belongs far along in the plot, forcing you to use flashbacks
to explain who the heck these characters are and how they got into
their predicament. I made this mistake in early drafts of First Blood,
starting with Rambo being chased by the posse. He scrambled
through the forest. A helicopter pursued him. He shot deputies. In
theory, this approach should have guaranteed a reader s interest. But
The Tactics of Structure 71
in fact, it was boring because the reader didn t know anything about
Rambo and hence didn t care why the character was being chased.
Worse, after all the gunplay, I then had to provide a long flashback
in which quiet events explained the story s background. In an effort
to avoid beginning with those quiet events, I made them seem even
quieter by introducing them after a loud start. My initial draft had a
massively messed up BC,AB, CD structure.
The way to avoid the problem is to ask this question during
your written conversation with yourself: What is the event that
sets the story into motion? This is a deceptively simple question
inasmuch as the first answers are often the wrong ones. How do
you know a wrong answer? It will necessitate a flashback soon
after the incident you selected to start your story. Pay attention to
that flashback because often it is the opening scene that your story
wants to have.Your goal is to go back along the sequence of your
plot until you find an incident that fulfils two requirements: one,
it s interesting, and two, it introduces the characters without
demanding a ton of background about them. Don t be over-
scrupulous about this. Every plot requires a certain amount of
background information. Otherwise, you d need to start with a
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