Department of Historical Corrections: Writing Effective Flashbacks and Memories
The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans, is a fantastic collection, with a couple of stories that I frequently teach in my classes. I’m going to look at one I haven’t taught (yet?): “Happily Ever After.”
But first, let’s talk about the difference between a memory and a flashback. Both techniques bring us into the past relative to the real-time of the story, usually to learn important information about a character or a situation. Sometimes the heart of the story is located in this past.
But while a flashback is the writer’s magical time jump, narratively speaking (which a writer has every right to do!), a memory is tied to the present of the story through a character’s thoughts. A memory may be just as immersive as a scene told through flashback, or it might be enriched with a more processed or retrospective feel. But in either case, it is embedded into a different scene—the one in which the character is having the memory.
Maybe this seems too obvious to talk about. But when you think of memories this way, you understand that the memory’s trigger is not only a story concern to transition from one time period to another, but that it’s integral to character. We not only learn about the character through whatever they experience inside the memory, but through what it is that makes them think of it. For example, is it easy to reach this memory, so that we know it is always on their mind? Or does it take a greater push, so we suspect it is somewhat distant or even repressed? What is the emotion tied to the moment when they reflect on their past? What is their process for retrieving it? In this way, we not only learn what happened, but we learn how the character feels about it, and how the character handles those feelings. Flashbacks, on the other hand, can take us to a place in the character’s past that their memory can’t—or won’t—go.
In “Happily Ever After,” Lyssa’s mother has recently died of ovarian cancer, and she has been urged by doctors to have her own ovaries removed. However, Lyssa is not ready to make that decision.
But we don’t learn of this impossible situation so simply. Instead, we meet Lyssa as a clerk in the gift shop of a replica of the Titanic. (What a metaphor!) She’s just been an extra in a music video and has had casual sex with the director. Afterward, he asks:
“But are you on something?”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” she said. “I don’t have ovaries.”
“Hmm?”
“My mom died of cancer. So they took mine out. To be safe. See the scar?”
I believe Lyssa wields this strange confession as a sort of weapon, or perhaps as armor. She pushes the director away by telling him too much. A moment later, she tells him outright: “We don’t have to be friends.”
Reading the story the first time, I don’t yet know Lyssa’s history, and I’m not sure if the line is true or a practical sort of lie. But it doesn’t really matter if I believe it or not, because I see how Lyssa is using the line within the scene and that makes me understand something important about who Lyssa is, how she interacts with people, and it makes me guess at the hurt she might be holding to behave this way. She takes a sort of pleasure, almost, in making a stranger uncomfortable through a devastating revelation of personal trauma, and then quickly shutting down further discussion of it.
After a space break, we learn that what she told the director is not true: “She did, in fact, have ovaries.” But then we learn that the emotional core of her statement is true–that her mother has died, and that she’s not supposed to have her ovaries anymore, but she’s delaying.
And there it is, a most unusual memory trigger. It’s her lie to the casual sex partner and its explanation that prompts the story’s movement to her mother’s death, the tale of the relationship Lyssa has recently ended, and the difficult decision she faces. We go deep into the scene and Lyssa’s story is truly devastating.
Evans has created something between a pure memory and a flashback. The conversation between Lyssa and the director certainly sparks the story’s movement into Lyssa’s past. However, the space break moves us out of that scene, and so it is also very much like a flashback. It’s a great example of combining multiple—even opposing—craft tools to apply the best parts of each.
I’m also interested in the brutality of that transition, the brushback half-truth as memory trigger.
It seems key to me that we launch into Lyssa’s past after a moment of forced numbness, a moment in which she pretends it is all no big deal. Underneath that denial, we can feel it is a very big deal indeed.
Once we learn about Lyssa’s situation, we understand that maybe her words aren’t only about shoving off friendship with the director but about holding off the truth itself. If I can say it in a casual way, it doesn’t matter. If I can then say I don’t care, maybe I won’t. And if I can take that step back of correcting the lie, to know I do have ovaries, well maybe I’ll get to keep them after all. It’s a negation of a negation. We think in circles until we don’t know what is true—and maybe that’s the point for Lyssa.
There’s something paradoxical about a deliberate overshare. There is the sense that nobody wants to hear it, that the speaker doesn’t even want to say it, and an accompanying sense of compulsion. And so we understand that state of mind. Lyssa doesn’t want to think about this fact of her life; she can’t yet face the loss of her mother or the decision she has to make about her future.
But not thinking about it doesn’t make it go away. Avoiding the decision and the procedure itself does not change the fact of her situation. This truth intrudes upon her life. And there’s no denying anything.
Consider the more sentimental options Evans might have used to bring Lyssa to a memory of her mother’s death—if she had encountered something of hers lying around, perhaps. Structuring the story that way wouldn’t have been wrong, but it wouldn’t have given us the same psychological complexity, or glimpse into the very particular mind of this specific character.
Then think about the hybrid memory/flashback form employed. The story of Lyssa’s mother is linked to Lyssa’s half-lie and numb denial, but is also told after a space break, as if it emerges from the narrative, rather than her own mind. Consider how that mimics the way a horrible truth intrudes, unwanted, upon the character.
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