Young Writers Society

OK, first of all just let me admit that I am a natural infodumper. A couple months on these boards have revealed to me that my instinct is to just "Tell" readers what is and what was in my story. I fight with this every time my fingers hit the keys.

With that in mind, I have come to a chapter where two characters are meeting each other for the first time. They will proceed to explain to each other where they are going and why. But I'm not sure how to go about this without coming of as too "Telly".

Switching to first person is too awkward and forced. And If I do it through dialogue it will just be a huge section of only a single person talking. Not only that, but I would like to elaborate on some details from their history that they might not just come out and say, but the reader would find interesting.

I've done it all in third person as of now, but I'm not sure that's the right way to go. Basically, I'm asking about how to write an extended flashback without "Telling" to much. I want to "transport" the reader or "Show" them the past so to speak. Help?

Help is on the way. First, though, I need you to identify which type of Third you're using so that I don't have to talk about the entire spectrum:

So:

On the scale from Objective to Omniscient?
On the scale from Very Impersonal/Intimate to Highly Personal/Intimate?

Are you using multiple viewpoint characters?

And, are you employing third person indirect?

Basically, tell me as much as you can about your niche of third person.

Sorry, I should have provided more context. As far as I can tell my style varies and does not fit a single "type" of third person. It's more on a scale or range like you suggested.

1. Viewpoint is mostly limited (single character) with a sparse Omniscient feel (I occasionally reveal the partial thoughts of another character that are hidden from the MC). So I suppose that is Omniscient.

2. As far as Impersonal/Highly personal I would say somewhere in the middle. Possibly leaning impersonal. The majority of the characters feelings are revealed through dialogue. But some is done through description/narration.

3. Single viewpoint character thus far, but I would like to change the viewpoint during the flashback/back-story I mentioned previously. (Since the MC was not present for it).

4. By "Third person indirect" you mean "free indirect speech" correct?
I would say no. I either use Quoted/direct speech or Reported/normal indirect speech, depending on the flow of the scene.

I hope those answers were what you needed.

Hrm. Most of what I've written has been very limited, very personal, and highly free indirect, so I'm not really experienced in your style.. (Also, I don't know why I put third person indirect in italics. I think I wanted to put in a url link to Wikipedia but obviously that didn't happen. Oops.) Buuuut, my latest projects are more like yours, so I can go from there.

In regards to the flashbacks, the best way to go about it is probably to go full for it. Don't underestimate your reader's intelligence. We pull on our former knowledge of stories in the genre and out, as well as general knowledge about fiction and narrative, especially culture ones, to fill in blanks as we read. What that basically means is that you don't need to worry about the reader understanding things. The reader will understand by the way characters react to things. They'll get the idea from the way characters react to things, especially after you've gained general reader trust by not violating basic Reader-Author trust.

Now I feel like I'm dumping a ton of fiction theory on you at once, and I should have asked you two other questions beforehand. One is about what genre this is, and the other is about your narrator and his or her awareness to the audience. I don't mean your viewpoint character, but the narrator, like the speaker in a poem, and how active of a role he or she plays, whether he or she knows if the reader is an Outsider or an Insider or if there's even a Reader at all.

All that stuff influences how you reveal information. If Narrator knows that the Reader is an outsider, and this is in a fantasy world or in a situation where there will be many unfamiliar things to Reader, then Narrator may or may not give the reader more information. If the Narrator isn't aware that the reader may not know things, then obviously less will get old.

One final consideration before I ramble at you more is the Audience, and who you're writing to, who your Ideal Reader is. Because this also influences how things turn out. You can't control who your audience is, and people will always complain, but trying to please everyone is a bad idea and frankly wouldn't work. Writing a book that a wide audience would find acceptable is great too. But personally, I think writing a book that a decent number of people would love is better than sacrificing Awesome to Some for Goodish for More.

Anyway.

I'd advise against huge chunks of dialogue where it's just one character talking about their past. That's a monologue anyway, and it rings huge "The Author is going this to give us information in a less boring fashion than in straight prose" bells. Revealing information through dialogue can work, but only if it's natural and make sense. I talk about my past occasionally, but I hardly have my life story prepared to give to any person in one chunk at any time.

So. Flashbacks might be your ticket. With them, I'd suggest doing them like straight normal prose, taking the most interesting and revealing scene for the character in question and writing it in full, show fashion.

But, to be honest, I'm sort of taken with the idea of all these characters meeting randomly on the road somewhere, and the reader only being familiar with one character through viewpoint and these others just showing up. Not knowing who they are, knowing that they have secrets, that could be even more intriguing than knowing the interesting things about them. Now I'm possibly just taking your concept and running with it, of course. (My imagination does this often) but it could be something to consider.

So my next questions are to the genre and the narrator, and then whatever else you might find important.

Well well. It seems I have opened up quite the theoretical cookie jar. All kidding aside, you've already been a tremendous help. I am interested in what else you have to say as well. The "Experts" here are amazing.

Anyway, the genre is serious fantasy (I laugh a little on the inside everytime I say or write that). I am a little curious to why that matters though.
The narrator is . . . well I honestly haven't given that much thought until now. The narrator is faceless I guess. He is not any of the characters in the story. He knows things the characters do not. Simple and effective I think. The reader is not meant to question the narrator. So I suppose the narrator is unaware of them like you said. The 4th wall you know?

I think your 100% right about audience. I'm just writing what I feel is the best way to communicate the story. I'm not writing for anyone in particular, just anyone who finds it and enjoys it. Now that doesn't mean I'm not revising and trying to be more natural and compeling. It just means I'm not preoccupied with who and who doesn't like my story. I think a fiction writer writes for themself, and whoever comes along for the ride can enjoy it or not. That's my personal philosophy anyway. I hope it makes sense.

That got a little off topic. So yeah, just write the flashback in third person? The thing is, this part of my story is where the current MC learns about the motivations of the future MC (current viewpoint character drops out for a bit later on). But his motivations are tied to a series of events that begin eight years before he even met the MC. I've tried to break down the events into "sections" and just fast forward the years between them. But it comes off as "Telly" I think. Almost like a history lesson.

I think I've explained as much as I can without diving into the actual plot. Any additional advice or suggestions from the mighty experts would be much appreciated

It is best not to worry about staying on topic when talking with me. Digression is as natural to me as breathing.

I think you're spot on with your attitude in regards to your audience, and I know what type of narrator you have now. I asked the latter question because a conscious narrator has an influence that's more noticeable. As for why I asked about genre, that influences what a potential reader has. Since you said serious fantasy (I am now more excited to read this than ever), you can rely on a more advanced Reader-Author contract with regards to what Information you need to get out there.

If you're in college or university, think of it this way: your reader has already taken lower division and introductory/intermediate courses in the genre. He or she will know which things to look for. Which isn't to say, necessarily, that you should forget about the Curious Novice, but more that you don't need to be too concerned about the reader not understanding things.

That's helpful on two fronts, I find. One is that the reader already gets that hey, this is an alternate world, alternate stuff happens, customs will be different than ours, etc. Another is that because the reader already knows what to look for, you get to present it in ways that are far more interesting, or at least I think so.

Say a culture has a custom that typical North American/British/Australian society does not share. Maybe it's a Medieval custom that many will be aware of already anyway (such as knights in armor riding off). Or maybe it's something less fairy-tale like and instead is that there's this rite-of-passage ceremony in which young kids on the verge of perceived adulthood must walk alone to the top of a mountain and bring back a chunk of crystal from a cave (typical of something seen in late 20th century fantasy). In those cases, you don't have to explain, "Hey, so there are these people called knights that do X." Introducing a character as a knight does the trick, the reader gets the point. You don't have to explain that there's this rite of passage thing and they'll all have to go up to the cave to get the chunk of crystal. Rather, if you have a character who's currently on this journey, you can just have him worrying about dying and wanting to find the rumored orange crystal to impress X girl and wondering if the Bully who has his same birth month is going to beat him. And the reader will fill in the blanks, consciously or unconsciously, with "Rite of passage ceremony. Different levels of prestige."

The nifty thing being that this works even far better for things that aren't cliche and overused plot points (that crystal example even had the village-boy-going-to-find-his-aunt-and-uncle's-house-on-fire-then-discover-a-great-destiny feel to it and I nearly gagged). Say there's Culture Q, and in this culture it'd be incredibly taboo for a servant to look up at a member of a better class. Instead of having to explain how looking up at a member of a better class would be offensive to that person or be seen as insolence or both, and that such transgressions would be punished severely, and give the intelligent reader the feel that class divisions and such are going to be addressed over the course of the novel and there's going to be a scene approximately two thirds of the way through in which the servant character does this and winds up in serious trouble.... you have your insolent little character look up at his better instead of at the floor, even if it's the back of the noble dude's head, and then another servant in the room can stare at him, and the servant dude can give an insolent little sneer.

And the reader will get it. If not in one such encounter, then in a few.

Though this brings up an important point about culture while I'm at it. If you're brought up in a culture, it's extremely hard to look at your culture objectively unless you're trained to and/or have exposure to other cultures. So if that aforementioned servant is looking up when he ought to be looking down, it's because his character really is insolent, not because he's somehow tapping into our modern senses of fariness and equality and getting all statementy about it.

See? What did I tell you about digressions?

To return to your actual question, I'd say flashbacks are your best bet if you think you really do need to clue the reader into these events now or before the switch. Revealing to the reader this way can be an effective way to build suspense, because if we know that Character B has this past, but Character A doesn't know... it's always fun to know what the characters don't know, especially if one knows but the other doesn't.... kind of like waiting for the moment when A finds out.

Anyway.

To deal with the Telliness of it all, and if you're sure that the reader needs to know this, you might consider fragments of the backstory. Not all of it, maybe more distanced than the normal narrative. Maybe little clips in italics between sections? In a different tense, even?

And I'd say regardless of whatever style happens, the important thing is to keep the time-lapse small and focus on the events and the character's reaction to them rather than summarizing them. Because summarizing quickly turns into a history lesson.

What I mean by a small time lapse is instead of saying, "Joe took a flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo. After he arrived and checked into his hotel, he decided to go explore," you write Joe packing his bags and almost forgetting to bring enough underwear and actually forgetting his laptop charger and calling a taxi and leaving the house and getting in the taxi and talking to the driver and wondering about whether he remembered to lock the house or not and getting stuck in traffic getting to the airport and tipping the driver and going to the service desk and checking in, etc, etc, etc.

If you write your flashbacks like that, in small itty chunks of near real-time narrative, then it'll feel a lot less like a history lesson and more like part of the story, a puzzle piece. Maybe you write just the couple paragraphs of Joe packing his bags and forgetting his charger, and then in the next scene he's already in Tokyo, in the process of leaving his hotel to go explore.A reader's mind will fill in the blanks if the missing section isn't seemingly of interest. If it seems like something interesting might just be in that gap, then the speculation gears start turning and you've just given the reader another question to keep on reading for.

Annnnd, I think that'd be my advice for handling the flashbacks. That, and try something. And don't doubt your reader. Aim to keep your Beginner reader afloat, but don't insult your Intermediate reader, and don't bore your Advanced reader. Finding that balance is hard, but see signature.

In the end, the only real way to know if something works is to try it and find out.