flashbacks vs history
A confession: I do not care for flashback scenes, and try to avoid using them whenever possible.
I think part of that is because I thought I was going to go into academic history a long time ago. That didn’t work out, but the appreciation remained with me. Very often, the past is simply unknowable, and finding out what happened takes a great deal of work, and even then what we learn is subject to interpretation.
(The classic example of historical interpretation: the American Civil War has been called at various times the War For Southern Independence, the War Between The States, the War Of The Rebellion, the Confederate War, the War Of Northern Aggression, and the Second American Revolution. Likely we settled on “Civil War” because it is a.) factually accurate, and b.) neutral in its interpretation.)
A flashback seems like a lazy way to circumvent that, and a writer can get a lot of narrative drama out of efforts to discover what really happened.
Example: a couple weeks ago I went on a local history tour of a cemetery attached to one of the oldest churches in the upper Midwest, with some of the graves dating back to the 1840s. (British readers, who can easily find graves and churches dating back to the medieval epoch, will probably laugh at that.) What’s striking about local history is how much of it is simply lost forever. Like, there were a number of gravestones for people who had been born in Germany and died in Wisconsin. What drove them to migrate? Unless the reason happened to be recorded in a newspaper, an immigration document, or a church register, we don’t know and can only speculate.
To discover the truth would take a great deal of research in local history, documents, and genealogy. In other words, it would take a lot of work. It would be nice if we could just touch the tombstone and have a magical flashback about the person’s life, but it doesn’t work that way. If we want to know the truth about the past, we have to do the work.
That’s why I think flashbacks often (but not always) make for lazy writing, since there’s a great deal of dramatic potential in letting the characters work out the truth for themselves. That’s also why when in FROSTBORN and GHOST EXILE when Ridmark or Caina hear about something that happened in ancient history, they hear multiple conflicting accounts, and even the accounts that agree differ from each other slightly.
It’s much more fun that way. 🙂
-JM
I disagree that Civil War is factually accurate. A Civil War is a war where two factions are fighting for control of the government. In the Civil War, one faction was simply attempting to form its own government separate from the other.
So what should it be called? I have no idea. The Southern Revolution or Rebellion, but then the problem is that both terms are obviously loaded. But Civil War is just inaccurate, though popular.
I suppose the term “Civil War” has too much inertia to be overcome at this point – kind of like how people say they’re going to go Xerox something on a Toshiba copier.
The Confederate War is a pretty good one.
Some times flash backs have their uses. But it much cooler if character has to do actually research. It makes the past more mysterious.
I agree. A mysterious past can make for an excellent plot device.