Character-Building Flashback: A Revision Exercise
Katrina Prow
Overview and Rationale
When drafting the personal essay, one often focuses inward; it is a time of introspection, making sense of a personal event in the writer’s world. Other people are involved, but in early drafts, the nonfiction writer may fall into a trap of neglecting surroundings in lieu of articulating the meaning behind the event.
In my creative writing courses, I teach nonfiction last, after fiction, so the idea of a scene is still full and present in my students’ minds. I come to the essay as a fiction writer, and while nonfiction allows for more telling, I am always urging my students to find ways to show through a scene, to build evidence by putting readers into the moment so they can see it to believe it, instead of explaining.
One of the ways we build evidence for character is through flashback. This is not the only way, of course. We also do this with action, with things, with gesture, with dialogue. However, sometimes the best way to create believable evidence for character motivation is to show, in a fully realized scene, a previous moment where a character has acted similarly.
For example, I may write, in the potential memoir I am drafting, that my Yia Yia (grandmother) is particular, the kind of woman who isn’t impressed by much, not a five-star dinner nor a beautiful view. No, she is the kind of woman who says, “I’ve had better,” who looks down her made-up nose at a plate of $40 scallops to ask if they were frozen, if there is any alcohol in this drink, if I didn’t have anything nicer to wear.
These are all fine descriptions of her: particular, unimpressed, bourgeoisie, and perhaps, you, my reader, are getting a nice image (people used to say she looked like Sophia Loren, but according to my Yia Yia, this compliment was useless because Loren was fat).
In a scene of us together at Christmas, I might write her in the recliner, wearing Chico’s from head to toe, still a kitten heel (because no woman wears flats). She has a glass of brandy—neat—but is not satisfied by the food, or the music, or the television show; she looks over her shoulder to the front door, to the window showing the street, watching the cars roll by, waiting for something to happen, rocking back and forth, lines in her face from a resting scowl.
And while this is a working image—it’s a California Christmas, and my mom is still playing that NOW CD from 1999, there’s no fire, my dad is watching YouTube videos about how to use a drone from his side of the couch, my brother is texting—I might break here, give a few lines of white space, and enter into a flashback of my Yia Yia that I remember from childhood.
It starts with her wedding photo. At this point, my Yia Yia only speaks Greek, and her airforce husband has picked her out of many to marry and bring to America. My Yia Yia is the youngest of all her sisters, the one with the most potential, set up by her father in an Athenian bar without her con