thebibliosphere:

I think saying something can never be done is in the same snobbish vein as people who say “prologues and epilogues are dead!” like excuse the entire fuck out of you, but who died and made you king of the slushpile.

I’ve seen some truly awful flashback/prologue/epilogues in my time, but just because some authors fail to find a way to use them correctly, doesn’t mean the rest of us need to suffer from the restrictions of their ineptitude. A good editor will tell you if something isn’t working, or if there’s a better way to do it. A bad one will tell you you ought never to do something simply because it’s currently out of fashion.

As for how to do it well? I dare say if I sat down and tried it I could think of ways to do it, but the main questions to ask yourself are: does this add to my narrative in a way I could not otherwise achieve? Do flashbacks and visions work well within the world I have created? Is there another way I could relay this exposition in a way that is more effective? Does it feel convoluted and heavy when I do it? Does it slow the narrative down? Do I want to slow the narrative down? What effect am I trying to achieve by doing so?

If say, I were writing a fast paced contemporary piece, I would not use the above writing tools in my narrative. Now, an epic fantasy sci fi where the lines of reality are blurred and I can get away with heavier world building exposition? Sign Me The Fuck Up. 

Prologues and the like are very good for creating a sense of oration, like you are being sat down and read to from a text long since forgotten to the passages of time by an old man with a snowy white beard and the zeal of madness in his eyes. But, in the hands of a different author, it could also be used to give the narrative equivalent of an introductory handshake. This is my world, this is the narrative tone we’re going for, bathroom is down the hall on your left, bedrooms to the right, and yes, sorry about the mess on the carpet. The cat’s just been sick.

Flashbacks, dreams and other forms of internal and external analepsis (that’s injecting backstory to you and me, internal being central to the character experiencing it, external referring to the world they are in) can perform a similar role. It can either serve to break up or cement the narrative as the author desires. Breaking it up may create a sense of instability or fragility pertaining to the internal state of your main character.

Or, like the pensieve in Harry Potter, (which I didn’t see a lot of people bitching about the same way they do “flashbacks” even though it’s a literal vessel for retaining and reliving memories, making me believe that most people bitching about certain things don’t actually know what the fuck they’re complaining about. The time turner on the other hand was handled like a piece of shit, but that’s another argument for later.) it can be used creatively to give the author more narrative freedom to introduce their main character(s) to elements of exposition in their world, that otherwise they wouldn’t get to experience, and would perhaps, need to spend several pages of conversational dialogue imparting. So what would have been worse in that instance? Fourteen pages of dialogue telling you the story, or a quick hop skip and a jump down memory lane that lets the author show it to you?

It’s almost as though sometimes, not using valid narrative tools….could be worse…

At that’s what it is, at the end of the day. It’s a narrative tool and one worth having in your toolkit, even if you never foresee yourself using it. Like that miniature blowtorch you picked up at Home Depot that one time on an impulse buy cause it was on sale. You only went in for a hammer and nails but it was there and while the higher reasoning part of your monkey brain is telling you it was a waste of money and you’ll never use it, not with all the other tools you have, there’s another smaller, more ancient part of you, grinning in the darkness. Because it knows. It knows that what no matter others might say, fire is indeed sometimes the solution. How you use it however is up to you. 

You can either burn down the village by doing it poorly, or, you can figure out how it works and how best to contain it to better fuel your purposes. And if you decide you prefer to do it another way, great, fantastic, we are glad you found your way. But it’s just exactly that, your way. So I guess to answer your question a little more briefly than I have up until now: 

Said is not dead, there is no one correct way to write. Anyone that claims otherwise is, in all kindness and honesty, talking out their arse.