Peg Herring's Blog - Posts Tagged "flashbacks"

Readers are smart people. They pick up on literary convention quite easily, and they understand that those conventions are often vague and eminently breakable. The flashback is my current quibble with my editor. He says they have to be a certain way; I'm not so sure. He'll win, because he's the editor, but I like the quote often attributed to Somerset Maugham: "There are three rules for writing. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."

Readers pick up what an author is doing pretty easily if they're engrossed in the story, so I would like to leave my flashbacks as they are. Still, I know the editor is an intelligent reader. I guess I have to trust that as he goes, so go other intelligent readers. So it's off to rewriting the flashbacks!