Flashbacks and other potentially annoying devices.

A standard new-writer conversation that repeats ad nauseam on writer’s forums is the flashback. Flashbacks are kind of like gonorrhea, and if you find yourself breaking out, at least do something to minimize it if you’re going to go around expecting strangers to stick their face in your manuscript.

I don’t know how well the analogy really fits, but it seems like often the right thing to do is compare things to gonorrhea, so I’ll stick with it.

Why am I going over this tired conversation? Because it seems no matter how much it’s said and by whom, it’s still pretty virulent. If all it took was reason to get rid of it, nobody would have done stupid things to manuscripts since Stephen King wrote On Writing.

Okay so the reason this came up is that once in a while, a person and their girl need to  deliberately choose the worst movie available and watch it at a creepy theatre. So, like any normal person would, we smuggled in some wine and had a go at The Host.

Now, I haven’t read the book. This isn’t a stab at the author. Enough people have done that and despite what it seems like, I’m not into trashing other people unless there’s a good reason to. All I am doing is using this film as a catalyst for discussion about gonorrhea.

So I doubt I have to tell anyone that I’m not a particularly animated person, and can pretty much contain any emotion and keep a straight face. I could not while watching most of this. We did have a hell of a time, and it was a lot of fun. So in that respect, The Host was well worth it. But only to two of the most sarcastic people ever created.

The problem with flashbacks is when they’re used to foist often unnecessary information on the reader. Duh. That’s repeated so often it’s painful to actually be writing it. But anyway. Sometimes it’s a lazy way of forcing us to remember plot coupons that might titillate us later on. In this movie, a regular pattern of flashbacks happened in the first quarter. Okay, ham-fisted, sure. But you eventually get used to it and consider it part of the story’s architecture. But as soon as the author shoe-horns that plot coupon they want you to have into your brain, they change the structure and abandon flashbacks altogether.

You could argue for pure pragmatism on this and say I’m overanalyzing. You’d be right. But even though simpler is better and solid writing is usually better than elaborate techniques, I think there’s a limit to how careless you can be with these tools for the sake of easily dealing with exposition.

I think Blightcross had a couple flashback-type things going on. But if I remember correctly, my approach there was to not write them as scenes but quick, invasive thoughts. Not only is it economical, but I think dealing with it that way puts you more in the character’s head in the present while still having to deal with the past. You’re getting what they’re dealing with right now while they’re being reminded about something in the past, instead of being immersed in that past. Does that make sense? That’s by no means the only or best way, but the point is that there are a LOT of ways to do what writers think they can only do using a flashback scene.

Look, all we really care about is why the character is remembering something now and how it’s affecting them and how we think it’s fitting into the story. Very rarely have I noticed scenes accomplishing this better than, say, injecting an invasive thought into the character. And yes, what I did isn’t practical for most films, but in the end, there’s no reason to be using those flashback scenes. I didn’t feel any more connected to what was going on in this case.

The exception is of course the case of the parallel story. I actually like these a lot when people do it right. Think of basically every episode of Highlander. Even those were a little ham-fisted, but as long as you have an entire narrative that’s being played out alongside the main story, it can be interesting. It is not just for the sake of dealing with exposition, but literally integral to the engineering of the story. Or having it in reverse–the main story being one gigantic flashback framed by something important taking place in the future. But both of these hardly resemble the literary shrapnel that is the usual flashback.

Also in this film: a lot of internal monologue. This is such an important thing to get right, but in this case I was left, again, not believing it. It’s a tough thing to make work. I still struggle at it.

The trope itself deserves a post of its own later. Any attempt to do it in an interesting way deserves some props, even if it didn’t work out.

The one interesting potential in this movie was the romance situation between the host body, the symbiote, and their separate interests. Note how I said “potential,” since it wasn’t utilized the way it could have been. It was a little cutesy, especially the way the author basically used algebra to solve it: the distributive property used here easily allows everyone to be with whomever they want at the end and leave us with a sickening scene designed to satisfy youths wrapped up in the fidelity stage of psychosocial development.

Anyway, you always have to be on guard against your own laziness when you write. Or when you do anything, really.

 

Oddly enough, I thought the movie was done quite well. There’s only so much you can do with a script. The soundtrack was great and so was the photography. Even the acting wasn’t terrible, but as I said, the things the actors said almost caused us to make a scene.