Tenses in a flashback

Dwight

Help! Tense problems. The dreaded flashback scenario.

So our poor young protagonist, currently thinking and acting in the perfect tense, is thinking back to his Mum’s wedding of the previous weekend:

<What a pure waste of time that wedding had been, for instance. What had come over his Mum. It was Bernard, Bernard, Bernard, Bernard. Hanging onto him in that grey, depressing courtyard at the hotel, as if medically joined at the elbow, through hours of stupid photographs...>

My problem is the ‘was’. Or should it be: ‘had been’?

Later it goes on:

<Al hadn’t managed a single smile all afternoon. If Jeeps had only been there, they could have had a laugh every ten seconds. But surely everyone was fed up to the back teeth of hearing how Bernard had re-wired his mother’s house from top to bottom in one hour and forty minutes, and it was only afterwards it was realised that he’d installed half a dozen outdoor surveillance lights while he was at it. God, it had been sickening to see the guy getting so much pride and glory, and a hundred per cent of Mum’s attention.>

The added problem here is the shift back to an even earlier time-frame in which Bernard had performed his miracles of prowess. Can both time frames be conveyed in the same pluperfect tense?

What do kind TBers think?

Please take pity on me because this is an extended flashback of four pages, and it is doing my head in.

Jay Mandal

I'm confused - not an unusual state for me. Is it really written in the perfect tense? Do flashbacks need a different tense once you've said that that's what they are?

Jenny

I'd say it's best to avoid using the pluperfect if you have a choice. Too many "hads" look awkward and I think they slow the story down!

heather

If you start the flashback in pluperfect and then let it slide back into perfect it usuallly works without getting too clumsy.

e.g Their wedding day had been wet and miserable. Everyone got wet and the hem of Mary's dress was sodden.

Bill

if you refer back directly it should/must be pluperfect. How else? It would sound silly and confusing if not pluperfect. The odd 'was' is ok if you've already established in the para 'had'

If you start a section/chapter with a HEADING... 'last week' or 'two hours ago' or 'ten years previously' something which tells the reader where he is, then it doesn't matter too much.

Some say it doesn't matter, some readers don't notice and maybe attribute their doubts to their own reading ability rather than to the writer.

Carol

I always understood that in flashbacks after a few 'had's' to tell the reader this is a flashback, you then wrote it as if it is now. As Heather demonstrated above.
I shall have to look up pluperfect, as I have not heard that term before- yes, I know terrible isn't it.

Dwight

Wow, Jay, Jenny, Heather… you mean I may be able to choose any tenses that suit me as long as they seem right? And there could be a way of ditching all or most of these perishing pluperfects? Once I’ve tried it out, this idea would instantly elevate you both to Messiah status.

I sure hope so, but when you have a good story, almost ready for submission, have you ever suffered this feeling of doubt over something in your first chapter, an element which will push your prospective agent into pitching your proposal into the bin as soon as they reach it?

That is my worry over the choice of tenses here. If I can draw on your patience, I’d like to give a longer extract, to illustrate the depth of the problem.

The situation is that 11-year-old Alex is recalling the serious down-step in his relationship with his Mum since her wedding of nine days earlier. He is thinking back to the reception, during which he was able to play a significant part in solving a dramatic episode.

<There was something about Bernard Lyss that he couldn’t take. Something dodgy. Something so false he put Al in mind of one of those lame bits of duff software that come with the Sunday paper. In fact worse. He was a flipping virus that was going to contaminate the whole works in 22, Wolsey Road. Because now they’d got Bernard in the house full-time… in Mum’s room… in the kitchen and living room. And next he would be turning up in Al's room itself. He was getting really in the way. And he was putting Al in the background.
What a pure waste of time that wedding had been, for instance. What had come over his Mum. It was Bernard, Bernard, Bernard, Bernard. Hanging onto him in that grey, depressing courtyard at the hotel, as if medically joined at the elbow, through hours of stupid photographs... then sitting on his knee – pathetic really – to giggle over the photos for the rest of the afternoon. Half sploshed out of her head. If any of her pupils had seen her they would have thrown a wobbler. And those speeches! What a torture! It was all “Bernard did this” and “Bernard was a whizz at that”, with Brian going on and on and on, and everyone bobbing and choking like a whole fairground stall of laughing dolls going off at once. Al hadn’t managed a single smile all afternoon. If Jeeps had only been there, they could have had a laugh every ten seconds. But surely everyone was fed up to the back teeth of hearing how Bernard had re-wired his mother’s house from top to bottom in one hour and forty minutes, and it was only afterwards it was realised that he’d installed half a dozen outdoor surveillance lights while he was at it.
God, it was sickening to see the guy getting so much pride and glory, and a hundred per cent of Mum’s attention. Al knew he would have to do something about this great and accomplished Bernard and where he had got himself. He couldn’t help wondering how the big hero might cope with a real emergency… close-quarters combat… survival!
He scanned the best white shirts and shiny dresses, slumped by now and depending on elbows to keep their chins from hitting the table as Brian droned on and on. Astounding that amongst so much adult wisdom, an eleven-year-old lad was the only sober person in sight. He looked back from his end-of-table vantage point at the moment when his Mum turned the back of her little white hat towards him and pressed a warm… long kiss onto the lips of her new husband with his balding head and closed eyes, dragging ahhh’s and whistles of support from the company. Hmm. The last time she had kissed Al had been as he left the house that morning: she had pulled him close by the shoulders, had tried to straighten his short blond hair and had called him her general... and then she had kissed him between the eyebrows. Right now, though, a lesser son might have seized his alco-pop and crunched it to granules of silicone in his hand, but Al rose above the provocation and turned side-saddle on his chair to… God! … to see the start of a vicious development not a moment too soon.
A maniac of 43 or so, neatly kitted in a maroon D & G jogging suit and white Lacoste trainers, stepped through the curtains with his feet at table-cloth level. How did Al recognise him for a maniac? Because it was Ted Robinson, of course, his own father and abandoner… Public Enemy Number One. Oh, and there was the small matter of the high velocity scatter gun that he swung up to hip-level readiness.>

And this scene continues for two more pages.

To my mind – and possibly that of an editor/agent – the episode starting <He scanned the best white shirts> needs to be changed into the pluperfect, to avoid uncertainty for the reader over when it happened. And I don’t think it would read so smoothly. It could be that there is an obvious way round it which I can’t see through wrestling with it for too long.

Any comments?

Carol

Okay I've looked it up, and now know what it means.
I shall leave the better knowledged to answer your question. :)

heather

As it is such a long flashback you do need to make sure that the reader periodically knows it is still in flashback throughout. 'He had scanned...' and 'A maniac... had stepped..' would be sufficient to achieve this in my view.

As Bill says, to be completely gramatically correct you should stay in pluperfect throughout, but it can get clumsy and unreadable and, for popular fiction at least, the more readable version is better.

Dwight

Thanks, Heather, and everyone. I'll tinker with it now, and come back to it in a couple of days to see how it feels.

I can't help feeling that Dickens would have slapped down what came into his head first, assured that what seemed right to him at the time would read well later.

Do you remember the quote in 'Quo vadis' where Peter Ustinov's Nero was composing a song to sing over Rome and came up with:
'Oh omnipotent flame...'
but then had second thoughts and prefered:
Oh omnivorous flame'?
His courtiers agreed what an improvement this was, until he asked his friend, the venerable Petronius. The patrician begged to disagree, to nervous intakes of breath all round. He went on to explain that when genius is at work, it is invariably the word that comes first to mind which is best.

louise

[quote=Carol] shall have to look up pluperfect, as I have not heard that term before- yes, I know terrible isn't it. [/quote]
Me neither. :(

Carol

That's a relief- for a moment I thought I was really stupid. :)

heather

That's the opposite of me, Carol.
Every now and then I think I'm quite smart - then I remember!

Carol

:)

louise

tbh I thought it was a spelling error and felt to polite to point it out. Good job I didn't. Would've felt a right plum!! :D

Mutley

me neither Carol - it turns out I use it in exactly the way suggested but I didn't know it had a name!

Carol

Yes, this is something I find. I've been doing the stuff for years but either didn't know the name existed, or had long forgotten what it was called.