Poetic feet

I’m jumping ahead to poetry because I’ve reached that point in the new writing book, which (have I told you this?) I’m calling Writer to Writer, and hoping my publisher will go along.

On October 17, 2012, writeforfun wrote, I would love a post on poetry! What makes good poetry, how to find the best rhyming words, how to keep good meter…plenty more that I can’t think of right now. Actually, that’s my biggest problem – meter (am I spelling that right?). I tend to “Fudge,” as I call it, the meter so I can fit in the words or syllables to finish the thought, sacrificing rhythm for rhyme. I try not to let it become too extreme, although very few of my poems are consistent enough to be turned into songs. I also do have a hard time with rhyming, usually only using approximate rhyme, but that problem isn’t quite as extreme as the meter.

I’m still very much a student when it comes to poetry, although there are poems in many of my books and Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It is a poetry collection. Last year I took two poetry classes and every January I attend a poetry retreat for female kids’ book writers.

Assessing quality in poetry is trickier than in stories. Most of us, I think, are confident in our judgment of novels. Good or bad, we pronounce, and then we’re happy to spout our reasons, like, predictable or thrilling or boring or great characters, and so on. When it comes to poetry we’re not so sure. The only hallmarks of a bad poem, in my opinion, are forced rhyme and sickly sweet sentimentality of the sort we find in greeting cards – which are fine for that purpose. By forced rhyme I mean something like Then Jack did run, so as to rhyme with to have some fun. In normal speech or prose we’d say Jack ran. The did run sounds weird and calls attention to itself. Poems of long ago used forced rhyme. That was the convention back then and not a flaw. But modern poems go for a more natural feel.

Aside from those two, I go with what I like, and generally I like poetry that speaks to my experience or that opens me up to new experiences. I’m not fond of impenetrable poems that need to be puzzled over for hours, but many poetry hounds love poems that yield their meaning only slowly. Two poets I adore are Ted Kooser and Lisel Mueller. I don’t have permission to reprint any of their poems, but you can find samples online. Both generally stay away from topics that aren’t appropriate for kids, but they’re poets for adults, so you might have a grown-up take a look first. One of my favorite Ted Kooser poems is “A Jacquard Shawl.” Here’s a link to it, but first a warning: there’s nothing inappropriate, but it’s not happy: http://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/kooser/JacquardShawl.html. And my favorite Lisel Mueller poem is “Monet Refuses the Operation.” Here’s a link to that one, which is inspirational, and which, in a single poem, represents why I love poetry: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/236810.

The point is, decide for yourself what you like and what you don’t. Many poems don’t send me, but the ones that do are worth reading the others for. The ones I love pierce my heart.

As for meter, not all poems have it. Free verse, very common today, has no meter and no regular rhyme, although everything, poetry and prose alike, contains words that rhyme. In my last sentence, for example, no and although rhyme. Many many many fabulous poems are written in free verse.

My go-to book on the basics of poetry is The Teachers and Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms (high school and above, I think, but it may be okay for younger kids – check with a librarian). Here’s a snippet of what it has to say about free verse, “…it demands more of the poet, because he or she must question every word, test the shape and sound of every line, and be able to defend the choices made.” Sounds scary, but the idea is just that you should have a reason for what you do in a poem (which can simply be that it appeals to you that way). And that reason can change over time as we become more experienced poets. I confess that when I’m writing a free verse poem I can become confused about where to end a line. I try it one way and then another and then a third. I rearrange the whole poem and switch back and forth, and finally go with what I like best, which I may change a month later if I revise.

Meter and form help with line ending decisions. In metered poetry, the line is divided into feet, each foot a unit of meter. Accented and unaccented syllables determine what kind of meter we have. Shakespeare wrote in iambs, which is one unaccented syllable followed by an accented one, sounding like ta dum, as in the word complain or the two words to eat.

Here are other major kinds of meter in English:

∙ the trochee, which is the opposite of the iamb. It’s an accented syllable followed by an unaccented one, as in the word screaming or the two words jump in.

∙ the dactyl, which is an accented syllable followed by two unaccented ones. The word carefully is a dactyl.

∙ the anapest, which is two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one. Into feet would be an anapest.

∙ the spondee, which is two accented syllables. Very few words are spondees, but here’s one I found online: shortcake. This spondee sentence example comes from my Handbook: “Bad heart, flat feet, sad shoes–bad news.” In that sentence every word receives equal emphasis.

If your head is spinning, maybe this will give you comfort, I once read that it’s impossible to figure out – called scanning – the meter system in a prose sentence or in a line of free verse. You can see meter only if the poet put it there, which I personally find a great relief. I’ll tell you why with iambs, which I understand better than the others – because I took a class in prosody, which means the study of poetic meter and versifying, and our professor went into iambs very thoroughly.

It’s all in the pattern. Let’s take the first stanza from a sonnet I wrote about a new kind of apple. It’s a Shakespearean sonnet, which means it’s written in iambic pentameter with a certain (Shakespearean) rhyme scheme. Pentameter means there are five feet – five iambs (ten syllables) per line. Here they are:

The Arctic Apple, perfect apple, skin
a blushing scarlet, flesh as pale as snow–
flesh slow to brown and oxidize; it’s been
revamped, its genes were modified. It grows

If you read it out loud in a ta dum rhythm I think you’ll hear the stresses, the iambic-ness of it. Of course, that’s a terrible way to read the poem for any other purpose, like meaning or feeling, but try it just for now.

Here’s how poetic notation shows the stresses:

The Arc’tic App’le, per’fect app’le, skin’

The syllable before the apostrophe gets the stress. For example, Arc is stressed and tic isn’t. I don’t know how to do it on my computer, but if you want to show the unstressed syllables, you’d put a little u above them.

And here’s how poetic notation shows feet:

The Arc’/tic App’/le, per’/fect app’/le, skin’/

What’s between the slashes is a foot (and the first foot doesn’t start with a slash).

Now let’s look at the word oxidize in this line:

flesh slow to brown and oxidize; it’s been

My professor explained that we look at relative stresses when we scan – figure out – meter. Oxidize is a dactyl; that is, the first syllable is stressed. But if we look at relative stress we notice that we emphasize dize a little more than that i in the middle. Because of relative stress, oxidize works as iambic. If it weren’t for relative stress, metered poetry would be really hard.

It isn’t so hard once you get used to it. If you write ten poems in iambic pentameter you’ll get the feel for it, especially if you use a thesaurus. If you switch words and move words around you can say anything in iambs, because much of English falls naturally into an on-off pattern of unaccented-accented syllables. To make it even easier, it’s okay in an iambic poem to throw in an occasional trochee (called a trochaic substitution) or an occasional extra syllable. It’s also okay to drop the first unaccented syllable in a line and to add an unaccented one at the end. Shakespeare does all of these frequently. Still, most of the poem needs to be in iambs so that a reader can pick up the pattern. Because I’m not very experienced with writing in meter, I try to stick to the straight and narrow, but that’s just me.

Let’s look at these two famous lines from Hamlet:

To be, or not to be–that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

They’re written in iambic pentameter but each has eleven syllables, that last unaccented syllable hanging off the end of each line. Both lines contain trochees, trochaic substitutions. I wouldn’t feel confident enough to do it, but this is Shakespeare.

Here it is with the stresses and the feet:

To be’,/ or not’/ to be’/–that’ is/ the ques’/tion:
Wheth’er/ ’tis no’/bler in’/ the mind’/ to suff’/er

Having said all this in a very long post, I found a neat little shortcut to meter worries. For the beginning of Writer to Writer I wrote a writing spell, which I wanted to have a strong rhythm and to feel spell-like, so I looked at the witches’ spell in Macbeth and I pretty much matched syllables and stresses.

Here are two lines from Macbeth’s witches:

In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,

And this is what I turned them into:

On the paper, laugh or wail,
Days of joy and weeks of woe,

In some of the other lines I altered the syllables slightly but for the most part I stuck to Shakespeare’s meter, and the result has a strong rhythm. There’s nothing wrong with doing this. It’s not cheating.

So here’s a prompt: Pick a poem or a fragment of a Shakespearean play or song lyrics that has a strong rhythm and go syllable by syllable to come up with a new poem with entirely different words (except for the unimportant ones, like and and the).

And here’s another prompt: Look at song lyrics that you like and see what’s going on with the meter. Use what you learn in your own poem.

And another: Pick a poem you’ve already written and revise it so that it’s in iambs. Or write a new poem in iambs. It can be short, say six lines.

If you’re in need of poem topics, here are a few:

• a spell to make something happen or to keep something from happening;

• a poem about winter or something you do in winter or from the POV of winter itself;

• a fairy tale told in a poem.

And here’s a final prompt: Please tell me if this was much too complicated, if you wanted to throw your computer across the room, or if it was interesting, or if I went way too deep into the weeds of poetry. Tell me if you felt moved to try writing in meter. I don’t think I’m going to go into this level of detail in the book – or even if I’ll go into meter at all, but I would welcome feedback.

Next week, rhyme, which is a little less complicated.

Have fun, and save what you write!

The blog on blogging

On September 3, 2012, Leslie Marie wrote, …how about a post about WRITING blogs? Just a thought. I’d like to start one but have absolutely no idea what to write. I think my biggest block is just fear of some sort holding me back!

I follow only one blog, written by a former student about her unfolding experience in the Peace Corps in Moldova. Before, I’m not sure I’d ever heard of Moldova, which used to be part of the Soviet Union and is the poorest country in Europe. Now, I know how warm and friendly people are, how education doesn’t seem to be as highly valued as it might be, how people are forced by poverty to work in other countries, leaving their children behind with other relatives, and on and on. Kerry posts irregularly but frequently, not at all some weeks, several times others. She includes photos and videos and links to articles, but mostly it’s her own fascinating (and well-written!) commentary on her experience. Interestingly, I almost never see any comments. I assume the blog is mostly read by family and friends, and they’re in touch with her in other ways.

Leslie Marie, I’m not sure if one of your fears is about finding blog readers. The way I started to build an audience was entirely accidental. I was invited to write a message for NaNoWriMo-ers and included the URL for this blog, which was pretty new. My message went live, and – boom! – I had followers. Whenever I speak at a school or a conference I give out information on my blog and website. The numbers continue to build, but slowly. In getting ready to write this post I googled “how to bring traffic to a blog” and found an interesting site. If you hope to attract a big audience, you can google, too. To start, however, you can tell everyone you know about your blog and ask them to spread the word if they like it.

I also googled “blogs about writing,” and found lists of the most popular sites, whose subscribers number in the thousands. At this moment I have 434 followers, plus, I’m sure, people who check out the site without ever signing up. The other blogs must have such visitors too. From what I read the most popular bloggers guest post on other blogs and include guest posts on theirs. They also have book giveaways. It seems that people can earn money by blogging, which I do not do – except when reading my blog causes you to buy one of my books. Some sites advertise books about writing written by other authors. If a reader clicks or buys, I’m not sure which or possibly both, the blogger gets paid (very little). I didn’t see general advertising on any of the sites I checked out, but some may carry ads and get paid for clicks that result. One of the blogs had a tab through which a visitor could hire him as a freelance blogger or writer, so that may be another source of income. The writing advice seemed useful. None of it – but I didn’t search extensively – made me sputter in outrage.

For any of you who are thinking about ways to be a writer and still eat while you establish your place in literature, blogging may be part of the picture, but you’ll have to do more research. Social media keep changing. We need to stay up to date.

I’m proud that many readers of this blog are teenagers and that some are even younger and that some of you post comments and questions. And I’m over the moon that you’re wild about writing.

I also clicked on some of your blogs. Agnes, you haven’t kept it up, but I think your idea of a blog as a resource for homeschoolers is great. If you continue with it, please let me know and I’ll post the URL, because, as you probably know, a lot of homeschooled kids read this blog. I suspect there would also be interest from other people (such as me) in what it’s like to be homeschooled – homeschooling is entirely different from my school days.

Agnes, you have a few blogs going, each with a different purpose. That’s terrific, too. You can fool around, try one thing, then another, and another.

One kind of blog can be about yourself and your life. I checked out the blogs of some fellow kids’ book writers, too, and many of them are chronicles of their days along with insights into the sorts of people they are. A friend suggested that I do that, which in a way is making myself – and yourself – a character, because we can never present our whole selves in all our complexity. We have to decide what aspects of us we want to share. I imagine this kind of blog is similar to writing a memoir. The memoirist becomes a character, someone whose company the reader enjoys.

And this sort of a blog would be somewhat like journaling if you were writing for more than yourself. Suppose you visit your Aunt Susan and you blog about the day. Well, you want to give your reader an image of your aunt, so you write that you adore or despise her or love her for the first hour until she starts driving you crazy. You say that she wears her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, and her lipstick is always fading. Is there a brand that sells faint lipstick? you wonder. (You can post photos of her, too.) When you hug her tight you’re surprised again at how thin she is under her big wool sweater. Then she starts questioning you about everything and you’re grateful for her interest until she asks about Nora, your best friend until the two of you fought last week and you really don’t want to talk about that, and you say you don’t want to discuss it and she says, “All the more reason to get it off your chest,” and you’re wishing she had lost her voice.

The point is, we want to include as much detail in our blog as we put in our fiction. Blogging is writing, after all.

This is all amusing and interesting with Aunt Susan, but suppose your thoughts are more hostile than wishing that she’d lost her voice. In your journal, to be read only by you, you might write those angry thoughts. You might let yourself be whiny and resentful. You might wonder why you’re cursed with such a nosy aunt and why she has to heat her house to ninety degrees, and why she can’t cook anything but meatloaf that tastes like shredded cardboard. That’s fine in a private journal. Ranting is one of the joys of journaling. But not in a blog. These things follow us for decades!

(One of the joys of writing fiction is that we can make a character whiny, and no one will connect the character with us.)

And remember that when you post, you are publishing. A blog is a form of e-publishing.

Now that I’ve scared you silly, I think blogging is very worth doing if you’re careful.

In addition to writing about your life in general, you can:

∙ pick a single aspect of your life to blog about, like public or private or home school or babysitting or your writing;

∙ take a journalistic approach and report on doings that interest you;

∙ blog about the news and present your own take on events;

∙ have friends write guest posts;

∙ present interviews of interesting people in your life;

∙ write a how-to, how to make pie crust from scratch, how to paint with watercolors, whatever;

∙ combine all the above.

Like Agnes, I chose to blog about a subject I know well, and my blog is a kind of how-to about writing. I’m very aware of you blog readers out there in cyberspace, so I set a tone, which I hope is friendly, encouraging, down to earth, funny. The blog does create a version of me as a character. I’m friendly, etc., in real life, too – but not always.

I aim for clarity and usefulness. I want you to be able to put my thoughts to work in your stories. If I’m ever less than clear I would welcome being told.

I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t started asking questions. I could have written about what I was grappling with week-to-week in my writing, but I wouldn’t have thought of all the topics you’ve raised. So I’m grateful. If you comment a few times I start to feel that I know you a little. E. S. Ivy, to single you out, I think of you as supremely helpful and supportive. You’re not the only one who helps, though. One of the things I love about the blog is the aid many of you give other writers against the confusion that sometimes afflicts us all.

Then there’s the frequency of your blog. If you’re collecting an audience you don’t want to disappoint them by dropping out of sight for six weeks. Some people post daily, some weekly, and some when the fancy strikes – but I don’t think bloggers in the last group are concentrating on readers. As you all know, I post weekly. If I have to skip a week I give you advance warning.

And there’s length. Some who post every day deliver short bursts. Others write lengthy daily posts; I don’t know how they find the time. I feel I want to give you your money’s worth (hah!), so my posts are substantial and I’m not satisfied until I fill two single-spaced pages and start a third (this post is exceedingly long).

Last: prompts. Naturally not every blog offers prompts, but I do, because what’s a writing blog without exercises? And I love writing them. How do I do it? Well, I consider the problem of the blog, in this case blogging itself. I’ll do it now, to demonstrate. First, what’s inside this post that I can use? Hmm… Aunt Susan! Maybe Nora, too. Where can I find conflict?

And I think about the blog topic itself, in this case blogs. What can I do with that directly? And with the possibility of trouble from exposing oneself unguardedly online?

Here goes. These are the prompts I came up with:

∙ Whether or not you actually set up an online blog, write a post for three different kinds of blogs.

∙ Write a story about your main character Madison and her Aunt Susan. Create an argument. Resolve it happily or not. Have best friend Nora come up.

∙ Madison blogs about the confrontation with Aunt Susan. She’s careful not to write anything that will hurt anyone, or so she thinks, but Nora reads the post and reads between the lines, too. Write Madison’s post and what follows from Nora. Again, resolve it happily, or not.

∙ Madison applies to a music school (or starship school or unicorn training school) she desperately wants to get into. Her audition goes brilliantly well, or so she thinks until the school rejects her. She’s furious and posts her rage on the blog, suggesting that the school’s admission policies are rigged. Write how this post changes her life.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Mountainous hyperbole

An interesting report on the radio this week got me thinking. I may not have it exactly right, but this is what I understood: Researchers compared attitudes toward learning in the U.S. with attitudes in Japan. In the U.S., according to this study, children are praised for catching on quickly, and such kids are called smart. In Japan, children are praised for working hard, and I heard no mention of intelligence. Researchers visited a classroom in both places and gave the children a math problem that was impossible to solve. The American children gave up in under a minute; the Japanese kids struggled for an hour until the researchers told them to stop. The report concluded that each society yielded different weaknesses. Japanese children tolerate prolonged effort well but aren’t very creative, and vice versa. And I thought that we writers are the perfect combo of East and West. We need that creative spark, but it comes to nothing without a lot, A LOT, of hard grunt work, which we may not honor enough. After all, I felt embarrassed when the last novel, whatever its name will be, took so long. I thought it should have come more easily, but now I’m taking comfort. Writers have it all!

Now onto this week’s topic. On September 1, 2012, Leslie Marie, aka Kilmeny-of-the-Ozarks, wrote, I have a writing question. It’s about the use of hyperbole. I was reading an excellent article on the subject this morning and it reminded me of an instance where my writing instructor said I had used hyperbole and should delete it.

The problem is, my story is Christian fantasy based on Norse myth–and the hyperbole was the World Ash Tree that, according to myth, the world is built upon. I described the trunk of a tree as “larger than a mountain.” I didn’t think it hyperbole but logical for my imagined world–if it’s holding up the whole world then surely it would be bigger than the mountains! She said it’s too big a stretch of the imagination.

My instructor has been very helpful, so I want to listen and learn, but this seems like a necessary “hyperbole” for my story! The article I mentioned, used Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series (e-texts can be found on Project Gutenberg–fun read!) for an example–that hyperbole doesn’t work well when everything is stretched to the limit. Like all the women are gorgeous, all the bad guys are the cruelest he’s ever met, the hero has no faults…but it seemed to me that I had enough contrasts in my story for the huge tree to stand out…

So, I guess what I’m asking is, what do you think of hyperbole? How can it be done well and when should it be avoided?

First off, the comparison between a tree that supports a world and a mountain doesn’t seem like hyperbole to me, just a reasonable comparison that gives the reader a sense of scale, a way to judge size.

But I do agree with the article about hyperbole overload. When everyone and every feature of landscape are maxed out, that sense of scale is erased. It doesn’t sound like you did that.

Generally, I like hyperbole because hyperbolic language is lively and economical. Here’s an example from my Dave at Night in which Dave describes Mr. Bloom, the superintendent of the orphanage where he’s just been left. Mr. Bloom is the main villain of the book.

Mr. Bloom was huge, not fat. His chest and head loomed over his desk like the Hebrew Home for Boys loomed over Broadway. He pushed back his chair and stood up. Scraping against the wall on the way, he walked around to my side of his desk and bent down to inspect me through thick spectacles. He smiled, showing a million teeth.

I guess there are two examples of hyperbole here, the comparison between Mr. Bloom looming and the orphanage dominating the street, and the million teeth. The reader knows he doesn’t have that many, but she gets the picture: big, fake smile showing lots of teeth, which I could have said straight out, something like this, Mr. Doom’s big smile, which revealed a lot of teeth, seemed fake. See? It’s not as lively, and it uses up more words; it’s not economical.

Besides, hyperbole gives an opportunity for character development. Imagine Phil is describing Zelda, a very short person (like me). Will he say she’s small as a Barbie doll or a hamster or a dot of dust in sunlight? The answer suggests the cast of Phil’s mind by the kind of similes he’s drawn to.

We can also use hyperbole to reveal a character’s emotional state. In the grip of terror, a character can see a threat unrealistically, hyperbolically. The gun in the mugger’s hand can seem to glow; the mugger himself can appear seven feet tall. In the grips of romance, Phil can describe Zelda to his friend Petra as having emerald eyes, skin as perfect as satin, and the delicacy of a butterfly. Petra, who’s maybe a wee bit jealous, meets Zelda and comes up with her own hyperboles when she thinks, Yeah, right. Eyes the exact color of pus, the kind of thin skin that makes you look eighty by the time you’re thirty, and skinny as a pencil.

The barbie-hamster-dust simile, whichever is chosen, when delivered by an impartial narrator, gives a sense of Zelda. A hamster creates quite a different picture in a reader’s imagination than Barbie does. And dust in sunlight is fascinating. Is Zelda dirty? Fragile? Both? We can’t wait to learn more about her.

Hyperbole is characteristic of tall tales and part of their charm. For example, the fish that got away was as big as a whale. When we use wild hyperbole we employ a technique of tall tales that adds flavor to our story. I say, go for it.

Here are three prompts:

∙ Write a tall tale about one of your friends or someone in your family. Pick one of her most important qualities and exaggerate it and its effects. For example, my father was pretty charming, so in my tale I might have him charm the painted bird off a plate and go on from there.

∙ Pick a character in one of your stories and describe him hyperbolically. Go way over the top. Consider the result and, if any of it fits, insert that part of the description in your story.

∙ Fairy tales, which deal in exaggeration, are perfect for hyperbole. Retell a fairy tale loading up on the hyperbole. Don’t worry about overdoing. If it gets funny, so much the better.

Have fun, and save what you write!

In the rearview mirror

On August 4, 2012, MNM wrote, I’ve been working on a story that is written in first person and I’m having issues with putting in the background or writing flashbacks. I can bring them into the story easily enough, but I am having trouble getting back on track without a choppy transition. Any tips?

Here’s a confession: I’ve started to put together a second writing book, this one based on the blog, and I’m about to write a chapter on flashbacks and back story, so this question is exactly on time. Thank you, MNM!

The first consideration with back story (background) and flashbacks is whether they’re needed. If not, I say leave ‘em out. No matter how smooth our transition, the reader has to quit the forward movement of our tale to journey to an earlier time and, often, a different place. When he returns he has to get immersed all over again.

Let’s go back to last week’s post about Queenie, the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, who specializes in shouting, “Off with his head!” Suppose Queenie’s love of execution comes from a childhood tragedy. Her father, Daddy Card, the late King of Hearts, was assassinated, stabbed in the neck, eek! The assassin was never found, but the Chief Constable and Queenie are convinced he or she is still at court. We want the reader to understand Queenie, maybe have some sympathy for her, so we decide to show what happened. There are lots of choices.

One way is a flashback. We want a smooth transition so we plan it ahead of time. Let’s say Daddy Card liked to write lengthy letters to family and friends on pale purple stationery in his distinctive spidery handwriting. In present time, Queenie is in her study when a Nine of Clubs, a servant, brings in her mail, among which is a letter in a pale purple envelope, not the exact tint Daddy Card favored, but close. Hands trembling, she picks up the tiny silver dagger she uses as a letter opener, and thinks, Ten years in a month.

That day she’d been in this room, too, opening replies to her birthday party invitations. She’d issued eighty-nine invitations, and eighty-nine children had accepted. As she was mounding the responses in a triumphant pile, feet had thudded in the corridor outside. She hardly heeded – the servants were always rushing about. Then came a soft knock, her lady-in-waiting’s shy tap, but an instant later the woman opened without permission.

We’re in. Notice that I started with had been and had dispatched, but switched to simple past in the sentence, The servants were always rushing about. That sentence marks the complete shift to the earlier time.

The flashback continues. We see the shaken maid delivering the terrible news. Whatever follows follows: weeping, rushing out of the room, going to Mommy Card, could be anything. Finally we bring Queenie back to the study and start the return transition:

She sat dully at her desk and stared without comprehension at the party replies. Oh, she’d finally remembered, the girl she used to be was going to have a celebration. For the first time, on that sad, long-ago day, she’d collected her hair in a bun at the back of her neck. Then she’d picked up another letter and had slit it open.

The mauve envelope in her hand now had nothing to do with a party. There was no party. She hated parties. Who would be stupid enough to choose this color?

And we’re back. Did you see that I repeated the tense switch on the return? Two devices make the transition smooth: the tense shift and an action that bridges the gap in time, in this case opening the mail.

But if we don’t want to interrupt the story, what are our other choices?

Suppose Queenie always touches her throat before calling for an execution. If Kingie, who thoroughly understands his wife, manages to put his arm around her quickly enough, she relaxes and doesn’t give the order. A newcomer to court can observe this and ask her uncle to explain. In a short bit of dialogue the father’s assassination can be revealed.

If we’re writing in Queenie’s POV, the revelation can come in thoughts, something like, Ten years in a month. I was nicer before the assassin. Then we go back to the action. Five pages later, she might think something else, like, Dr. Two of Spades says I lost my father at a girl’s most formative moment, no matter how he died. What a Two he is! She makes a weighing gesture with her hands. Heart attack – assassination. Heart attack – assassination. Not the same. More action. Later on she can finish the back story by thinking, I probably killed the assassin long ago, but as long as he could still be playing croquet, I’ll keep the executions coming.

If we’re writing from another character’s POV, he can be present for one of Queenie’s execution orders and think about the past in a sentence or two.

Or the reader can do without. Everyone knows Queenie orders people’s heads off. It’s one of the facts of her rule. People avoid playing croquet with her and are terrified when they have to. The history doesn’t have to come to the fore. If she’s an important character, we can show her touching her throat, loving Kingie, seeming relieved when her husband pardons people. She’ll come off as a complex character. Excellent.

I would ask the same questions about a back story as about a flashback, and if I can, I would do without.

But suppose you need to put it in and the back story is the history of this card kingdom. Let’s imagine that Alice has a mission in Wonderland and in order to have a chance she has to understand the place. She can find a tome about it in her parents’ library, and we can put a page of the book right in the story. We can have her stop in the middle to gasp or to get a glass of water, whatever. For suspense, we can have her leave the room for the water and find the book gone when she comes back. She knows part of the story and she has to find out the rest, which moves the back story into the front. She can ask the university historian, and we can include their conversation. If we break up the back story, again we haven’t suspended the forward story for very long. In the first instance, we leave the back story to get the glass of water. In the second, the historian can look at his watch and say he has to teach, and we’re out. The trick, I think, is to plant the seeds for the return from the back story in the way it begins, for example, with an action that the character can return to.

Here are four prompts:

∙ The White Rabbit is hopping ahead of Alice. From his POV write a flashback that explains his urgency. In Lewis Carroll’s story, he and Alice separate and the story follows her. Stick with him and invent what happens.

∙ Write the back story that explains the history of the card monarchy.

∙ Let’s use a modern weather event, Hurricane Sandy or a tornado or a blizzard, and have Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz show up in it. Provide a back story to explain how she got there.

∙ After an election I always wonder how it feels to be the winner or the loser, but a prompt on the actual election seems too close to home, so let’s imagine one in the republic of Tulipe, where Mistress Prunette of the Globule Party ousted Master Rosto of the Concavities. Each has asked to be alone for a few minutes to reflect on the contest. Write a flashback for each that gives personal meaning to the outcome.

Have fun, and save what you write!