MetaFic

they are presented as memory - in other words, if the narrator is telling a story and so he or she relates it as though it's spoken, and not like the narrator just dropped a paperback in your lap and said, "here, read this while I have some coffee."

The way I avoid it is by telling my story out of order. That way there's no recognizable past. :)

ah, but that's the beauty of your writing. I have used your story with my students, thanks for allowing it (on SIYE). A bunch of my kids are Potterheads, and most of them are just really enjoying your vocabulary. (this is totally random, I know, but thanks again)- Jeanne Sorry this was in reply to rbackwards' comment that was there for a minute and now I don't see it- I think I'm having an Alice in Wonderland moment. Sorry about that.

Does that mean it's anything like imminent?

What I should have said is that chapter twenty is full of strange words, chapter nineteen has a few, and it's as imminent as having a newborn will allow. I'm getting close to done with it. Trying to set the third piece correctly.

What bugs me about flashbacks, as it's been said, is when they're overly obvious. I read a story not too long ago in which every time one came up, there would be a large "FLASHBACK", followed at its conclusion by "END FLASHBACK". I think the text was also italicized and perhaps something else was there to indicate it as well. It was kind of like driving by neon billboards advertising casinos, starting thirty miles outside of Las Vegas and continuing until the pavement started. You know, "Hey! Over here!"

Aside from rampant Flashback!Markers, Flashback!Italics, Flashback!Three-Sentence-Scenes, Flashback!Inheritance-of-Billions, . . .

I'd suggest it boils down to the weight of the matter. If the flashback moment would take more than perhaps 50% of the same word-count in summarizing prose, and exceeds ~500 words minimum, then I'd rather read a well-crafted scene set in the right time than a Flashback!Abuse construct. Otherwise, your desire to see so-called flashbacks in prose directly is one I can agree with.

For example, there's no way I'm going to write the (large number of) various timeline moments in Echoes as inline prose, rather than standalone scenes.

…and on this very site…is in the first chapter of TLT. Dumbledore is recalling his conversation with Moody and McGonagall about the risk/benefit of bringing in the "Dark Magic Specialists", which also touches on several other angles. It neatly sets up the revelation of who the "Specialists" really are, and paints a nice little character portrait of the three participants. It would not work nearly so well as a second-hand description of Dumbledore's memory of the conversation.

This example demonstrates how flashbacks are an inevitable consequence of commencing a story in medias res. I suppose the basic question is whether some authors really ought to be using that kind of literary device if they can't handle it.

That chapter works fine for me, but I think the reason that people might not think it works so well is the format. It just seems like a regular chapter, same as all the others, when it really is not.

If it were to be published in hard-copy, it could be made a feature: different fonts and layout would spice it up and make it clear that these are newspaper cuttings from the past. There's so much you can do on hard-copy that electronic publishers are still struggling to emulate successfully. That said, there are probably ways you could manage it even with the restrictions imposed by the various sites you'e publishing at. I'm sure there's a few formatting tweaks we could apply that would make those cuttings work better: maybe some font changes, and probably a bounding-box would help, although I don't know whether the HTML filter will let that through.