So, little help maybe?
I'm currently writing a novel (my sixth) that has two main characters that meet. My idea is to have their past and what brought them to the point of their meeting told through flashbacks but I'm struggling a bit with weaving in the flashbacks and worried about confusing the reader.
My main issue is that the story is in third person limited perspective. It is fairly easy to show the reader when the focus character is going into a flashback. Much harder when it's another character that is not in the narration focus...
Right now, the best ideas I have are to either:
1- Write from one character's perspective with a triggered flashback, then do the other character's flashback, kind of tacked on and when the perspective returns to the present tell from character 2's POV.
2- Write from character 1, do flashback, come back to present and write the next part of the scene from character 2's perspective, then flashback.
3- Write straight from the beginning of both of their stories and essentially write non-intersecting plotlines which eventually collide in the meeting...
With 1, I feel like this will work once the reader goes through it a couple of times and sees the formula of present, flashback, flashback, present. This is the way I've started writing it and when I first started it seemed to really be confusing as I started with the non-POV character. Switching it around helps a bit, but is still wonky.
I like 2 more, but my worry is that by having to constantly jump back to present to tell the story I feel like the tone will get really stilted. One advantage to this is the present plot is pretty positive while the flashback scenes will most likely be pretty dark. Increasing the breaks might make the tone a little more light, but I don't really think that's what I'm going for.
3 would be the way I would normally write, starting at the beginning, but there are wildly different timeframes on the character flashbacks with one only going back a couple of years while the other goes back more than twice as long. Though, I could simplify and just have both take place concurrently...
Okay so maybe I just talked myself into a solution, but I'd still be interested to see how other's would handle it.
I'm currently writing a novel (my sixth) that has two main characters that meet. My idea is to have their past and what brought them to the point of their meeting told through flashbacks but I'm struggling a bit with weaving in the flashbacks and worried about confusing the reader.
My main issue is that the story is in third person limited perspective. It is fairly easy to show the reader when the focus character is going into a flashback. Much harder when it's another character that is not in the narration focus...
Right now, the best ideas I have are to either:
1- Write from one character's perspective with a triggered flashback, then do the other character's flashback, kind of tacked on and when the perspective returns to the present tell from character 2's POV.
2- Write from character 1, do flashback, come back to present and write the next part of the scene from character 2's perspective, then flashback.
3- Write straight from the beginning of both of their stories and essentially write non-intersecting plotlines which eventually collide in the meeting...
With 1, I feel like this will work once the reader goes through it a couple of times and sees the formula of present, flashback, flashback, present. This is the way I've started writing it and when I first started it seemed to really be confusing as I started with the non-POV character. Switching it around helps a bit, but is still wonky.
I like 2 more, but my worry is that by having to constantly jump back to present to tell the story I feel like the tone will get really stilted. One advantage to this is the present plot is pretty positive while the flashback scenes will most likely be pretty dark. Increasing the breaks might make the tone a little more light, but I don't really think that's what I'm going for.
3 would be the way I would normally write, starting at the beginning, but there are wildly different timeframes on the character flashbacks with one only going back a couple of years while the other goes back more than twice as long. Though, I could simplify and just have both take place concurrently...
Okay so maybe I just talked myself into a solution, but I'd still be interested to see how other's would handle it.