On deciding how to tell a story
Apr. 27th, 2019 02:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
breathedoutCross-posting my response to this excellent writing ask I received on Tumblr, since I am still not really Over There. But I do occasionally check my messages, and this one was too good to pass up.
Hi there! Aw, I'm so glad my writing posts have been useful to you! I'm not generally on Tumblr anymore (... *looks shifty*), but this is such a great question I'm answering it here as well as mirrored on my Dreamwidth, which is my current main internet home in the wake of CensorGate 2k18.
I've been turning it over in my mind, and I think the answer is that this kind of thing isn't really separate for me, from—certainly not from establishing the plot beats, and not really from the rest of the aspects you mention, either. Since I see that you reblogged this post in its original Tumblr incarnation, I'll continue with the development of the Rambouillet story to try to dig in a little deeper.
For others following along, you probably want to read the original post, but the TL;DR version is that I live-blogged developing a storyline/plot structure from a passage in Colette, in which a woman looks back on an erotically-charged relationship she had with a woman who was a rival for the affection of a single man—their rivalry having turned to friendship in later years. I identified the locus of my interest in this anecdote as the interplay between the two relationship dynamics (the earlier "Malevolent Dynamic" and the later "Comradely Dynamic"); zeroed in on a key scene that I knew I wanted to build around ("Street Scene"), and established the general arc of the women's relationship as the two of them experience it in real time. At the point where I left the post, I'd narrowed this to one of two potential plot structures:
I then said:
So, here some of the kinds of things you're asking about are coming in: which scenes happen on-screen, what is the "now" of the story versus what happens in flashback; how much time the story covers; what the pacing looks like; the order of the scenes, etc. But I will note that, although I have a broad trajectory of how the characters experience what happens to them, I don't yet have the plot beats, or even the "main conflict" of this story as a story. Although they cover the same exact character experiences, Outlinelet #1 above is much more a story about late-middle-aged female companionship, in which the main conflict is a coming-to-terms with the loss of, and enjoying one's recompense for, the desperately-felt passion of one's youth; whereas Outlinelet #2 is more a story about quasi-repressed female/female eroticism, in which the main conflict hinges on the urgent, conflicted energy expended in the sexually-charged rivalry between the two women. Not that the main focus of #1 is absent from #2 or vice versa, but there's definitely a different emphasis.
I think a lot of that is pretty self-evident (maybe?), but I'm bringing it up because, at least for me, the process of "how the story becomes a story" doesn't necessarily follow a set order or hierarchy of priorities. Maybe the plot beats and primary conflict will precede the structural decisions, but maybe it'll be the other way around. Maybe what I really feel like writing right now is a technically-challenging, conflictedly nostalgic story with a non-chronological presentation and an air of the eerie; in which case that desire might dictate a main conflict focused on quasi-repressed violent eroticism. Or maybe I feel like writing a more wry yet comforting story, in which the reader is taken by the hand to a balcony overlooking the past, where a companionable narrator leads them through events in a logical order: that might dictate a main conflict focused on companionship and maturation. Those things will be decided in tandem with the more structural decisions you're talking about, because the structure needs to support the content and vice versa. (I will also say: either of these structures could stretch to novel length, but the shortest version of #2 is much longer than the shortest version of #1. So my main conflict could even be determined by whether I feel like writing a long story or a shorter one.)
So, let's play this out a little further. One thing I always find helpful to ask when answering the kinds of questions you posed above is: where is the tension coming from for the reader? This question becomes particularly obvious when I think about non-chronological approaches, because I won't necessarily have the "What happens next?" source of tension: the reader may know what happens next (in this case: the women get older, ditch the guy and become friends), so there needs to be some other source of tension to keep drawing them in. If I go with Option #2 above, then at least some of that tension will come from the question "What is going on with this interaction between these two friends? Why, when they are generally so tangibly and appreciatively companionable, do they sometimes attempt to antagonize each other in this very pointed way? What do they want, when they do this? Why does it fail, and what does it mean that it fails?" Those are the questions to which I want the final Street Scene—with its conflicted, yet unrelieved and therefore almost more-than-orgasmically intense eroticism—to be the answer.
So that becomes kind of a guidepost for laying out the structure, the scenes that should be included, etc. I like the notion that, for the reader, the visceral, subjective, in-the-moment reality of the Street Scene should be difficult to access, because it's become difficult for the women themselves to access it as well. In the same way that they can only glimpse, occasionally, a hint of their former dynamic, and can't fully recapture what it was like to live it, the reader's approach to understanding should also feel like an accumulation of glimpses around corners, or through windows, or veils. This kind of thing is necessarily gradual, and it means I'll need quite a bit of on-the-page action in the Comradely Dynamic in order for the Malevolent Dynamic to be the contrast enticingly glimpsed. There will also need, I would imagine, to be some kind of catalyzing incident around which I can organize the two present-day characters relating to their shared past. Presumably they don't go around thinking 24/7 about this past phase of their lives, but for the purposes of this story I need them to think about it with some persistence over a (probably) relatively condensed period, so that I can give the reader repeated glimpses of their past from different angles.
What might catalyze this kind of concentrated dwelling on the past, in two people who have generally more or less moved on with their lives? The immediate thing that occurs is that they might hear something about the man for whose affection they fought. Receiving some news of him, after years of not knowing what he's up to, would certainly explain a tendency to think back on the days when they knew him. And if this piece of news is something that requires sustained engagement on the part of the women, that would be even better for creating my desired accumulation of glimpses around corners. Add to this that a theme of this story is already "the irrecoverability of the past," and let's say: the dude dies. The women hear of his death, and the sustained process of engagement I was looking for becomes the preparation for, and attendance at, his funeral—which, as friends, they go to together. If the funeral is in a different city then they might even travel together, to share costs. A journey is always a nice structural container for a story, and if the women are spending an extended period in each others' company, for a reason related to their former lover, then it makes a lot of sense that they would repeatedly approach the topic, both in conversation and in their own minds, of how things used to be back when they both loved this guy, and were enemies of one another.
So now I've got a story whose "now" covers somewhere between, I'd say, two days and a week; which starts roughly when these two women hear of their former lover's death, and takes them some way through the trip to his funeral—possibly through the end of it, possibly a little bit past the end of it, but largely constrained by the preparations for, and execution of, the funeral trip. Everything depicted on the page which happens outside that 2-7 day timeframe will be some variety of flashback(ish), or disclosed via dialogue. I know that, very early on in the story, I want them to have an interaction where they try, ultimately unsuccessfully, to egg each other back to their old sexually-charged Malevolent Dynamic; but I want it to be obscure to the reader what exactly they're doing, and why they might be doing it now. It should read as a sort of weird, cruel note in their otherwise supportive and friendly vibe. Understanding as I do what's going on with them, though, it makes sense to me that this egging-on would happen as part of the initial conversation in which they hear about, or one breaks the news to the other about, the guy's death—although I would want to arrange the scene in such a way that the connection there isn't immediately obvious. (One thing that occurs: if one of the women already knows about this death but the other one doesn't, then the one who knows could initiate the egging-on before broaching the subject of the death; this way it would seem less like a reaction to the first-time reader.) I also know that the Street Scene is what I'm building toward, as the final scene in the story, and that in between the obscure-to-the-reader initial egging-on and the Street Scene, I want a series of scenes in which the women, jointly or singly, attempt to approach or recapture the lived reality of this past phase of their lives.
The present-day framework of those brackets will be organized around the events involved in preparing for a funeral: deciding what to wear, packing a bag, going together to the station, the journey on the train, settling into the hotel room, finding dinner in a strange city, bedtime preparations and interactions; the funeral itself; the journey home; etc. Obviously not all of that needs to happen on the page, but the main thing is that I have a lot of options; the parts I use will be determined by the trajectory of the flashbacks(again, ish—more on this later) that I want to engineer.
The crafting of the disclosure-of-the-past trajectory is now the main task. Its job should be to reveal to the reader—gradually, yet in an unpredictable, not-controlled-by-the-characters way—what was up with these women and this man; what their dynamic used to be, how they both related to him; how they related to each other. I'd go about this, I think, by breaking down what needs to be revealed into discrete pieces:
Some of these pieces will be revealed right away; others should be kept back longer. Many of them could be revealed or partially revealed—implied, hinted at, etc.—through conversation, which makes good use of present-day spaces like the train carriage, the hotel room, the dinner restaurant, and so on: extended periods when these two women will be enclosed together with reason to think about this man, and the women they were when they knew him. Others might be better grappled with via internal narration, for which solitary present-day spaces might be better: a woman alone in her bedroom, deciding what to wear; in a restaurant, waiting for the other woman to come back from the toilets; in bed, mulling things over after the other woman has fallen asleep. To get the best haphazard-glimpses-around-a-corner effect, these revelations will probably be presented out of order, in a referential way: for example, one woman might think, as she is packing her bag, about the odd disconnectedness in the relation of a funeral-goer to the person who used to inhabit the corpse; and how in a way it's fitting, because even back when the three of them knew each other her former lover had no idea of vast swathes of her inner landscape: that taken up by the other woman, for instance. This gets Point #9 above while not necessarily clarifying #'s 1-8. The women, after all, are not laying out a reasoned argument for the reader, but reflecting on their own shared past lives, which they (sort of) already know.
That "sort of" gets at the other real keystone issue with this story, which is that, while the items on the list above are all more or less facts, there's a big difference between disclosing facts and actually being able to recapture lived experience; and to a certain extent the haphazard revelation of facts to the reader is standing in for the haphazard recapture of lived experience by the characters. I kind of got at this earlier, and it's what I meant by that parenthetical "ish" I added to the word "flashbacks": in a lot of cases, maybe even every case except the Street Scene, I want any flashbacks to be… I'll say "unsuccessful." Or only partially successful. This is a period of these women's lives that is no longer (generally) viscerally accessible to them: so how do you relate to those periods of your life that now seem remote? You can talk about the events that happened, with a certain detachment or even incredulity, or with nostalgia; you can try to remember the feelings you felt, although they now seem far away. You can attempt to put timelines in order: this happened after that, and before another thing. You can second-guess yourself, or practice revisionary history: surely I didn't really feel THIS; surely I wasn't THAT upset: it seems unbelievable, now. In talking with another person about a shared memory, they can offer new information that seems to contradict your own knowledge, or puts your own memory in a new light. You can forcibly try to put yourself back in the same mindset that was once customary for you, either just by force of will or by revisiting people or places you spent time with back in the day. But, at least in my experience, the results of all that stuff tend to lack the immediacy and transparency of a traditional flashback, where events are being narrated as if you're right there experiencing them in the present tense. So a lot of the effect that I want, with the pacing and the gradual revelations in the story structure here, is to simulate the experience of working to recapture your previous self, with only partial and imperfect results. Then I'll need some sort of Proustian madeleine to jump-start the more visceral, complete-feeling flashback to the Street Scene; I'm not sure what it will be but I like the idea of it happening after the women have returned from the funeral, and parted from one another; when one of them might happen upon something in her house that sort of unexpectedly unlocks this vivid memory.
That is over three thousand words so maybe it's time to stop typing about this?? Did I answer your question?? Ahahahaha I'M LEGIT NOT SURE. But I did reignite my own interest in the Rambouillet story, so that's something. Follow-up questions welcomed & encouraged. :-)
@tractata said: Hey, I love your writing posts & they’ve helped me think about writing in a new way, so thanks so much! I was wondering if you’ve covered narrativizing the plot of a story anywhere. Once you’ve established the characters’ urges/motivations, plot beats, main conflicts, etc., how do you decide which scenes to depict (vs summarize/allude to/interweave somehow), the chronological span/pacing of the narrative/sections, the order of the scenes, flashbacks, etc.? No worries if you can’t answer!
Hi there! Aw, I'm so glad my writing posts have been useful to you! I'm not generally on Tumblr anymore (... *looks shifty*), but this is such a great question I'm answering it here as well as mirrored on my Dreamwidth, which is my current main internet home in the wake of CensorGate 2k18.
I've been turning it over in my mind, and I think the answer is that this kind of thing isn't really separate for me, from—certainly not from establishing the plot beats, and not really from the rest of the aspects you mention, either. Since I see that you reblogged this post in its original Tumblr incarnation, I'll continue with the development of the Rambouillet story to try to dig in a little deeper.
For others following along, you probably want to read the original post, but the TL;DR version is that I live-blogged developing a storyline/plot structure from a passage in Colette, in which a woman looks back on an erotically-charged relationship she had with a woman who was a rival for the affection of a single man—their rivalry having turned to friendship in later years. I identified the locus of my interest in this anecdote as the interplay between the two relationship dynamics (the earlier "Malevolent Dynamic" and the later "Comradely Dynamic"); zeroed in on a key scene that I knew I wanted to build around ("Street Scene"), and established the general arc of the women's relationship as the two of them experience it in real time. At the point where I left the post, I'd narrowed this to one of two potential plot structures:
- After establishing the Comradely Dynamic and then gradually via flashbacks introducing the Malevolent Dynamic [including Street Scene], end with an interaction like the one the narrator mentions, where the two women attempt to egg each other back into Malevolent Dynamic, almost succeed, and then… collapse back into Comradely Dynamic.
- After establishing the Comradely Dynamic, introduce an interaction like the one described (an attempt to egg each other back into Malevolent Dynamic, near success, followed by collapse), which the reader won’t totally understand as it’s happening; then gradually, via flashbacks, work back into an understanding of Malevolent Dynamic, and end with Street Scene.
I then said:
Either, I think, could produce an interesting story. #2 is definitely going to be more technically challenging, because it involves more teasing of the reader’s incomplete knowledge, and I’d have to put some thought into how to get the bridge back into Malevolent Dynamic working. That could be a plus or a minus, depending on whether I’m feeling like a technical challenge. The two options are also going to end on slightly different notes. I’d say #2 is overall more sharply nostalgic, even regretful: ending with a memory, especially a very vividly-held memory, is almost always a palpably nostalgic move. With #1, that nostalgic feeling will still be present, but I’ll be ending on a more forward-looking note, and one that reaffirms the tangible value of the more comradely current relationship between the two women.
So, here some of the kinds of things you're asking about are coming in: which scenes happen on-screen, what is the "now" of the story versus what happens in flashback; how much time the story covers; what the pacing looks like; the order of the scenes, etc. But I will note that, although I have a broad trajectory of how the characters experience what happens to them, I don't yet have the plot beats, or even the "main conflict" of this story as a story. Although they cover the same exact character experiences, Outlinelet #1 above is much more a story about late-middle-aged female companionship, in which the main conflict is a coming-to-terms with the loss of, and enjoying one's recompense for, the desperately-felt passion of one's youth; whereas Outlinelet #2 is more a story about quasi-repressed female/female eroticism, in which the main conflict hinges on the urgent, conflicted energy expended in the sexually-charged rivalry between the two women. Not that the main focus of #1 is absent from #2 or vice versa, but there's definitely a different emphasis.
I think a lot of that is pretty self-evident (maybe?), but I'm bringing it up because, at least for me, the process of "how the story becomes a story" doesn't necessarily follow a set order or hierarchy of priorities. Maybe the plot beats and primary conflict will precede the structural decisions, but maybe it'll be the other way around. Maybe what I really feel like writing right now is a technically-challenging, conflictedly nostalgic story with a non-chronological presentation and an air of the eerie; in which case that desire might dictate a main conflict focused on quasi-repressed violent eroticism. Or maybe I feel like writing a more wry yet comforting story, in which the reader is taken by the hand to a balcony overlooking the past, where a companionable narrator leads them through events in a logical order: that might dictate a main conflict focused on companionship and maturation. Those things will be decided in tandem with the more structural decisions you're talking about, because the structure needs to support the content and vice versa. (I will also say: either of these structures could stretch to novel length, but the shortest version of #2 is much longer than the shortest version of #1. So my main conflict could even be determined by whether I feel like writing a long story or a shorter one.)
So, let's play this out a little further. One thing I always find helpful to ask when answering the kinds of questions you posed above is: where is the tension coming from for the reader? This question becomes particularly obvious when I think about non-chronological approaches, because I won't necessarily have the "What happens next?" source of tension: the reader may know what happens next (in this case: the women get older, ditch the guy and become friends), so there needs to be some other source of tension to keep drawing them in. If I go with Option #2 above, then at least some of that tension will come from the question "What is going on with this interaction between these two friends? Why, when they are generally so tangibly and appreciatively companionable, do they sometimes attempt to antagonize each other in this very pointed way? What do they want, when they do this? Why does it fail, and what does it mean that it fails?" Those are the questions to which I want the final Street Scene—with its conflicted, yet unrelieved and therefore almost more-than-orgasmically intense eroticism—to be the answer.
So that becomes kind of a guidepost for laying out the structure, the scenes that should be included, etc. I like the notion that, for the reader, the visceral, subjective, in-the-moment reality of the Street Scene should be difficult to access, because it's become difficult for the women themselves to access it as well. In the same way that they can only glimpse, occasionally, a hint of their former dynamic, and can't fully recapture what it was like to live it, the reader's approach to understanding should also feel like an accumulation of glimpses around corners, or through windows, or veils. This kind of thing is necessarily gradual, and it means I'll need quite a bit of on-the-page action in the Comradely Dynamic in order for the Malevolent Dynamic to be the contrast enticingly glimpsed. There will also need, I would imagine, to be some kind of catalyzing incident around which I can organize the two present-day characters relating to their shared past. Presumably they don't go around thinking 24/7 about this past phase of their lives, but for the purposes of this story I need them to think about it with some persistence over a (probably) relatively condensed period, so that I can give the reader repeated glimpses of their past from different angles.
What might catalyze this kind of concentrated dwelling on the past, in two people who have generally more or less moved on with their lives? The immediate thing that occurs is that they might hear something about the man for whose affection they fought. Receiving some news of him, after years of not knowing what he's up to, would certainly explain a tendency to think back on the days when they knew him. And if this piece of news is something that requires sustained engagement on the part of the women, that would be even better for creating my desired accumulation of glimpses around corners. Add to this that a theme of this story is already "the irrecoverability of the past," and let's say: the dude dies. The women hear of his death, and the sustained process of engagement I was looking for becomes the preparation for, and attendance at, his funeral—which, as friends, they go to together. If the funeral is in a different city then they might even travel together, to share costs. A journey is always a nice structural container for a story, and if the women are spending an extended period in each others' company, for a reason related to their former lover, then it makes a lot of sense that they would repeatedly approach the topic, both in conversation and in their own minds, of how things used to be back when they both loved this guy, and were enemies of one another.
So now I've got a story whose "now" covers somewhere between, I'd say, two days and a week; which starts roughly when these two women hear of their former lover's death, and takes them some way through the trip to his funeral—possibly through the end of it, possibly a little bit past the end of it, but largely constrained by the preparations for, and execution of, the funeral trip. Everything depicted on the page which happens outside that 2-7 day timeframe will be some variety of flashback(ish), or disclosed via dialogue. I know that, very early on in the story, I want them to have an interaction where they try, ultimately unsuccessfully, to egg each other back to their old sexually-charged Malevolent Dynamic; but I want it to be obscure to the reader what exactly they're doing, and why they might be doing it now. It should read as a sort of weird, cruel note in their otherwise supportive and friendly vibe. Understanding as I do what's going on with them, though, it makes sense to me that this egging-on would happen as part of the initial conversation in which they hear about, or one breaks the news to the other about, the guy's death—although I would want to arrange the scene in such a way that the connection there isn't immediately obvious. (One thing that occurs: if one of the women already knows about this death but the other one doesn't, then the one who knows could initiate the egging-on before broaching the subject of the death; this way it would seem less like a reaction to the first-time reader.) I also know that the Street Scene is what I'm building toward, as the final scene in the story, and that in between the obscure-to-the-reader initial egging-on and the Street Scene, I want a series of scenes in which the women, jointly or singly, attempt to approach or recapture the lived reality of this past phase of their lives.
- Two friends meet; converse (establish familiar, comradely dynamic). Striking a note that seems unusual, one of them attempts to antagonize the other; the other woman picks up on this and antagonizes her back; there's a spark of something, which then collapses. They move on to other topics. Eventual semi-casual disclosure by one to the other, of the death of their erstwhile lover. The funeral is two days hence in a city two hours away by train; they decide, on a whim, to go together and split expenses.
- [
- [
- [
- [
- [
- [
- Street Scene (text copy/pasted with some editing from my previous post): Visceral body-memory, triggered by [what? Something unlooked-for], of one woman's past self: walking down a public street with her male lover; and suddenly feeling, piercingly clear and visceral, the sensation on her skin and in her guts of the other woman’s malevolent remote attention. This “upsets” her. She is possibly panting in public, very “upset.” She is wholly occupied in “thinking of” the other woman. The man is inquiring what could be wrong: perhaps it is the sun? Yes, she says, and squirms in her voluminous skirts on the park bench onto which he’s lowered her. All she can think of is the prism-focused beam of the other woman’s regard. She can almost feel her touch. It’s very. Upsetting.
The present-day framework of those brackets will be organized around the events involved in preparing for a funeral: deciding what to wear, packing a bag, going together to the station, the journey on the train, settling into the hotel room, finding dinner in a strange city, bedtime preparations and interactions; the funeral itself; the journey home; etc. Obviously not all of that needs to happen on the page, but the main thing is that I have a lot of options; the parts I use will be determined by the trajectory of the flashbacks(again, ish—more on this later) that I want to engineer.
The crafting of the disclosure-of-the-past trajectory is now the main task. Its job should be to reveal to the reader—gradually, yet in an unpredictable, not-controlled-by-the-characters way—what was up with these women and this man; what their dynamic used to be, how they both related to him; how they related to each other. I'd go about this, I think, by breaking down what needs to be revealed into discrete pieces:
- Woman A was the man's lover.
- At the same time, Woman B was the man's lover.
- The women professed to hate each other.
- At at least one point, one of them set out with the idea of murdering the other.
- The women spent all their time thinking obsessively about each other.
- The women believed they could remain ascendant over the other by devoting themselves to thinking malevolent thoughts about her.
- At at least one point, one woman got busy with her life and neglected her malevolent thoughts, and the other woman gained the upper hand. (More probably, this kind of see-sawing in their fortunes happened a lot.) They both, even in the present day, agree about the causality here: malevolent thoughts get results.
- They believed they could physically feel the malevolent thoughts of the other woman, reaching out across distance.
- The man had not the first clue about the depth of this inner life that his two lovers were sharing. PLAINLY, yet probably not stated outright by either woman and only acknowledged elliptically, there was a strong erotic component to these obsessive practices of malevolent and "upsetting" directed thoughts—possibly a more compelling erotic attachment than either woman had to the man. This is what they occasionally attempt to recapture by antagonizing each other.
Some of these pieces will be revealed right away; others should be kept back longer. Many of them could be revealed or partially revealed—implied, hinted at, etc.—through conversation, which makes good use of present-day spaces like the train carriage, the hotel room, the dinner restaurant, and so on: extended periods when these two women will be enclosed together with reason to think about this man, and the women they were when they knew him. Others might be better grappled with via internal narration, for which solitary present-day spaces might be better: a woman alone in her bedroom, deciding what to wear; in a restaurant, waiting for the other woman to come back from the toilets; in bed, mulling things over after the other woman has fallen asleep. To get the best haphazard-glimpses-around-a-corner effect, these revelations will probably be presented out of order, in a referential way: for example, one woman might think, as she is packing her bag, about the odd disconnectedness in the relation of a funeral-goer to the person who used to inhabit the corpse; and how in a way it's fitting, because even back when the three of them knew each other her former lover had no idea of vast swathes of her inner landscape: that taken up by the other woman, for instance. This gets Point #9 above while not necessarily clarifying #'s 1-8. The women, after all, are not laying out a reasoned argument for the reader, but reflecting on their own shared past lives, which they (sort of) already know.
That "sort of" gets at the other real keystone issue with this story, which is that, while the items on the list above are all more or less facts, there's a big difference between disclosing facts and actually being able to recapture lived experience; and to a certain extent the haphazard revelation of facts to the reader is standing in for the haphazard recapture of lived experience by the characters. I kind of got at this earlier, and it's what I meant by that parenthetical "ish" I added to the word "flashbacks": in a lot of cases, maybe even every case except the Street Scene, I want any flashbacks to be… I'll say "unsuccessful." Or only partially successful. This is a period of these women's lives that is no longer (generally) viscerally accessible to them: so how do you relate to those periods of your life that now seem remote? You can talk about the events that happened, with a certain detachment or even incredulity, or with nostalgia; you can try to remember the feelings you felt, although they now seem far away. You can attempt to put timelines in order: this happened after that, and before another thing. You can second-guess yourself, or practice revisionary history: surely I didn't really feel THIS; surely I wasn't THAT upset: it seems unbelievable, now. In talking with another person about a shared memory, they can offer new information that seems to contradict your own knowledge, or puts your own memory in a new light. You can forcibly try to put yourself back in the same mindset that was once customary for you, either just by force of will or by revisiting people or places you spent time with back in the day. But, at least in my experience, the results of all that stuff tend to lack the immediacy and transparency of a traditional flashback, where events are being narrated as if you're right there experiencing them in the present tense. So a lot of the effect that I want, with the pacing and the gradual revelations in the story structure here, is to simulate the experience of working to recapture your previous self, with only partial and imperfect results. Then I'll need some sort of Proustian madeleine to jump-start the more visceral, complete-feeling flashback to the Street Scene; I'm not sure what it will be but I like the idea of it happening after the women have returned from the funeral, and parted from one another; when one of them might happen upon something in her house that sort of unexpectedly unlocks this vivid memory.
That is over three thousand words so maybe it's time to stop typing about this?? Did I answer your question?? Ahahahaha I'M LEGIT NOT SURE. But I did reignite my own interest in the Rambouillet story, so that's something. Follow-up questions welcomed & encouraged. :-)
