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Jordan Rosenfeld – Using Backstory and Flashback Scenes in Creative Nonfiction

Nonfiction Authors Association Podcast | November 9, 2022

“Flashback scenes are really powerful at bringing the reader into the experience that the narrator wants us to feel and see, so that we are engaged.”
   — Jordan Rosenfeld

Jordan Rosenfield backstory and flashbacks

About Jordan Rosenfeld

Jordan Rosenfeld is a writing teacher and coach who has spent more than 20 years working with writers to strengthen, grow, and refine their skills in fiction and memoir writing. Jordan has authored three novels and published six books on the craft of writing, including How to Write a Page Turner, A Writer’s Guide to Persistence, Make a Scene, Writing the Intimate Character, Writing Deep Scenes (with Martha Alderson) and Write Free: Attracting the Creative Life (with Becca Lawton).

Her writing can be found in national publications such as The Atlantic, Mental Floss, The New York Times, Pacific Standard, The Rumpus, Scientific American, and The Washington Post, to name a few. Her book commentaries have appeared on The California Report, a news-magazine produced by NPR-affiliate KQED radio.

Jordan holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars and a B.A. in Liberal Studies from the Hutchins School. A former resident of Petaluma, California, she created and hosted the LiveWire Literary Salon at Zebulon’s lounge, and Word by Word: Conversations with Writers, on KRCB radio, a radio program interviewing well-known writers such as TC Boyle, Louise Erdrich and others, which won an NEA Chairman’s grant in 2004.

She lives among the garlic and the mushrooms in Northern California with her husband, young son and their two cats, Pickles and Elvert.

Nonfiction Authors Podcast: Jordan Rosenfeld

Find the video podcast, show notes, links, quotes, and podcast transcript below.

Live on 11/09/22 at 10:00am PT

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Show Notes

Links

In this episode…

  • The difference between backstory and flashbacks.
  • Why front story and backstory are different, and equally important,  in flashback scenes.
  • Using transitional language in creative nonfiction.
  • How much an author should use flashbacks and backstory.
  • The concept of chronology and linear structure in writing, and when it’s needed or not needed.
  • How to use whitespace in your writing.
  • Techniques writers can use to build front story, backstory, and flashbacks.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the interview series for the Nonfiction Authors Association. Today’s session is with Jordan Rosenfeld and we will be talking about using backstory and flashback scenes in creative nonfiction. I’m Carla King, your host, and I’m happy to have you with us today. This interview will last only 30 minutes and you can find the replay on our Nonfiction Authors Association website and social media platforms including YouTube, and wherever you listen to podcasts.

And now I’d like to introduce our guest.

Jordan Rosenfeld is a writing teacher and coach who has spent more than 20 years working with writers to strengthen, grow, and refine their skills in fiction and memoir writing. Jordan has authored three novels and published six books on the craft of writing, including How to Write a Page Turner, A Writer’s Guide to Persistence, Make a Scene, Writing the Intimate Character, Writing Deep Scenes (with Martha Alderson) and Write Free: Attracting the Creative Life (with Becca Lawton).

Her writing can be found in national publications such as The Atlantic, Mental Floss, The New York Times, Pacific Standard, The Rumpus, Scientific American, and The Washington Post, to name a few. Her book commentaries have appeared on The California Report, a news-magazine produced by NPR-affiliate KQED radio.

Jordan holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars and a B.A. in Liberal Studies from the Hutchins School. A former resident of Petaluma, California, she created and hosted the LiveWire Literary Salon at Zebulon’s lounge, and Word by Word: Conversations with Writers, on KRCB radio, a radio program interviewing well-known writers such as TC Boyle, Louise Erdrich and others, which won an NEA Chairman’s grant in 2004.

She lives among the garlic and the mushrooms in Northern California with her husband, young son and their two cats, Pickles and Elvert.

Hi, Jordan, welcome to the podcast.

Jordan Rosenfeld  1:03

Hi, Carla. It’s great to be here.

Carla King  1:06

I just want to say–you teach, you write articles, you really walk the talk. I’ve known of you, and seen you speak, and looked at your books for a long time. But in preparation for this podcast, I just sort of Googled you, and you really are in the Atlantic and Writer’s Digest. I mean, you’re just everywhere. I don’t know how you find the time.

Jordan Rosenfeld  1:33

Is that the question? How do I find the time?

Carla King  1:35

That’s the first question, because we’re all struggling with our books. And a lot of nonfiction authors, especially, have a whole business and they’re writing about their business for the book, and they want to promote. And we’re told to grow our platform by writing stories, and articles, and columns, and all that. So I just didn’t want to throw that out, right at you, first off.

Jordan Rosenield  2:01

Well, let me first point out that I’ve been working at this for over 20 years. So, when I started out doing anything–freelance writing–I started out as a fiction writer. That’s my love, that’s my passion. And then I always had these jobs that I ‘hated,’ and the truth was, there was nothing wrong with the job. It’s that I didn’t like working for someone else. So I was always looking for ways to work for myself. I’m a lone wolf, I’m independent. And I was already like, ‘Well, I think I’m okay at this writing thing.’ So I would sort of look for opportunities that were writing related. Like I’d reach out to the local magazine. When I used to live in Petaluma, there was both the newspaper and the magazine. So I’d reach out to them and see if they took freelance. I always just threw myself at things.

When it came time to write my first nonfiction craft book, Make a Scene, I was writing for Writer’s Digest magazine, and I was editing very loosely. I’m gonna answer your question, I swear. And I just sort of reached out to the editor of the books, because I thought I’d seen this craft element that wasn’t yet written about, which was scene writing. And I asked if they would take pitches from unagented writers, and they said, ‘Yes,’ so I wrote a book proposal. So it was like–I was in my 20s, I had a lot of ambition and energy. That’s where I got my start.

But it was–I always tried to keep my fingers in things writing related. And over the years, as I’ve gotten married, had a child, life gets more complicated and more expensive, it really comes down to–for me–always picking projects that I’m interested in. Because if you like what you do, you’re gonna make the time for it, even if it’s a lot of different things. And so for me, everything I do feels connected. I teach writing, I freelance, edit people’s manuscripts, I write writing books, and I write articles and essays. And so it’s all–they’re all big drops in the same bucket.

How I make the time–I’m a deadline driven writer, or deadline driven person. So it’s like, ‘What’s most pressing today? What do I have to do today?’ And so on and so forth. And over the years, you get really good at writing under pressure, as well. And being able to turn something out fast. I wish I could give some magic formula. I really do. The magic formula for me is picking things I like to do. Because then even the worst work week is never bad compared to working for jobs I didn’t like.

Carla King  4:32

Great. And you wrote a lot of books on craft. I mean, six, is that right? Seven? Why so many? Did you keep finding things that weren’t being addressed?

Jordan Rosenfeld  4:44

That’s a good question. I mean, the first one, I was like, ‘Can I do this? Will they let me?’ And it was actually a lot of fun. I really enjoy analyzing the craft. And then I took a big break. I didn’t write a second one until A Writer’s Guide to Persistence which isn’t, per se, a craft book. It’s more of cheering writers on through the trials and tribulations of the writing path. And that came out of my own kind of dark night of the soul after my son was born, and my agent didn’t sell my novel, and I kind of felt like, ‘Who am I anymore? I’m just a mom, I don’t write.’ A lot of people go through that with children.

And then, once you’ve written a couple books for your publisher, there’s kind of this momentum. I wanted to keep the momentum up, but it was definitely–I could only write a book if I saw a need. So I think most of that need came out of what I see as an editor. Or even teaching, I’d teach a course and people would be like, ‘I’ve never heard that before. Or I don’t hear that enough.’ Not like I’m recreating the wheel here. It’s all stuff we’ve heard. But sometimes you hear it for the first time. And all of that would go into me thinking, ‘You know what, I think maybe there’s a whole book on this.’

Carla King  6:02

Well, thanks. And you write these craft books, and you edit and help authors in both fiction and nonfiction. And I always think that there’s a lot to learn from fiction about nonfiction. And these days–okay, so creative nonfiction is memoir, mostly, right? Biography, autobiography, maybe you could name some more.

But even inside these professional, entrepreneurial, or psychological or mechanical books, authors tell stories, right? And they tell stories to illustrate a problem and a solution, or situation. And the hardest thing, I think–that I’ve seen–is the backstory and the flashbacks, and putting enough information in without overwhelming or getting tedious and boring. And that’s what I really want to dig deep in with you today.

So can you maybe just first talk about what’s the difference between backstory and flashbacks? And any other information–you want to set the scene for us?

Jordan Rosenfeld  7:13

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, backstory is kind of this general term for anything that you’re sort of filling the reader in about. We’re going to say you’re a narrator, right. In fiction, we call that a protagonist. In memoir, in essay, that’s the narrator, who’s you, or some version of you. And so it’s like–you want us to know that your narrator had a tough childhood, and maybe was in the military and is afraid of snakes–this is all information. But if you just dump that on us in a big summary, and you don’t engage us in scene.

So scenes, right–which flashback scenes, we’ll talk about this in a second–if you don’t engage us, we get kind of bored. The reader can get bored, distracted, feel overwhelmed, or waiting for something to happen. And it’s funny that you mentioned how nonfiction can learn from fiction, because this is where–flashback scenes are a technique, you could say, that are borrowed from fiction. So what is a scene? A scene is this kind of unit of compelling action in which a character, or a narrator, is pursuing a goal or learning something, or discovering something. But there’s action or momentum–real time is passing. And you only get that when people are doing things or saying things. If we’re just thinking, if we’re just ruminating, we fall out of scene.

So if I want to let the reader know about my character having had a traumatic experience in the military, I’m not just going to say to the reader, ‘Well, there was a time in Korea, when we almost died’. And we’d be like, ‘What? Tell me more.’ So we drop into scene, and we actually put our reader in the moment of that war, where you describe the scene, the setting, the actions, what people are saying, what they’re doing–almost as if we’re watching a movie, right? So flashback scenes are really powerful at bringing the reader into the experience that the narrator wants us to feel and see, so that we are engaged. If we don’t have that engagement, we will likely get bored, eventually.

Carla King  9:10

So what I’m hearing from you, is that flashback scenes work to illustrate and fill in the blanks of the backstory that needs to be told so it makes sense, or the story makes sense.

Jordan Rosenfeld  9:29

Yes, and that’s a good point. Because what I always say is that–front story must trigger backstory. So you don’t just randomly throw in a bunch of flashbacks. Like, ‘I just want to randomly tell you five things about my narrator. And I’m going to do it in five random scenes.’ It has to be coming at a point in the story where you’re like–I’ve told the reader this information, now I need to illustrate it in scene, or else they’re just gonna have to take my word for it. Does that make sense?

I use an example in one of my classes that’s actually from one of Michael J. Fox’s memoirs. You know, he’s been living with Parkinson’s since he was in his late 30s. And the story opens where he’s describing the events leading up to this fall he has that ended up kind of really setting him back in his independence for a while. And so he sort of describes–narratively summary–the scene. ‘We were in Martha’s Vineyard, this was happening, I was going to go back to work on a movie shoot, or I was staying behind to work on a movie shoot.’ And then he’s like, ‘And guess what? Bad things happen.’ So then he goes into the flashback scene, and he shows you–’I’m standing up, the phone rings, I walk into the kitchen. Before I know it, I hit the ground or something.’ I’m very badly paraphrasing his wonderful book. So the one thing facilitated the other thing. He told us about it, and then he showed us–in flashback scene–what happened. There’s also nuance we can talk about in a minute–about why front story versus backstory, but I think you’ll get there.

Carla King  11:01

Okay, yeah–I do want to get there. And maybe we should talk about that now, because my next question was gonna be about more technical–about verb tenses and all that–but maybe we should just go there now.

Jordan Rosenfeld  11:16

So I mean, this is where I feel like a lot of memoir and essay writers in particular–not so much just general nonfiction writers–kind of run into problems. And that’s figuring out–what is their front story? Think of the front story as what your reader came to find out about. And then your backstory fills in information we need to know. Now for some people, that’s confusing, because they’re like, ‘I’m writing about a time in my past.’ It doesn’t matter when it takes place, just ask yourself, ‘What is the leading story that my reader came here to know?’

I’m reading a book right now called Uncultured by Daniella Mestyanek, I think it’s pronounced. And she was raised in the Children of God cult, if you are familiar with that–it was a pretty serious cult. And then after she got out, she joined the military. So she’s writing about two really intense parts of her life. And it all takes place in the past from who she is today. But the front story we’re there to read about is her cult experience, right? So she just kind of starts at the beginning of her cult experience, and then works her way forward to the military. But sometimes in the military scenes, she will flash back to cult scenes.

So the front story is–she was raised in a cult and how she got out. Similar to the book Educated–she was raised in a fundamentalist extremist family and she got out, right? We want that story, but then there might be stages in the story where we have to go back in time to illustrate something. And that’s our backstory scenes, or our flashback scenes. So backstory is the supporting material. But it has to come in a way that is truly supportive, and then engages us or else we will just go, it will feel like we’re being lectured to and drawn out.

Carla King  13:08

In scenes, which is why scenes are so amazingly important. So how do you give–this is my question about verb tense–there’s subtle ways to give the reader a clue as to where they are in the story. Are they in the now? Are they in the future? Are they in the past? And I always talk about verb tense. I don’t know if you have any others? Or is it just flat out past, present tense?

Jordan Rosenfeld  13:37

Oh, tenses that I recommend, you mean? Or tricks?

Carla King  13:40

Well, yeah, I mean, how do you give the reader a clue? I know, there’s several devices. So transitions, and then also verb tense.

Jordan Rosenfeld  13:51

Well, there’s a lot of little kinds of transitions. And actually, that is something I teach in one of my classes. Of course I don’t have them up in front of me, but things like the weather, or the season–you can reflect. ‘In the fall of my 16th year,’ and we know the narrator’s 25. So we already know we’re going back in time. You can, if you’re writing your story–your front story–in the present tense, then using the past tense will alert the reader.

But it’s actually very nuanced, and I feel like it’s not as simple as just saying, ‘Change the verb tense,’ because sometimes that actually can confuse. And sometimes you’re writing your book in the past verb tense already. So then you just need transitional language. And so that’s why I like using time, season change, or even just something as simple as, ‘It reminded me of that year I was in basic training.’ And then the scene drops into basic training. So it’s really very interstitial–very small. You don’t need a lot of big language, or alerts that you’re going into the past, but you do need something or the reader will sort of lose themselves in time. But that is a good point about verb tense.

Carla King  15:14

And I bet you that’s where a lot of authors actually overwrite, and as an editor you slash and burn, right?

Jordan Rosenfeld  15:20

Yes. There’s a lot of using ‘had’ in the past tense–’He had gone,’ and, ‘We hadn’t taken.’ It’s like, once you get to the flashback, you actually can be in whatever tense you’re in. What is that, the past perfect or something? I’m terrible with the names of grammar functions. It’s like–imagine, you just need a bridge to get you into the flashback. And then you can stay in whatever tense. In fact, some people write flashbacks in the present tense, which can work if you’re doing it right.

Carla King  15:52

I noticed that in a recent book–it was kind of shocking. I was like, ‘Wow, this book–I pay attention to it now.’ Like, ‘Wow, that’s pretty shocking. She’s put me right in the past and the present tense.’ Because it’s a more immediate experience for the reader. And so it’s tempting to put yourself or your character in action and have it be very–it has a whole other emotional impact. Bigger emotional impact, right?

Jordan Rosenfeld  16:22

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And the thing about contemporary memoir–it’s like, we have to remember, if we’re trying to be traditionally published–to publish a memoir today, you really have to write much more fictionally. It has to have a lot more scene, and a lot more in the moment writing. And a lot less of that ruminative.

So in my classes, we talk about there being two voices in memoir and essay. One is the voice of innocence–I’ll explain that in a minute. And one is the voice of experience. And the voice of innocence is the lived experience. It’s the scenes, it’s the putting us in the moment. And the voice of experience is the meaning maker–it’s that voice that comes in and says, ‘What I didn’t know then was that….Now that I’m older….’ It analyzes, it summarizes, it makes meaning. But if you wrote too much of your book in that voice, and you’re not showing us in the moment scenes, readers can get slowed down, and it can be harder to get published, apparently.

Carla King  17:24

Yes, I have noticed that about–well, I’m big in travel–John Steinbeck, the travel writers. They just do clip along today. And I almost miss the richness of the description that the old books have. Do you think publishing has been a part of that?

Jordan Rosenfeld  17:48

So I miss it too. And I feel like memoir and essay used to be the place where you could ruminate and take these intellectual detours. And for me, I’m more satisfied by the books where I feel the writer is giving me some meaning, right? But you have to think of publishing as–I mean, the best comparison I ever got from an editor was it’s like real estate. We’re looking for a product we can sell. And we’re competing with entertainment that is now instantaneous–you can binge it in a weekend.

So fiction and memoir–the line has to be very blurred, because they’re afraid it won’t hold people’s attention unless it’s someone famous, right? You know, someone famous writes a memoir, we all rush out to buy it, because we want the dirt or the juice. But if you’re not so famous, then you have to tell this gripping story. You know what book I think where the line changed was Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle. I read that memoir.

Carla King  18:46

Oh, lovely, lovely book.

Jordan Rosenfeld  18:48

It is a lovely book. But I read that book, and I was like, ‘She’s doing a lot of creative nonfiction here.’ Because I don’t think anyone remembers that many conversations explicitly word for word. And I’m sure she was given direction–’This needs to be more cinematic, it needs to be more fiction-like.’ Because from that point forward, I started seeing a lot more memoirs like that. And I think it’s an incredible book, and I’m not judging her quality of writing. I’m just saying, I think she must have been given direction to really try to dredge up more to put into scene. I mean, I hear this at conferences more and more. And it does frustrate me, because I think it’s the current zeitgeist, but it’s going to change again in 10 or 20 years, you know. Who knows what it’ll look like?

Carla King  19:37

Yes, I just recently talked to an author on a podcast about owning the truth and whether you can change anything, and when does it turn into a novel? But now, on reflection on The Glass Castle, there was a lot of dialogue. And also when she was a small girl, so we could talk about that all day, right?

Jordan Rosenfeld  19:59

Yeah. That’s a whole podcast in and of itself.

Carla King  20:03

Yeah, and I’ve talked about that in a couple of podcasts, actually. But really what I want to focus on here, that you’re so good at, is telling the story. Are there any general rules or guidance you can give us about how much backstory? How many flashbacks?

Jordan Rosenfeld  20:26

It’s a good question. I mean, there probably are some roles that I don’t know. What I would say is–focus on your front story. Beef up your front story, make sure that it can stand alone, that you could pull out all of the backstory and you would still have a complete story. It might be missing a few elements, but you would have a mostly–unless more of that flashes back, like every other chapter. Some people do a structure–like ones in the present, ones in the past. That’s different–it’s almost like you’re telling both stories side by side. And if your story is structured like that, that’s different.

But focus on your front story, figure out what it is, and make sure that you have that narrative arc for your narrator that is clear and starts with that beginning, middle and end. And then look for supportive places, where flashback scenes are necessary to deepen our understanding of the front story. And that might only be five. That might be two, that might be twenty, I don’t know. And there’s also questions of chronology. Where are you starting your story? If you’re starting like Daniela’s book, Uncultured–from the beginning of her earliest memories in the cult, that’s pretty great. It’s pretty linear, it goes forward.

But if you’re one of those people who’s–maybe you’re starting way forward in time, and then you’re working your way back to that moment. Or you’re flashing back and forth. There’s a lot of questions that may come up for you if you’re not just kind of following a linear structure, which a lot of memoir writers don’t. Because, what we’ve discussed in one of my writing classes, is that a lot of what we’re writing about as memoirists has some element of trauma associated to it, or difficulty. And those things are often not linearly kept in our memories. So even writing about it can be difficult to do in a linear fashion. Sorry, I know I just said 10 times more things than you asked.

Carla King  22:20

No, no, that was great. No, you’re right. And these need to be addressed. And it’s true. There are the memoirs of overcoming a difficulty of abuse, or it’s something difficult. And I’ve seen it handled very well in books, in very interesting ways linearly, as you said, but also in fragments that are not following a linear pattern. They’re just illustrating the incident and they might go to teenagehood, or toddlerhood. It takes a lot of skill, I think. And I think it takes a good editor to help with that. In writers groups, we can help a lot. A lot of us have written a lot, but there’s nothing like an editor to really help you navigate that timeline.

Jordan Rosenfeld  23:17

Absolutely. And some people, I will say, don’t write linearly. I have a lot of students who don’t write that way. And so it’s refreshing to them to know that they don’t have to write a memoir that just starts at the beginning and flashes all the way to the end. Some people need to move in and out of time. And some people do it well. I couldn’t do it, because it doesn’t come organically to me, but for some people it does.

Carla King  23:43

You know, I’ve used–and with my writing group, we all started using Scrivener. And I know there’s Scrivener-like apps out there now, too. But I started marking present, and then past. Like backstory–present, present, present, and in the app. And it was super helpful to see how much was happening in my memoir  with that. And also, the verb tense was important to me, because I did choose present tense. And the flashbacks were in the past. And with little transitions, maybe just whitespace. What do you think about that–can whitespace do the whole job?

Jordan Rosenfeld  24:28

I think whitespace can be really powerful as a break to suggest that we’re heading in a different direction. Because you can use whitespace to signal a scene change, so why not as a flashback scene change? I think what matters is that there’s some cueing information. So like when I’m reading Daniella’s memoir–when I’m in the military section, any reference to the cult I know is past tense, because it’s already happened. So it doesn’t even matter how she references it, I already know where I am in space and time. So as long as the reader understands like, ‘Oh every time we talk about that time at my grandmother’s house, they know that’s in the past.’ Then you could use whitespace to just–’we’re moving there now.’ Or if you were recounting dreams, or something ephemeral, you know. I think there’s a lot of ways.

I personally–the more I teach memoir, the more I feel it is a form that lends itself to experimentation. And it is one of the most–and I know that some people will disagree with me. Well, maybe only traditional publishing might disagree with me. But I really have found the most impactful memoirs to be ones that don’t just go limp. There’s one by Lacy Johnson called The Other Side. And if you’ve read that, that one is one that is very nonlinear, and really worked for me. She kind of pulls us in and out of the past experience, which is a traumatic one. Partly because you can’t linger in it very long, it’s so intense. But you don’t really know each chapter where you’re going to end up. But you get somewhere by the end.

Carla King  26:09

And you do write a lot of essays, and sometimes in column form for periodicals, too. You’re right–I do think memoir is so much more essay-ish. What do you have to say of people writing prescriptive nonfiction–kind of inserting the story? I was working with a psychologist who was writing stories about couples therapy? And you know, ‘so and so came in with this problem,’ and then they journeyed through, but it’s only an example. So people only come through a little bit at a time. That seems kind of challenging at times.

Jordan Rosenfeld  26:52

It is. It’s funny, because I’m editing something like that right now, and have before. And it’s interesting, because I actually gave a talk at a podcast symposium, Women in Podcasting. And it’s the same thing–even in certain kinds of podcasts, you’re telling stories, right? You have to write these scripts to tell stories to engage the reader. I think what people need to understand is that–so for me, all good storytelling involves around scene writing. So you bringing readers into a specific moment in time with action, some kind of setting detail, and maybe dialogue. And anytime you do that, you engage the reader.

The question is–in nonfiction–so the woman I’m editing now, I actually sometimes feel her scenes go on too long. And then I want to come back to that intellectual head that’s giving me advice or telling the information, because that’s what I came for. So it’s like, I actually think you have to be careful not to take it way too far from the prescriptive part–’Here’s what I came to tell you.’ So you want to use shorter, little ‘scenelets.’ And again, highlight the ones that are really illustrating the point you’re trying to make. I would say.

Carla King  28:01

I like the term scenelets..

Jordan Rosenfeld  28:04

Yeah, scenelets. I don’t know why I call them that.

Carla King  28:06

You need to put a TM next to that. Well, we just have a few minutes left. Do you have any other thoughts about how to attack backstory, flashbacks, scene?

Jordan Rosenfeld  28:21

I mean, I think when you’re at the brainstorming, and even early drafting stage of your memoir, or essay, or how-to book you want to really, again, ask yourself, even write down the events of the front story, or of the main points you’re trying to make. Or if you’re one of the people who has to do a memory dump, where you pour it all in, try to pull out–what is actually going to be a flashback scene? What is your front story? What is your backstory? Pull out what can be saved for later, in essence. And build that front story spine first. And then, when you have the front story spine, then you’ll know where you need to beef it up. Where you need to illustrate points. I think that’s the best I can say.

But I do also encourage people to not lose that voice of experience, that comes in and makes meaning and analyzes. Maybe weave it in a little more deftly. A writer who does this really well–she can write anything. Her name is Maggie O’Farrell, and she’s most well known for a book called Hamnet, but she wrote a book of essays. It’s a memoir in essays about seventeen brushes with death, her own or beloved’s. And it’s called I am I am I am, which is from a Sylvia Plath poem. And she has such a good weaving of front story and backstory. She’s such a good example. So I recommend that book for anyone who’s interested. Also, Michael J. Fox.

Carla King  29:46

For all those examples–definitely going to go out and study those. And I just love the term the spine–the front story spine, and the backstory spine. We had Ted Weinstein on, talking about book proposals and business plans–how to write those out chapter by chapter. Do you think that’s a good exercise? Or beginning? I just did that for a book I’m three quarters of the way through on, and I was surprised at what was happening in the book when I wrote it down.

Jordan Rosenfeld  30:21

Oh, yeah. I mean, whether you want to go so far as calling in an outline or not, what I think is great about a book proposal is it forces you to write all those chapter outlines, chapter summaries, and a table of contents. That exercise alone–a table of contents and chapter summaries, which is small paragraphs about what happens in each chapter–and you could repeat that exercise a few times, until you feel you’ve gotten what you want–that would be a great starting point for anyone writing.

And actually, there’s a great technique for essay writers in one of my favorite–the best title book ever–by Adair Lara, which is Naked, Drunk and Writing. I love it too. And there’s–she calls it her Story Writing Template or something–I forget. I think it might be chapter three. And it just gives you this model of–what I wanted, what my goal was, what got in the way, what I did instead. She breaks this down. And I have found that very useful, too, for even chapters or just standalone essays. So those would be my recommendations.

Carla King  31:27

Thank you. We could talk for another half an hour, for sure. Or just read all your books, or take all your courses. You have a lot online–how can we reach you and find out about you?

Jordan Rosenfield  31:39

My website is Jordanrosenfeld.net. And you’ll find–there’s a Classes tab, there’s an Editing tab, Books, and About me. But you can also contact me through that website, or just feel free to give them my other email, which is jordanwritelife@gmail.com. Because I check it more frequently. I do check the other one, but only once a week.

Carla King  32:13

Great. Thanks so much, Jordan, and thanks for being our guest today.

Jordan Rosenfeld 32:17

Thanks, Carla. You have a good one.

Carla King 32:19

Thank you. And thank you to our listeners for joining us today and every week. For a list of guests and topics just check our schedule on the site, use your favorite search engine, or better yet, sign up for our mailing list at NonfictionAuthorsAssociation.com.

Quotes from our guest

“Flashback scenes are really powerful at bringing the reader into the experience that the narrator wants us to feel and see, so that we are engaged.”

“Focus on your front story, figure out what it is, and make sure that you have that narrative arc for your narrator that is clear and starts with that beginning, middle and end. And then look for supportive places, where flashback scenes are necessary to deepen our understanding of the front story.”

“I think whitespace can be really powerful as a break to suggest that we’re heading in a different direction. Because you can use whitespace to signal a scene change, so why not as a flashback scene change? I think what matters is that there’s some cueing information.” 

“…So for me, all good storytelling involves around scene writing. So you bringing readers into a specific moment in time with action, some kind of setting detail, and maybe dialogue. And anytime you do that, you engage the reader.”

“I think when you’re at the brainstorming, and even early drafting stage of your memoir, or essay, or how-to book you want to really, again, ask yourself, even write down the events of the front story, or of the main points you’re trying to make.”

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