Technique Excercise #18

The Flashback/Dissolve Excercise:

The dissolve excercise was created by Robert Olen Butler and comes from "From Where You Dream."  Essentially, in the excercise you take two "Similar" objects which are your link to a memory or the past.  The dissolve is created between two similar images and when you move between the images, you move from the present  to the past, and then using two more similar images, you move back--from the past to the future.

Instructions:  Choose a point in your timeline and a location, in the same point of your timeline.  Go to that location, be it a room, a place, a park, anywhere ,and write for me through the senses.  Experience the objects there, with the senses. What is your basic emotional state, write about it, showing yourself, dealing with the objects to show your emotional state.  All of a sudden, one object in this place is directly connected with your emotional state.  Go to the object, touch it, experience it, sensually. This object will spur a memory of another object.  This other object is "similar" in basic sensual pattern.  Construct a sentence with a "Coordinating Conjunction" in the center.

The first half of this sentence should be in the present, focusing on the object, but the second half of the sentence enters the past, focusing on the second, "similar" object.

Example:  As I move to the mantle above the fireplace, I pick up the wounded looking baseball and grip it in my hand before dropping it and letting it roll along the table, and when melon rolls off the edge, Susan bends to catch it in her hands.  "Food is not a toy, " she says and wags her finger at me.  "This melon is for later.  Quit rolling it across the table." Her tone is firm, but then her mouth curves upward into a smile.

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Notice in the first half of the sentence the object is a ball, and in the second half the object becomes the similar object.  Once this is done, we simply are transported through the object without a blink.  There is no reason to explain, nor any confusion.  The reader should understand, that the object has transformed, and the conventions and tone of the piece have also changed.  Another person is talking,  A different object has been presented.  The reader of this can figure it out.

Once we come to this new place, it is the writers job then to present the information as quickly as possible--the reason for the flashback.  The flashback was stirred by the current emotion of the writer.  The flashback should rperesent something of what is bothering the writer in the present.  Once that is done, the writer should then return the reader back to the present as quickly as possible.  Once again, a two objects should be used, these objects are used to transition back with the and in the center of the sentence forming the transitional point between the two objects.

Susan chuckles for a bit, holding the sifting tool for flower, the flour pouring through it, like a thick wave of dust.  She shakes the sifting tool for a moment and smiles back at me, "Whatever happens after this, just know, you are loved, Sonny Jim."  And with that, she flicks a little flour in my face, which catches my left nostril, and  I sneeze, cough for a moment; the dust from the mantle is thick, and messy and has already clung to my hand and is now all down the front of my shirt.  There is dust everywhere because I haven't cleaned in so long, but for a moment, I look and notice one of Susan's pictures, half-obscured by a some porcelin angel statue of hers, the rest of her picture covered in dust.  I cough again, and pick the picture up, blowing the dust layer off of it.