Writing Lessons on BART

I've been dying to write this all day. Finally found the time.

Flashbacks: A writer can do amazing things with time. Even more amazing then what a director can do with movies on screen. And all of this simply depends on something as simple as grammar. That is why if I ever have children in the future, I will teach them to love grammar. I wish I had learnt this earlier, that they are not just rules, they are tools. They are things a writer can use as part of his storytelling arsenal. Study, for example, the passage below from The English Patient.

A few months later he had escaped to Italy, had packed the shadows of his teacher into a knapsack, the way he had seen the green-clothed boy at the Hippodrome do it on his first leave during Christmas. Lord Suffolk and Miss Morden had offered to take him to an English play. He had selected Peter Pan, and they, wordless, acquiesced and went with him to a screaming child-full show. There were such shadows of memory with him when he lay in his tent with Hana in the small hill town in Italy.
--The English Patient, pg 197

Astonishing. In this short paragraph, that is actually only made up of three sentences, Ondaatje takes us "a few months later" the 'he had escaped" tells us that we are still in a flashback even though we are told a few months later Kip went to Italy. Then in the same sentence, we get a flashback within a flashback, to the green-clothed boy he once saw at Christmas. from there we go into the play. And the last sentence brings us back to the present as he lay in his tent with Hana at the Italian villa.

In three sentences, we have travelled so much in time and so seamlessly. That is the amazing thing with sentences and grammar. You can't do a time shift in a single scene in a movie, but this can be accomplished in a sentence.

What's even more amazing, is that writing allows the writer to move into the future, something that would not make sense in a movie. But which I will talk about some other time, because I'm tired.

Technique: The Key is to have a strong anchor in time first. The anchor in time is the Tent with Hana in the Italian villa. ONdaatje often returns to that throughout his novel. That is the base from which past memories and future fates springs. It is the temporal space he has chosen to set his story. And he needs to return to it.

But grammar tells us everything else. "Had seen" "had offered" "had selected" tells me how far into the past we are launching into as readers.

Ondaatje doesn't strictly follow grammatic rules. Notice the last sentence. "There were such shadows of memory with him as he lay in his tent..." "were" is used with "lay" in the same sentence.
This is my own theory, but I think it creates a sense of something before both in the past and happening in front of our eyes. A strange mix of something that has already happened but captured in an old video perhaps?