Thanks, I'd like to be one one day haha :)

@@ShaelinWrites Prof. Bishop, what is my grade? :)

She really would ❤️

No it isn't you guy's. He--he just made that up.

Now...where was I?

Ahh congrats! Writing 10k in a week is a huge feat, you're doing amazing! I'm very happy I could help :)

ShaelinWrites Thank you 😊

@@ShaelinWrites Do you have multiple YT-Channels?

@@loturzelrestaurant This is my only channel, but I work for Reedsy and so I make the videos on that channel, but the channel itself doesn't belong to me, I just manage it.

@@ShaelinWrites Ohhhhh! I was so confused, cause you are on multiple channels.

what is your book called? want to read it

@@jo.k.4210 Glad to hear it. :) Unfortunately, it is not out yet and I wrote it in my native tongue of swedish. But, I will probably translate it to english at some point. If you see the name Blue Beryl, it will be my book.

@@torbjornlekberg7756 thanks, very cool, keep going! the climax sounds so fascinating and Original

@@jo.k.4210 Thank you! It is wonderful to hear such words of support. :)

They are different things! The past participle is the verb part of the construction, but past perfect is the tense. So in "I had walked" to the store, that's in the past perfect tense, but the participle would be "walked" since that's the verb. But 'had' is also part of the verb construction here, so it's the past perfect sense. I might not be explaining it that well, but you can google it for clearer examples!

Bill Stahl Hi! As a reader and writer, I personally love reading those types of flashback. I think they are effective and built more tension :))

My recommendation is to consider what the question of your story is! This could be a more concrete question, like if the character will achieve their external goal, or a more subtle question, like whether the character will make a certain choice and why. Once you know the main question of your story, the ending should provide an answer to it.

I think, you just have to watch out that the tension in the flashbacks is real and not depending on worrying, whether the character will survice.

@@mariamann8292 Thank you.

nvm got thru half the video. thnx

Those would probably be considered flashbacks considering they're only 20% of the plot. A secondary timeline would have a clear through line, like it could stand on its own as a full story.

@@ShaelinWrites Alright thank you for clearing that up!

Some books do it, but personally I wouldn't recommend it since it's a bit jarring (in my opinion).

An example of using something that a dead character used to make a habit of saying, is in Stephen King's novel Insomnia, where the protagonist, Ralph, hears his dead wife (Carolyn? Was that her name?) say, "It's a long walk to Eden, sweetheart, so don't sweat the small stuff" in his head at regular intervals throughout the book. That was something that she said on a regular basis throughout their marriage. It was an element that tied the novel together and revealed a little something about their relationship--apparently that Ralph needed to be reminded not to sweat the small stuff more than Carolyn did, and she was always there to remind him. At the moment I can't think of an example of an instance in a novel when a character remembers one line that someone else said on one particular instance, and the book comes back to that again and again, building more significance into it. But I know I've seen that done in the past, and if I think of an example I'll come back to this thread. But, oh yeah, here's another example of the sort of thing that might be a 1/32 of a flashback--something from my own writing, which I might or might not edit out. It's basically the same thing as one line flashing back on something that happened in the past, which the novel returns to and fleshes out over time. But in this instance it wasn't a line of dialogue. It was a mental image of something that my protagonist saw in his childhood. This story would have multiple narrators and jump around in time, but probably at least half of it would be in first person retrospective from the point of view of my main protagonist (I was familiar with the basic concept of what that was, but the term was new to me, and I just now had to go back and re-play the bit of the video where you used it--thank you for expanding my vocabulary of writing-related terminology!) My protagonist would be narrating the story as an adult, but most of the story that is told from his point of view would take place when he was fourteen, and this miniature flashback would be referring to something that happened when he was nine. So, during one of the scenes in the beginning that take place when Toby is fourteen, he catches a glimpse of a bathtub full of garments too delicate for the washing machine, soaking in water and detergent. *quote from my novel, which I might or might not get rid of* "All of the clothes were varying shades of red, making the bathtub look as though it was full of blood. (italicized) A bathtub filled with blood. (end italics). I quickly looked away. End quote. So, that should make it clear that the sight of the tub brought back to his mind a mental image of a time in the past when he saw a bathtub filled with actual blood, and it should make it clear that the memory distresses him, because he looked away. It doesn't come out and say it, but it implies that he had witnessed a suicide or an attempted suicide in the past, and when I wrote that scene, I was planning on returning to that flashback/memory and fleshing out the details of the attempted suicide that he had witnessed at age nine. At this point I'm thinking about writing the attempted suicide out of the novel entirely, so I'm using this strictly for the purposes of an example of the kind of flashback I was talking about.

But then is it true that your more interesting story takes place in the past?