Everyone who saw Memento said, “Wow!!!!!! How did Jonathan and Christopher Nolan do it?” After all, this movie is about a man who cannot remember what he did yesterday and makes notes to remind him of important things that he’s discovered in his “present” that he’d normally remember so that he could use them to evaluate what’s going on tomorrow, even tattooing the notes on his body to make certain that he won’t lose the information. The difficulty in writing the last sentence indicates just how tough a job the Nolans had to tell their story without losing the audience. Indeed, in lesser hands, the entire thing would have been a mess.

Before discussing Memento further, let’s consider the whole idea of time as an element in writing. Philosophically, time doesn’t really exist. Everything we do is in the present, the past is a present recollection of an experience and the future is a present guess of possible experiences that may happen. Way too egghead, you say? No, Booboo, it’s not. Indeed, it’s helpful. When writing, think of the past as a recollection not a series of actual, linear events that happened earlier. We don’t remember the past exactly; we remember the high points. Therefore, in approaching that great flashback you want to use, my suggestion is to hit the high points and eliminate the inconsequential stuff you might otherwise use in writing a “present” narrative. The same goes for “future-casting”.

There are three things (at least that number) that make handling time difficult. First, there’s the basic structure of any story: what happened if we told the story in linear time, first event to last. The normative state existing prior to the first event that happens must be covered somewhere in order to provide reference. The various events of complication must build and there has to be a climax that returns the world back to the normative state.

Second, we need to consider “The Cat”, the paradigm for screenwriting that insures that elements of the three-act structure are covered in the manner that the audience expects (as well as those pesky producers that we want to finance our projects). The first act presents the characters, the fundamental theme of the movie, the problem that must be solved, discusses the foregoing and leads to a transition setting up the second act. The second act introduces the “B” story that allows the characters to develop, explores other facets of the overall story and sets up the “loss and resolution” of the third act. A linear presentation of the story may work fine for The Cat. It may not.

Third, whether the actual time line of the story is inflected or not, scenes that occurred earlier create rules that must be followed in the later scenes. Continuity is critical. If the character is anorexic in scene one, we can’t have that character eating a six-course dinner in scene seventeen without handing the anorexia problem. Continuity is much more than making sure Hugh Grant is wearing the polka dot tie between takes as he enters Number Ten Downing Street in Love Actually (which he doesn’t). At its most critical, continuity is making sure that the events of the story logically build, and that the changes to the characters (character development) is both logical and presented in a manner the audience can follow.

Fourth—I just knew there’d be a fourth—if the time line is going to be bent, there must be a reason for doing it that enhances the themes, impact, or sense of discovery in the story, or there’s really no reason for doing it. Christopher McQuarrie opens  The Usual Suspects at the end of the story. The heist that resolves the criminal activity of the principle characters has occurred. Why not tell the story linearly? McQuarrie’s story really isn’t about the heist; it’s about who Keyser Söze is. By using the narrative flashback technique, McQuarrie is able to have a wider discussion of this elusive person and is better able to set up the ending than would be possible otherwise. After all, his task, essentially, was to contrast Söze’s persona, a character that doesn’t actually appear in the story except for one, brief flashback, with that of Verbal Kint’s, the narrator of the story. Since Kint is the narrator and a character present at nearly all events, using narration gets rid of the first person bugaboo of providing information that was given in scenes that did not include the first person narrator. Kint doesn’t have to be in every scene if the story is structured as a recollection of what happened because Kint simply could have heard about events that transpired in his absence from the other characters. Moreover, a cop grilling a suspect is interested in hearing the events he needs to know about, not a linear story dictated by the Kint (although, McQuarrie did follow nearly a linear story once Kint got going).

American Beauty solved the “ick” problem in its story by having it be essentially a narration by (again) Kevin Spacy of the last year of his life. Alan Ball is going to have his character, Lester Burnham, seduce an underage girl. There is far less ick in this if we know already that the character is dead.

Memento achieved its continuity by using pieces of action that occurred in the past as lead-ins for the next sequence of events. Thus, the story is a series of overlapping loops that divulge the past as the story slowly moves forward. The story plays fair, in my opinion, in that the lead character, Leonard, does not in fact get the story straight. Yes, he ends up killing the bad guy thus satisfying our need for closure in the story, but he never learns the truth about his involvement in the crimes that were committed.

DGM’s story, Absaroka, deals, in part, about the Battle of the Little Big Horn. I suggested a story arc that used flashbacks in order to begin the story in the middle of fight. This allowed the back-story of the central character to be used as the “B” story of the second act. If the story were told linearly, the history of the leading character would have come in the first act, leaving us with no “B” story. It also allowed us to largely ignore the period of time leading up the battle that, historically, was repetitious and somewhat uninteresting, a series of scouting forays by the Seventh Cavalry to locate the Sioux.

I think it is important for the writer to know the story he/she is telling in linear time. We must remember that messing around with time as an element of the story is a fairly recent tool that been added to the writer’s toolbox. Playing with time can be fun stuff. It can also cause continuity problems and confuse the audience. As writers, we know the story. We have to make sure that in telling it, we don’t lose our audience because we haven’t been effective in understanding what the audience must know if it’s to follow the story we are presenting.