Flashbacks, Backstory & Reveals

[JohnDusenberry]

Thanks for the explanation and suggestion to search the forums. It was hard to pinpoint this exact issue, but I did find one post in which an answer from Jim seems to satisfy part of my question, in regard to “flashbacks” (which I guess are the same thing as telling a story out of order?) Same thing you said, basically. Thank you.

@decastell

Could you expand on that? I kind of have the same question: if the underlying story chronology of a murder was:

Joe and Frank fought over control of their company
Joe murdered Frank and hid the evidence
Detective Helen is assigned to investigate the crime and finds clues.
Helen finally puts together that it must’ve been Joe who killed Frank.

But in a mystery story, the actual movie or novel would go something like:

Detective Helen is assigned to investigate the crime and finds clues.
Joe and Frank fought over control of their company
Helen finally puts together that it must’ve been Joe who killed Frank.
Joe murdered Frank and hid the evidence

So the question (for me, anyway) is if the Dramatica progression screen shows 1-2-3-4, am I supposed to ignore that when writing the book or screenplay and instead write 3-1-4-2 (since the former might hold the same argument but would make for a crappy mystery.)

@jhull

Totally. And for that exact reason.

So do “reveals” and “misdirecting the audience” basically work the same way?

Or is that really just the author’s discretion to move through the PSR beat near the first Signpost of something like “Hans deceives Anna” by instead making it appear that they’re falling in love for REAL, and then use some other beat in the last Signpost, like maybe something about Truth to reveal the author was misleading you?

I guess in short I’m just really curious about approaches to “engineer” deception, misdirection and out-of-order storytelling using Dramatica.