I've noticed how a lot of people seem to dislike flashbacks. I think that they're fine, as long as they're interesting and relevant to the plot, but I decided to ask about them anyway. Here's a bit of background for my question: In of my projects/stories, the three main characters are people who have been living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland all their life. When they were young children, they were guided through the wasteland by a woman named Hana who was stranded there after an unfortunate disaster. Hana eventually disappeared, and the other characters were left to survive with the knowledge she had given them. Fast forward to the present, and the characters have discovered that other parts of the world repaired from the apocalypse and are now doing fine, so they set out to leave the wasteland in search of these places. Aske, one of the MCs, is set on one important goal; finding Hana. I've planned on having flashbacks throughout the book that show what life was like for Aske and their friends when they had Hana around, starting with when Aske first met her. These flashbacks range from taking up an entire chapter to being only a paragraph long. They always have some plot relevance to them, as the search for Hana becomes a large part of the story. However, I wanted to hear what other people thought about relying on flashbacks and having them appear many times. Should I cut them out and do something else, or will they be fine?
Here are K. M. Weiland's thoughts on flashbacks. And she's real smart 'bout all this-here writin' stuff.
A thought of my own, based on a few noirs I've seen (especially Sunset Boulevard). The entire story can be one big flashback, with the beginning and end just serving to bookend it from a future persepctive. American Beauty used that setup too, and like Sunset Boulevard, the main character was a dead man already at the beginning. Then we go back and see how it happened. It's really more like there's a story, but to make it really mysterious we get a pair of flash-forwards, one on the beginning (where we see the MC already dead) and one on the end. I'm not sure about peppering a story with a bunch of flashbacks and constantly pulling back to the present. You'd almost have to have 2 parallel stories, one unfolding in the flashbacks and one in the present. Only, you know, they're the same story, and at the end we see how they connect up.
Sorry @Opalized , I know this isn't what you asked about exactly—it's me thinking out loud about good reasons to mix up events. It is relevant, if in a somewhat roundabout way. Here's a noir that uses the same strategy as Sunset Boulevard and American Beauty—most of the movie is a long flashback, with only the very beginning and the very end being in the 'present'. If you just watch the first 10 minutes and the last 5 you can see what I mean. But note that important story information is contained in the 2 bookending flash-forwards. Every flashback you use needs to supply vital information like that and not dawdle too much. I think the reason they took the climax and split it into bookends is because it's intriguing and has a powerful hook. Told in a more straightforward manner it would have been a long while before anything really exciting happened. But having seen that aftermath you're hooked and really want to see what led up to it.
I find your comments interesting nontheless! The method of having the entire story be one big flashback is one I haven't seen much, could be fun to try writing in a seperate novel.
For your story, I’d say flashbacks can be a distraction. There’s ways to show relationships (especially those with Hana) through conversations, objects people have kept hold of, even through their decisions during the action. I’m certainly from a generation where messing up timelines was made cool by Pulp Fiction, and no one wanted to be linear anymore. Flashbacks didn’t drive the story forward, but we’re just placed in there because the author wanted the scene and didn’t want to have several chapters of exposition at the start where characters meet and take part in symbolically important events that will crop up later. Much better to slap them in as a flashback (so they thought). Even if flashbacks are used to drive the plot forward, they can be really clunky and almost like a deus ex machina. “Hey reader, I know you’re wondering why this character has suddenly betrayed our here…here’s a flashback to when they made a deal with the villain five weeks ago. Plot hole solved!” I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing, but when done badly, flashbacks are either needless or a sort of god-of-the-gaps. When done well, they’re amazing. After all, you couldn’t have Rashomon without using flashbacks.
It surprised me to find just how small a flashback could be. I always considered flashbacks to be entire scenes, or maybe a page from a scene, but a flashback can be just a line or two. So you can use that as a device to vary the paragraph and not be stuck too much in one moment. For once, I remember the exact book I saw this in. It's this famous one that I'm sure everyone has seen on shelves. We get these questions around here about how to navigate a boring scene. Like say, your character is doing some sort of drudgery, like folding laundry. (It's important to the scene and can't be left out. The wife's going to find incriminating evidence in the husband's pockets.) Leading into the scene's highpoint, you need some way to make the pages compelling, and shifting the flow of time around is one way to do it. You absolutely don't want to just sit there and detail how all the laundry is being put in piles. No one likes doing this and so they don't want to read about it. But if you are able to jump back in remembrance and then jump forward with imagination, you can mix up the moment. So for me, I would say "always flashbacks." They have to be small though. The big flashbacks, which I think the question is really about, eh . . . maybe. If your story is told out of order then it's unavoidable. If it's only one scene out of order, then it better pull its weight. It better have a reveal in it that's transcendent. When the reader sees that flashback starting, they should cry out "Yes, finally!" and not "What are you doing?"
I'm guilty of loving flashbacks, as long as they are done appropriately. Don't have it be an early 2000s anime like Naruto where flashbacks happen every 10 seconds and go overly long (though by now that is a trope of that genre, so...anime can unabashedly embrace it). I sometimes slip in flashbacks in the form of a character having a dream, such as if a past event in their lives still haunts them. I can show the flashback once, then any recurrence can just be mentioned in one sentence, no need to get super detailed every time since that would be repetitive. So if you make it clear from the get-go that your story is going to have two plotlines going on concurrently (the modern day and the flashbacks), then go for it. Embrace it. Make it what sets your story apart. What people tell you is just their personal tastes and opinions in writing, just like mine is, so take it all with a grain of salt. There's no right or wrong if you're just writing for pleasure.
When telling stories out loud, it's natural to get carried away and realise there's some additional piece of context that the listeners are going to need before you get to the end. So perhaps flashbacks can make a story feel more natural, impromptu, spontaneous, colloquial, or bardic. Perhaps there should always be a flashback. For there not to be one implies a story is artificial, or over-plotted, or wrongly paced: running for 80k words without ever overtaking the reader. Or pausing to consider if it might have overtaken the reader. A flashback says the writer has maintained an ambitious pace, but still made space to supply some extra context for anyone who needs it. If the reader has given their undivided attention for the whole distance, they might already have figured out what Bob and Jim must have done the week before the oil rig blew up - and when those readers get to the flashback they can pat themselves on the back for reading the book so closely (plus for buying it). But the other type of reader, who pressed on and pressed on even though they didn't understand - get it all explained to them in the flashback. They can finish the book happy and be able to hold their heads up in subsequent pub-critique sessions.
There's nothing wrong with flashbacks. I've read novels with two parallel stories: present and past, the stories meeting up at the end. It works.
I have a mixed feeling about flashbacks, perhaps because I've seen them done correctly as often as they failed. I can't exactly pinpoint what made them click either. Sometimes having little flashbacks scattered equally on several chapters works for me. Other times it only annoyed me with the frequent focus jumps. Reading a separate chapter (or group of chapters) dedicated to a flashback scene felt neater, but once in a while it dragged on for too long and I wished for the writer to just hurry up and take me back to the main timeline already.
I fumbled with the piece of flint in my cold-numbed fingers. The pain was nearly gone now; a sure sign of frostbite beginning to set in. I brought the chunk of rock down against the flat of my Bowie knife blade. No sparks. Damn it, I'm going to die here, aren't I? "Always strike your flint against the steel at a 35 degree angle, you want a glancing blow. A direct strike won't make sparks" a voice like a rusty hinge whispered in my ear. I whirled around, expecting Ed to be standing behind me, looking over my shoulder. That was always his way, watching your mistakes, correcting you. He never gave words of praise but you would, when he didn't think you were watching, nod approvingly when you got it right. He wasn't there of course, I had buried him with my own two hands a year ago. Readjusting my grip on the flint and knife I struck the blade and a half dozen sparks flew into my tinder pile, sending up little curls of smoke. ** That is my preferred way of doing mentor-mentee flashbacks.
