Flashbacks

Oh, I'm not offended at all - it's just a quirk I have that sometimes has to be reigned in by a higher power, LOL. My editors have allowed a few to go through, and I tend to think it's because they really did serve the story.

 

Like any other kind of writing device, flashbacks can be a pain if they're in the wrong place, or not handled well.

If they yank the reader out of the story, wittering on about something from the past that interrupts the forward flow of the story, it's likely the transition from present to past then back to present again is faulty—or perhaps the flashback is not needed at all. But that's 'perhaps.' To say a flashback is never needed is, once again, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

So fix this. Learn to build good transitions. In other words, put the flashback in the right place, where it will answer a pertinent question or illuminate an issue that has already entered the reader's mind. Also learn to recognise when a flashback isn't necessary.

I get really disturbed when people start to think—in essence—that when it's hard to write a particular device well, it should not be done at all. Don't use adjectives. Don't use adverbs. Don't use anything but 'said' as a dialogue tag. Don't write flashbacks. Don't write prologues. And onandonandon....

Just a couple of days ago I started reading a book (a gift) containing dialogue that was overly melodramatic, unrealistic, and crappy enough that I stopped reading the book about midway through. So ...should we start advising other writers that since dialogue can irritate readers, we should stop writing it? No. Instead, we recognise poorly written dialogue, then learn how to write better dialogue.

Same with any other device that can be problematic. Learn to use the devices effectively. There is no shortcut to good writing. Automatically eliminating every challenging device is NOT a path that I think writers should be taking.

........
For those of you looking for recent examples of novels that use chronological scenic flashbacks, here's one. It also includes a few flash forwards as well—and never mind that the entire story is being told looking backwards from a first person POV! It's the Sunday Times bestseller and NY Times number 1 bestseller, published April, 2018: Circe, by Madeline Miller. (An excellent book, by the way. It kept my attention throughout, and the ending was perfect, although I didn't see it coming till very late on.)

I've also just finished reading the fascinating Cicero Trilogy, by Robert Harris, that also contains chronological flashback episodes. (Third person narration—also told from the narrator's perspective of looking backwards as an old man.)

These are examples of mainstream writers who do chronological flashbacks very well indeed.

 

Does anyone have any tips or know of any good websites with tips on flashbacks? I am interested how to successfully do the transition from current moment to flashback to current moment. Basically mc is sitting thinking then remembers in her flashback then is back in here and now making her decision.

Is there a way to take another character into a flashback? Or along with the flashback?

 

Flashbacks are hard. Brandon Sanderson does a good job in his Stormlight Archives. Great set up leading to the flashbacks so that it blends seamlessly into the story. You will want to read the flashback in his saga.

 

When I do flashbacks I start the flashback chapter with, for instance, 'One year earlier...'.

Not sure how that could confuse or befuddle a reader. Seems like a pretty solid idea.

 

Story flashback without personal flashback is quite empty trick. That's why I don't talk about them. Story flashback that arises from personal flashback have some point.

1. Flashback should have a reason.

Character with PTSD, amnesia, black out -drinking or total chance of life have a reason for flashbacks. Dreams are often like flashbacks.

2. Flashbacks can be in the arch and in the storyline.

There is no good reasons to build flashbacks as sidetracks. They can be rail switch in your main line. Your train slows and trembles a bit in switch but accelerates forward after it. It does not sidetrack your story. It gives it some rhythm.

3. Flashbacks can be the core of the premiss.

Jason Bourne -stories. Count of Monte Christo. Memento...

Everything goes back to the point of flashback. Don't use pointless flashbacks. Don't use flashbacks when they are trendy and everybody else uses them. Don't use literary flashbacks if there is no personal flashback involved.

Or do... if you can handle it.

But don't use flashbacks to fix the problems of plot, storyline or theme. If you do, they kick you hard.

 

Good

- Wodehouse uses small flashback all the time. They are in personal level and very often connected to social fears of Bertie.
- Potters are filled with flashbacks.
- Stephen King fills some of his storylines and character archs with flashbacks.
- Westlake uses them as anchors. The root of the premiss is guite often connected to some small and important but mild flashback. Quite often those flashbacks connect two books.

Not as good

- Carl-Johan Vallgren builds motive through flashbacks.
- Dan Brown cooks flashback buffets.

Culturally important

- Leon Uris
- Alexander Solzenitsyn

 

I can sort of see why a flashback would take the reader out of the mystery genre if it was inserted at a part where a disruption would take the reader out of the action, but I do believe that done right, flashbacks work well in showing what a particular character is thinking without having to infodump it, and I believe they have a place in any genre - as I say, if done right.

Personally, I like flashbacks, and I use them - sparingly - I think I put them in the right place but as with all fiction writing, I don't believe in rules (unless of the spag variety ...)

I have a character who kidnaps the child of an ex-lover, she does this in some kind of misguided revenge because when she was with him, she aborted their child and ran off. Unfortunately, the abortion left her unable to have more children. Her current (extremely rich) boyfriend dumps her because she can't produce an heir. Unbeknown to the child's father, the child's mother had dealings with the kidnapper in the past, and the child's grandfather had dealings with the kidnapper's father, none of them know this, except the kidnapper, who is seeking revenge on all of them. The kidnapper's plans start to go awry and she has to resort to plan B - which includes getting the child to trust her so she takes him for ice cream. While watching him eat, she notices he has a tiny mole on his neck in exactly the same place as his father does, so she begins to wonder what their own child would've looked like had she not aborted him, which leads to a flashback of the morning she dumped the guy and went to the abortion clinic.

The reader already knows this information from a previous book and is subtly reminded of this in the second book, so the reader already dislikes the kidnapper character. What the flashback does, is show the kidnapper and the child's father in a relationship where he has no idea what's going on, so he's acting all loved up and looking forward to being a father while everyone already knows whats going to happen to him (and the unborn child).

Two things come out of the flashback.
1. the reader has to endure reading something where the leading man is in love with someone other than the leading lady, this cements him in readers' minds as a really nice genuine guy.
2. the reader, knowing this info already but watching it unfold, makes them hate the kidnapper just a little bit more, and adds heaps of emotion to the overall kidnap scene, and makes them question whether or not the child will survive the kidnapping.

 

You can think flashbacks via they "size" - from huge to minor or vice versa.

You can show them, tell them of hint them.

You can use them as an arch, as sidetrack, as speed bump or as booster. They can be personal, collective or both.

All flashbacks are flashbacks even if they are not "technically" flashbacks.

And you can use flashforwards as flashbacks.

"The immediate story, the whole immediate story and nothing but immediate story" tends to be boring. It holds you - yeah - just like a straight road with no crossings, no speed altering and no stops holds you.

If we get first Jason Bournes and Memento, then maybe agents get tons of copycat -versions after that. And that might be a reason that they tell not to use flashbacks.

Id you study how Wodehouse uses minor flashbacks you find that "don't use flashbacks" is bs. It's not if you use them or not, but how you do it.

If you think about memoirs, you find that whole storyline is often a big chain of flashbacks with anchors in present. So it's like balancing huge flashback with minor flashforwards.

If you develope your own way to use flashbacks there is no rule that overrules your style. The rule is "don't copycat". A personalised style is does not copy.

 

I do think there is a device that you can use in your own head, regarding should I/shouldn't I use a flashback here. Ask yourself this question: Is the flashback going to illuminate an important issue which has already arisen?

Just a crude example: one character asks another character why he decided to become an entrepreneur. The person can answer with a 'narrated flashback.' "I hated the day my father got fired from his job..." and then segue into an unquoted flashback ...and come out of it with another quote from the speaker—something like ..."That's why I decided to start up my own business and work for myself. I'll never trust somebody else with my job, like my father did." Or something like that.

Or you can raise an issue as a minor mystery to the reader ...why is this person's home always painted red? ...and answer the reader's question with a flashback that illustrates why this person's home is always painted red.

In other words, rather than just dropping flashbacks in at random, make sure the flashback answers a question that's already arisen ...either in the story itself, or in the reader's mind. Do it as soon as you can after the question arises. And do your best to make the transitions in and out of flashbacks very clear, so, no matter how 'immediate' the flashback feels, the reader always knows it IS a flashback.

If you use this 'reader's question' method of deciding about flashbacks, it means your flashbacks won't 'yank the reader out of the story.' Just try not to do this too often, or—like any other writer's device used too often—it can become annoyingly obvious. Used too often, flashbacks can make the narrative seem choppy.

 

I think one of my concerns is that for the questions to be organic to the story, at least for the way I write, there should be another character in the story who needs/wants the question answered. I guess i can imagine a situation in which this wouldn't be true, where the question of the flashback is only of interest to the reader, not to anyone else, but I don't think I often have things set up that way.

So the problem is, a flashback might answer the question for the readers, but it doesn't answer it for other characters. I think that's why I don't use them much (ever?).

 

Just to clarify, I believe the speaker was referring to flashback scenes - "showing" the past event. That would pull the reader out of the story, I would think. There are other ways of bringing in backstory that the reader needs when the reader needs it.

 

Yeah.... But...

Wodehouse -type flashback:

There is an action line. There is also an emotional line. Wodehouse uses short flashbacks which glue emotional expectations to characters and happenings. His flashbacks are way of emotional foreshadowing.

He uses them where pace of the action line is slower than pace of the emotional line. He
borrows action from past to present for future.

That is just brilliant.

 

it would if the character was in the middle of any kind of story action, but put the character in a slow, thoughtful part of the story where he's contemplating his next move based on past events that happened before the story began, then a flashback can work better than the author sticking in an info dump of "character's feeling this was because blah blah blah past events blah ..."

You are kinda subbing a slow part of the story for continued action/reaction while the character - at the present story point - has a breather before moving on to the next part of the story.

 

I haven't read Wodehouse, but it strikes me that those short flashbacks might be by way of internal monologue. C. Hope Clark does this periodically in her Edisto Murders series, in which Callie Jean Morgan repeatedly revisits the attack on her home that killed her husband in the time before the story began. It helps to frame who she is for the reader.

 

I get that. See my post just prior to this one. But in my example, past events are replayed in the mind of the mc within the boundaries of her scene, not presented in flashback form as if it were part of the current story (which it isn't). I, personally, would find the latter treatment rather jarring.

 

The set up for a flashback is really important. If you hint at a back story then keep it from the reader, they will want to read the flashback. It would fill in a gap that has been missing.

 

Yes. good reasons to have them.

 

reading through this thread, was really helpful. I don't make flashbacks a habit in my stories (attempted it once in college for a horror fiction assignment, and it wasn't something I wanted to do again...I think because it didn't really "fit" the story)

But in a current WIP series (series because I've split my original WIP up into parts, or "books" to make it easier to tackle), a large portion of it deals with a flashback. The character crash lands in hostile territory, and is badly injured. She is discovered by the enemies and goes comatose. That's where the story splits.... while she is comatose in the present, a newly introduces character tries to figure out what to do with the new captive and his conflicts as it relates to her, his people, and the enemy (her being a potential threat to his people but also a potential bargaining chip). The flash back is of the comatose character and the events that lead to her crash-land which reveals information that syncs up with the present (such as her relation to the enemies, and an over all identity crisis).

Everything syncs up when she wakes up.

it makes sense to me reading the outline I created, but I am starting to doubt myself and whether I can pull it off effectively after reading through the comments in this thread. Any suggestions?

Its a sci-fi/space opera btw

 

Learn from the best. And with flashbacks humour & comic is very often the terrain where the best are.

In humour pace, rhythm, timing... is everything. When a good humorist takes you to a tour around time, you don't even notice that you are time travelling. You don't leave storyline or slow -in a wrong way - your going.

Don't study your own genre in this. You can use books that are storyworld heavy, but outside your own genre.

 

Sounds great. Go for it. You have created the suspense to set up the flashback. Just write it then you can tighten it up later once it's done.