There are two important things to know about flashbacks: how to do them, and when to do them. Both things can be trickier to figure out than they look.
First, a definition: as far as I’m concerned, flashbacks are a way of conveying some background/backstory information as if it were happening “now”. The central story that is being told, or the central problem to be resolved, is in the story-present, and the flashback is usually just an illuminating scene or memory from the past. When an author is playing around with the temporal structure of a story — alternating chapters set in 2010 with chapters set in 1810, for instance — that, to me, falls under “structure,” rather than “flashback.” Feel free to disagree on this; the terminology of writing is not standardized.
Flashbacks are one of several storytelling techniques that periodically get overused and abused. It’s easy to see why — they’re a tremendously useful way of getting background/backstory across without using infodumps or as-you-know-Bob/maid-and-butler dialog…especially when the writer has begun in medias res (in the middle of things) and needs to get the reader up to speed on why the hero is battling zombies in the first paragraph. They’re also very handy when your viewpoint character is the only person who knows what happened twenty years ago, but isn’t the sort who would actually tell anyone this crucial piece of information…or when the twenty-year-old scene is far more dramatic and memorable when seen than when summarized in dialog. Mini-flashbacks can be an absolutely terrific way of keeping the story moving while supplying important backstory.
On the other hand…well, one of the best examples of when not to use a flashback was a story opening I read a few years back which began with the main character walking through a deserted city, hearing distant noises. About two pages in, something triggered a flashback…of the events that happened fifteen minutes before the story opened, finally explaining all those distant noises. The author loved opening with the spooky deserted city (and it really was a great scene), but she lost most of her readers when they hit the flashback, because the readers felt as if she was cheating by not simply starting the story fifteen minutes earlier.
Another example is the deservedly infamous and legendary manuscript that opened “Blood spurted!” which segued immediately into a two-page flashback, after which the reader discovers that the dramatic opening line happened because the protagonist had cut himself shaving. Basically, the closer you are to the start of the story, the harder you want to look at the flashback to see if you really need to do it that way.
How to do flashbacks is actually fairly straightforward. The first thing to remember is that one needs to ground the reader clearly in Who, Where, and When somewhere near the beginning of each scene. This applies to all scenes, but it’s especially important for flashbacks, because the reader generally expects the story to proceed linearly, so it’s easier for him/her to get disoriented if that’s not the case.
For flashbacks, it’s often easiest to set up one or more of the Who, Where, and When parts in the present day scene:
…and she thought back to Paris, ten years before.
#The Louvre was cool inside, even on a hot July day…
When you do flashbacks, you also have to remember to move the reader back to the present when the flashback scene is over –
…He walked out into the hot July sun, and she knew she’d never see him again.
#Now there he was in Garden City, New Jersey, ten years older but as certain of himself as ever…
Using space-breaks to separate “present” scenes from “flashback/past” scenes, as I did above, is a useful technique to use when a) you are already using space-breaks to establish scene boundaries elsewhere in the story, and b) you’re doing the flashback scene as a full-fledged scene, rather than a summary paragraph or two. But you don’t have to use space-breaks to establish the boundaries (and if you’re doing a mini-flashback, you often don’t want to); you can do it with tenses, too, even for long flashbacks. I’ll get to that in the next post, because this one is getting kind of long already.
I’ve found two main uses for flashbacks. Sometimes theys have a structural function – you want to preserve the flow of the story and you only need one or two nuggets from the events between fully realised scenes so you show the character thinking about a trip, then you show him on the road a month later, with a couple of quick flashbacks to anything that happened inbetween. And the other is that in a mystery plot, flashbacks are often used to build the story. What happens in the story present makes only partial sense until you see the story past unfold in front of your eyes; and both strands – past and flashbacks – are resolved in a climax at the end.
Can you think of other uses?
green_knight – I don’t actually use major flashback scenes a lot in my work; I mostly use mini-flashbacks (one or two paragraphs) to get background or backstory in without interrupting the flow. With something like your guy taking the trip, I wouldn’t usually bother doing the quick intermediate bits as flashback, since they happen in order within the story. If the intermediate nuggets are important enough to show in detail at all, they’re usually important enough to show in order. Unless, of course, the whole point is to suppress some of the information about what happened in the interim because it will be more effective if it’s revealed later.
The main use for flashbacks, IMO, is as a more dramatic way of getting important background/backstory across (more dramatic than exposition or dialog, which are the other two basic ways). Playing around with the chronological structure – alternating present-day-story scenes with years-or-centuries-ago-story scenes, for instance – seems like a whole ‘nother thing for me, though I think that technically, you’re right: that would be considered using flashbacks, too.
Alex – I’d say you have the right idea. Maybe this series of posts will help. Do you have any specific questions?
Chicoy – You actually have three possible choices for this kind of thing: You can “close” the frame when the story reaches the “present” and then proceed on; you can ignore the frame when the story reaches the present and continue on; or you can close the frame and open a new frame. Well, OK, four choices: you can go back to the initial part of the frame and move it forward in time until it comes after the end of the story, so that one framing sequence will frame the entire book. Which thing you choose to do depends on the kind of story you’re telling and how you feel about it and what you think would be the most effective way to tell your story.
I’ve been playing with flashbacks in my current novel and I know I’m doing them very badly in the first draft, but at least I’m getting the information down.
In the next draft I’ll make sure they flow better and (likely) either make the scene real time, or get rid of the flashback altogether, slipping in the required information into the rest of the real time stuff.
Right now I’m playing with a partial frame story that begins with the heroine writing the events of her past. What I can’t decided is whether to ignore this when she reaches her present and just keep on with the story, or whether a slight change in structure at that point is in order.