Flashbacks are one of those indispensable writers’ tools that tend to alternately get encouraged and discouraged, depending on whether or not they’ve been overused and abused recently or not. They’re a way of slipping the reader back into the past of the story, so that a particularly important incident or incidents from the characters’ backstory can be written as a fully dramatized scene, rather than merely letting the characters talk about the incident or summarizing it in narrative.
One medium-common use of flashback is during the Big Revelation just before or after the action climax, when everyone has known for much of the book that something dire happened on that fateful night twenty years ago, but no one knows exactly what because everyone who was there is thought to be dead. And then one of the heroes (or, sometimes, the villain) reveals that he was there. “Let me tell you what really happened…” he says, and instead of a long explanation, the author cuts to the scene itself, with the speaker as the viewpoint character.
This can be extraordinarily effective, especially if the author has either a) built up to the revelation by dropping hints over the course of the novel, or b) dropped no hints, instead allowing the reader to believe the version that everyone in the story believes, so that the revelation comes as a total shock. For it to work, though, the revelation has to be big – something that changes the heroes’ perception of themselves and/or what has been going on all this time (“Yes, Luke, I am your father!”). Generally speaking, something like “Actually, she was killed by a shark, not by piranhas” is more a correction of the facts than a big revelation, and shouldn’t rate a flashback scene unless there’s something about the mistake that changes everyone’s perceptions.
What you don’t want to use flashbacks for is to cover your own mistakes and/or as an excuse to be lazy. If you write your characters into a corner, and you need for one of them to have some piece of equipment that they wouldn’t normally be carrying (whether that’s a butane torch or a mithril oven mitt), you don’t get to have the character flash back to her meeting with the Wise Sage on the mountain so you can show the Sage giving her the oven mitt or the torch, and then proceed with the story. You have to go back and insert the Sage giving the oven mitt to her in the earlier scene, all those chapters ago – and if that throws off the pace and the timing and so on, you have to fix those things, too. Or you cogitate for three weeks until you figure out some other way out of the impasse that doesn’t require backfilling anything.
You also don’t want to use flashbacks to create false tension or pseudo-cliffhangers – the kind of thing where the hero is alone in a dark, empty house and hears the door creak, then there’s a two-page flashback to a childhood incident in a dark house with a creaky door, and when we get back to the present, he hears his wife calling “Honey? Are you there? I’m back with the fuse!” This kind of thing annoys a lot of readers (me included), unless you’re writing parody and deliberately hamming up and undercutting assorted clichés.
Most of the time, you don’t want to flash back to an entire scene that the reader has seen in this book before, not even if you’re short on length and could really use the extra words. Padding never works. Having the hero remember a significant line or two from an earlier scene at a critical moment is about all you can usually get away with, though if you’re writing a bazillion-word series and you want to remind the reader of Book 5 of something significant that happened in Book 1, you may be able to pull off a verbatim repetition. Even then, though, most writers use a couple of lines and a pointed summary, rather than repeating the whole scene.
I should perhaps mention here that time-travel stories that loop through the same scene with characters at different points in their subjective lives are not doing flashbacks in that case. Also, while it is certainly possible to use flashbacks in a time-travel story, you had better know exactly what you are doing and be able to make clear to the reader which scenes are from the past that the character is time-traveling in and which are the past that he/she is remembering.
Used properly, flashbacks let you do all kinds of neat stuff with structure, timing, tension, pacing, and a lot of other aspects of a story (in addition to their most common use, which is providing crucial background information). Used improperly, they can bog a story down, annoy and confuse the reader, and generally turn things into an incomprehensible muddle. If you’re not sure you can do them well, spend some time working on them until you are.
I had three flashbacks in the first chapter of my last novel. And for some reason, I didn’t understand why people kept on saying that the pacing was off, until I went back and read the chapter – as a chapter, and realized that each time i switched to a flashback, all the momentum that I built up died.
I tried to change this, but I have a really hard time trying to balance starting out with an active, exciting incident, and filling in all the necessary information so the MC’s actions make sense. I’m worried my current WIP has the same problem, and I’m not sure how to fix it.
Cara,
my personal feeling is that if you feel to write a scene and flash back immediately, you should start slightly earlier. One thing about those ‘active exciting incidents’ is that I find most of them manipulative and boring.
If a person runs from a monster, I know I’m supposed to root for the underdog. I don’t get given the opportunity to make up my own mind about the situation, it’s pure reader-button-pushing: here’s a big bad, root for their victim. And it’s boring because I haven’t had a chance to get to _know_ the character as a person, and because – in several decades of reading – I have read that type of scene so often that they *do* feel repetitive.
Not saying your specific book suffers from this, but something to keep in mind. If you start slightly earlier, and give me a reason to care for the character, and make me understand why this particular confrontation _matters_, I’ll be much more engaged. You can keep me engaged by giving me small mysteries – who is this person, what are they doing, what is the explanation for [strangeness] – and then the story will just keep moving from there.
Or you can try telling your monster chase from a different viewpoint–say, Grendel’s mother.
I crashed and burned on a book that did a flashback… well, I’m going to say “wrong.”
Basically, it starts out with various characters, including one angsty, drunken fellow, and the reader starts getting invested in the character and what happened to him and where he’s going to go from here. Then it flashes back to him as a kid, doing exciting things, and you KNOW IT WILL END BADLY.
So basically, the character I was invested in was *the adult*. And I don’t *want* to be invested in the kid, because… I know this is going to end badly! He’s all messed up in “present time,” so this whole great bit of tension and whatnot about what he and his friends are doing is going to end up with them losing and probably all of them *dead* and I don’t want to read that. It’s depressing. So I set down the book and never picked it up again.
So my rule of thumb is: If I spend more than a very short chapter with one character, getting invested, I am *not* going to be interested in spending multiple chapters in a long extended “Oh, but the *real* story is in the past…” excerpt.
I wonder how you feel about prologues? Many times prologues are written as a past event, and then the reader starts with present day in chapter one. It seems like there’s a lot of back and forth about prologues in the industry. Personally, I’m not really a fan, since it just seems like a gimmick a lot of writers use to start with an inciting incident. Sometimes they work though.
I guess (from the comments) it seems like most people resort to flashbacks near the beginning of a novel to fill in some back story because they wanted to start with an inciting incident. So I think this is partly tied in with the prologue question.
Tiana,
I’ve never written a prologue hat I didn’t have to cut out. Many prologues don’t work for me because I get interested in the character, and then they die and a hundred years pass and I have lost the character I’m in and I am just that bit less keen to read about someone else.
On the other hand, a prologue can add tension when we see an obvious bad guy setting an obvious bad thing in motion – someone sabotages the magical defenses or the spaceship or gathers an army, and we start the story with an innocent protagonist who isn’t aware that there’s doom coming up on them.
Won’t work for every story or every reader, but it _can_ work.
I think for a prologue *to* work you need a very good sense of story, and tension-building. If it’s _just_ to give us backstory, it’s a bad idea. A prologue must be able to justify its existence just like every other scene.
@ greenknight,
Hmm, well, the exciting incidents are definitely not of the being chased by the monster variety. I just want to start with the start of the story. The flashbacks really are backstory, scenes from years before, I think, and if I put them first, I’m worried it would feel like a prologue.
Reorganizing the story so it begins at the earliest chronological point is possible, but I don’t know if it would be better. I ended up cutting a lot of backstory because it wasn’t important, and I really tried to trim it to the relevant bits. Finding the balance between beginning at the real beginning and making sure the reader has all the information they need without bogging down the story is really tough.
Caran
that sounds amost as if the problem might be a different one. If you’re starting in the right place, that shifts it to how much backstory/which techniques for backstory.
I find that as a reader, I’m happy with much less backstory than I want to put in as a writer. My reader self goes ‘ok, arrival at space station, whom does she meet’ where my writer self wants to talk about space travel technology and the distribution of space stations and how expensive the ticket was.