#writing flashbacks

How to write flashbacks

Flashbacks are a powerful tool to deepen character development, create tension, and unveil hidden truths. They have the unique ability to transport readers to pivotal moments from the past, adding layers of richness to your story

Why are flashbacks useful?

Flashbacks serve various purposes in storytelling, each contributing to the overall narrative in its unique way. Here are some of the most common ways flashbacks are used:

1. Deepen character development and provide backstory:

Flashbacks allow you to delve into a character's past, unveiling formative experiences that shaped their personality. By revealing childhood memories, past relationships, and significant events, you can provide readers with a deeper understanding of the character's motivations, internal conflicts, and complexities.

2. Create tension, suspense, or surprise:

Flashbacks offer a powerful tool for building tension and suspense. You can strategically use them to foreshadow future events, creating anticipation and keeping readers on the edge of their seats. Additionally, flashbacks can introduce surprising revelations, challenge readers' assumptions, and add unexpected twists to the plot.

3. Reveal hidden motivations or secrets:

With flashbacks, you can peel back the layers of your characters and expose their hidden motivations and secrets. By delving into the past, you can uncover buried secrets that impact their present actions, unveil the true nature of supporting characters or antagonists, and provide readers with a deeper understanding of the characters' complexities.

4. Highlight character growth or transformation:

Flashbacks are excellent tools for showcasing character growth and transformation. By contrasting past and present versions of your characters, you can illustrate their development over time. These glimpses into their past can reveal pivotal moments that trigger significant changes in behaviour, allowing readers to witness their journey of self-discovery and personal evolution.

5. Provide historical or contextual information:

Flashbacks offer an opportunity to provide historical or contextual information that enriches your story. By exploring past events, you can offer insights into the historical backdrop or cultural context of your narrative. This enhances the authenticity of your world-building and provides a deeper understanding of the setting in which your story unfolds.

6. Surface a forgotten memory:

One fascinating aspect of flashbacks is their ability to surface forgotten memories. By resurrecting your characters’ buried experiences, you can explore the impact of past traumas or significant events in their lives. This allows for emotional depth and character growth as they confront unresolved issues and find closure.

What makes a good flashback?

A good flashback is relevant to the main narrative, providing crucial insights into the character's motivations and conflicts. It evokes strong emotions and utilizes vivid descriptions to immerse readers in the past. A well-executed flashback contributes to character development and maintains a balanced narrative flow, seamlessly transitioning back to the present story.

Choosing a strategic moment that adds depth or context to the story.

Using sensory triggers from the present moment to initiate a transition to the past.

Having a clear transition in and out of the flashback.

Ensuring the flashback doesn't disrupt the overall pacing and narrative, and that it serves a functional purpose.

Connecting to the present with an object or a sensory experience that triggers the flashback.

Bringing flashbacks to life

To make your flashbacks come alive and immerse readers in the memory, effective descriptions are crucial. Consider these six quick tips for engaging descriptions within flashbacks:

Use vivid language to paint a picture of the scene.

Incorporate sensory details like sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures to immerse readers in the memory.

Focus on details that are relevant to the plot, character development, or thematic elements of the story, avoiding excessive tangents or unnecessary descriptions.

Choose words and phrases that reflect the intensity of emotions experienced during the flashback.

Instead of relying on exposition, use action, dialogue, and interactions for characters to reveal information.

Highlight specific moments or key aspects of the flashback that contribute to the overall narrative.

Emphasise body language and gestures to draw attention to the emotions and reactions of the event.

Demonstrate character development by highlighting changes in behaviour, belief, or attitudes.

Showcase conflicts and resolutions, allowing readers to witness how they were resolved or left unresolved.

How to fit flashbacks into your story

There is no hard and fast rule for the best way to incorporate a flashback. But here are some interesting ways you can work it into your narrative, each with a different feel depending on the type of story you’re telling.

Consider shifting the narrative perspective when transitioning to a flashback. For instance, if the main story is told from a third-person limited perspective, you could switch to a first-person perspective during the flashback to immerse readers in the character's direct experience.

Switch between past and present-moment reflections to create a sense of urgency. This can be done by having the character contemplate the significance of the memory or showing immediate connections to a character’s present situation.

Adapt the voice of the flashback to match the character’s age, knowledge, and emotional state during the flashback. This helps differentiate the narrative style and adds depth to the character's past experiences.

Blend flashbacks seamlessly into the main narrative by incorporating them into the character's thoughts, dialogue, or actions, rather than separating a flashback out into its own scene.

I am writing like a fury @boots-with-the-fur-club

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...Food is slopped into a meager bowl and tossed into the cage. Mikey flinches at the clattering sound, and how the mushed-up, mashed-up slimy brown gloop splashes onto his arm and foot.

"Mealtime, beastie," the worker says.

Mikey retches at the smell and consistency. But he won't get anything else. He drags himself over to the bowl and starts licking it up like the animal he is...

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..."Let me go!" he yells. "Let me go! I wanna go home!"

"You should have thought of that before you trespassed on government property," says the scientist.

"What?! Who are you people?! What is this place?!" Mikey demands.

"A better question is, what are you?"

The doctor with the needle kneels down beside Mikey's head.

"Hold him still," he orders the others...

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Hi :)

'Writer's block cure' is probably the best compliment for a blog like mine!

There are a few ways to include flashbacks to trauma in your writing. You can write them inbetween scenes without an immediate connection to what is happening right now. Or you could use some parallels: something that she is doing at the moment, like entering her apartment with groceries and nothing is happening, to the trauma that happened, like her entering the apartment with groceries and her sister waiting and starting a fight with her.

Another option could be to have her dream about the things that happened in a nightmare.

Hope this keeps you going and writing! :)

How to Write Flashbacks

According to Literary Terms. Net, a flashback is “a device that moves an audience from the present moment in a chronological narrative to a scene in the past. Often, flashbacks are abrupt interjections that further explain a story or character with background information and memories.”

Flashbacks are a subject of contention among the literary community. There are two distinct sides, lovers and bashers, and I feel that both are wrong: Flashbacks have the capacity to be very good for a story or very bad. It all depends on how you write them. So here, have some tips!

1. Keep Them Short

People don’t want to read a ten-page flashback in the middle of the story. Flashbacks are notorious for being slow, and drive a wedge between the narrative and an invested reader if it’s not done properly. It’s better if you take a huge chunk of information and spread it out than to have a big dump in one place. 

I don’t know your story, and I don’t know the importance of certain flashbacks in your story, but as a reader, I usually start getting tired of flashbacks around the two-page mark, sometimes shorter if they’re not particularly exciting. 

Flashbacks are essentially an interruption, and you want interruptions in your story to be as unobtrusive as possible.

2.  Don’t Put It In The Middle of the Action

Unless your flashbacks are PTSD-related and as a plot point are supposed to get in the way of the character trying to accomplish their goal, I highly suggest to never put flashbacks in the middle of the juicy parts. Your readers have been waiting for this buildup, this climax, this one kiss, and they will not be happy if a random memory sequence suddenly shows up.

If you truly have to put a flashback in there (i.e. PTSD, traumatic experience, sad memory, etc.), make it artistic by going line-by-line or phrase-by-phrase. 

As the character is talking to people or fighting, they remember more and more of the terrible things that happened to them, with certain words in the conversation or certain actions in battle triggering certain memories. The split between regular spoken conversation/action and italicized flashback can be a great prose-shattering way to turn an info-dump into something more!

3. Cut Them When Necessary: Instead, Weave the Information into the Narrative

Flashbacks, although admittedly important and a good way to convey past events, are very intrusive to the narrative because they pluck the reader from one part of the story and dump them into another. That’s why it’s best if you save the flashback for something that is VERY important, something that cannot be portrayed in any other way. 

Do you really need a flashback, or can you incorporate other aspects of storytelling to get the message across?

Here are some ways you can cut your line break flashbacks and weave them into the narrative instead:

Have a very long, very detailed flashback of a specific event that happened before the beginning of the story?

Write a Prologue instead! Prologues are at the very beginning of the story, and therefore are not an interruption to the narrative.

Pros: No interruption, places more importance on that specific event

Cons: People skip prologues, can make the story clunkier

Have no way of segueing into your flashback?

Make it a dream! Nothing like some night terrors to really get your character’s blood pumping.

Pros: Makes it less of an interruption than it would’ve been if split by a break

Cons: Cliché, Cannot be too detailed (must mimic the abnormality of a dream, can’t be just a straight-up memory)

Do you REALLY need a flashback, or can you just put it in prose?

If your character sees a seashell and is reminded of when they went to the beach with their dead mom, you probably don’t need a flashback for that unless something mentioned offhandedly in the flashback is used for foreshadowing a later revelation. 

Don’t be afraid to use the words “recalled” and “remembered”  A paragraph or two of a character revisiting a memory in real time beats a flashback any day!

Pros: No major interruption, more easily woven into the story

Cons: Has to be shorter, can’t be as detailed

Also reference the idea I described before of going line-by-line for your flashback instead of dumping huge paragraphs; quite literally weaving it into your story!

Ima keep this short because I’m tired, but I did want to share it.

Basically, a few tips about using flashbacks in your story (remembering that using them is very much a style choice and therefore these are opinions to consider more than anything else)

1 - flashbacks can be a very good way to explore how characters (pov and others) have changed over time, and can be very useful in first drafts. They can also help lend you the benifit of really fleshed out imagery and emotions in important parts of their lives. Sometimes it benifits the story directly. Sometimes it only benifits the author and it’s more useful to take them out in later drafts.

2 - often, a story that does not rely on flashbacks can come across as richer, as the results of the events that could be flashbacks are being shown, letting the audience infer what happened, and what emotions the pov character has about it. It does take more dicipline, but cutting out the flashbacks and communicating what happened to your audience without them is a pretty good way do the “show, don’t tell” thing for character backstory.

3 - if you are writing flashbacks, keep formatting consistant, and make sure it’s pretty clear when you are in a flashback, unless not being able to tell is deliberately part of the storytelling. A lot of authors use italics, but if your story is usually set in the present tense, you could also do a tense shift. 

4 - if you only have one flashback, and it needs to be told like that (as opposed to just talked about later), a prologue is a good place to put it. Readers are more forgiving about time skips/jumps between a prologue and chapter one than they are anywhere else. 

5 - if you only have a couple flashbacks, it’s often a good idea to cut them and weave the content through the narrative in other ways. As mentioned above, time skips can break immersion for readers, especially if it’s unexpected or isn’t consistant. 

Ah, flashbacks. They can be a controversial thing in books. Just like so many things in fiction, flashbacks are normally either hit or miss. I personally love reading flashbacks because I am a character-over-plot reader and flashbacks give all of that amazing✨backstory✨, but I know that they way they are written can sometimes annoys a lot of people. I think some people tend to dislike flashbacks because they can be confusing or even unnecessary to the plot, but they certainly don’t have to be! A well written flashback can tie everything together and work absolute wonderss for your story! So, without further ado, here are a few tips that have helped me when I’m writing flashbacks! 

Segue not Segway

I did not know that these two words were not the same thing for the longest time. A segway is that scooter thing that the guy rides in Mall Cop, and a segue is a transition from one subject to the next. The more you know 😉. Anyways, one of the most important parts about a flashback is making sure that you segue into them smoothly. A lot of flashbacks can seem really abrupt and jarring for readers if they come out of nowhere. Memories of the past normally don’t just come out of nowhere in real life. Normally there’s a trigger of some kind, like something similar happening in the present, a word or phrase, or maybe even a certain smell. Something needs to happen to send that character back into the past. I would recommend writing a sentence or two of transition before the flashback, then write the flashback, and then maybe a sentence or two to get you back into the present. 

Short and Simple

If you have a ten-page flashback anywhere in your story, even though I love flashbacks, I probably would not read it unless it’s really really interesting. Flashbacks can be kind of slow and exposition heavy, so it’s much better if they’re on the shorter side. I would say that three pages is probably pushing it a little. If they’re not really exciting, then two pages max. Having a flashback does not excuse an info-dump, and lots of flashbacks are really just info-dumps in disguise. if you really need to put the information in your story, spread it out instead of putting it in one large info-dumpy flashback. All flashbacks are interruptions of your story, and all interruptions that take away from the main narrative of your story should be kept to a minimum. That also means that you should never start your story with a flashback. The readers haven’t learned to care about the story or the characters yet, so starting with a flashback would only confuse them. 

Is It Really Really Important? 

Like I said earlier, no matter how amazing and well written a flashback is, it’s still intruding on the main narrative. It takes the reader from the part of the story they were used to and dumps them in a different part of the story. Flashbacks should be saved for something that is really important and cannot be portrayed or weaved into a story any other way. If you can put the same information in with the character have a short paragraph about remembering the past or by two characters having a conversation about the past, then you don’t need to waste a flashback on it. That also means you need to make sure that you have a clear reason for having a flashback. If I’m reading a flashback and I don’t know why it’s there, I probably will be very confused and wondering why the flashback was included in the first place. Some other ways to include flashbacks are prologues, dreams, or just putting it into your prose!