Flashback
Posted: Sat Jun 04, 2016 6:59 am
Some stories are told absolutely chronologically—this happened, then this, and then this. It’s a really good structure, especially for a very short story such as those entered into the Writing Challenge. But there are times when you want to have a flashback interrupting that narrative, to fill the reader in on something that happened before the events of the main story. I’ll get into some reasons why you might do that in a bit; first, here’s an example of a story that uses flashback.
Take a minute and read God Unties My Shoe, then come back here for the rest of the lesson.
(Of course, it bears repeating that I don’t link to my own stories because they’re in any way wonderful, but I know where to find what I’m looking for in my own list of writings. Definitely not fishing for compliments.)
Did you catch the paragraph of flashback in that story? It’s near the end, the 9th paragraph, the one that begins “Tom and I had only just…”
I could have written this story chronologically, beginning with the narrator moving into the new neighborhood and sending Christmas cards to everyone on the homeowners’ list. But putting it where I did served one of the purposes of flashbacks:
Contrast—the little paragraph describing the happy newcomers to the neighborhood, reaching out to all their new neighbors, contrasts sharply with the Jill that the readers have met—she’s selfish, even a little bit mean, not at all neighborly. If I’d started out with the Jill who sends Christmas cards to relative strangers, the reader would have to revise her opinion of Jill too many times. She’s nice. No, she’s shallow and selfish. Wait, now she’s being nice again. I wanted the “two Jills” to butt up against each other more suddenly than that.
So flashbacks can show an event, or a person, or a circumstance that is considerably different from the ones the readers have already encountered. It’s an effective little bump in the road for the readers, purposefully interrupting the flow of the narrative.
Closely related…
Character development—a flashback can fill in an episode from a character’s past that you don’t want to cover in complete detail, but that fleshes out the character’s personality. And hand-in-hand with character development is…
Motivation—a bit of flashback can help your readers to understand why your character is doing whatever he or she is doing. I’ll come back and edit this post in a few days, but I’ve got an example of this kind of flashback in my entry for this week’s Writing Challenge. If you’re curious, you can probably find it (in level 4); if you don’t have time to look for it, come back after “Bricks” are thrown and read what I’ve got to add about motivation.
Finally, flashbacks can fill out the
Conflict—by reading the flashback of the character’s life, you can more fully understand what the nature of the conflict is. In fact, a flashback might even introduce the conflict to the reader.
So…those are some of the reasons why you might choose to include a flashback. You may be wondering, then, how to write it into your story.
If you’re writing a very short story (like the Writing Challenge), then you don’t need a very long flashback; both of the examples I’ve given are only one paragraph, just a few sentences. If you’re going to do that, be sure you signal to your reader that the scene is changing. You can do this in any of several ways (or in a combination of these ways):
• Setting the flashback off with ellipses, as I did in the first example
• Or italicizing it
• Or setting it off with three asterisks before and after (you don’t need a whole line of them)
• Or setting it off with a blank space before and after
• Consider switching tenses: if the rest of the piece is in present tense, put the flashback in past tense (or vice versa)
• Or change POV—if the rest of the piece is in 3rd person, switch to 1st person (or vice versa)
The point is that you should do something to make the flashback different from the rest of the piece.
If you need a longer flashback, the above signals will work as well. But in a piece of writing that’s as short as the Writing Challenge, be careful of having a flashback that takes up several paragraphs. If it’s that important, then perhaps it deserves a story of its own.
In a novel, it would be most common for a flashback to occupy its own chapter. Again, you want to let your reader know what’s going on. I’ve seen writers give chapter headings that name the time of the new setting (and sometimes the character, too). This is actually helpful in any book that skips the reader around in time and place.
Do you have any comments or questions about flashbacks? If you’ve written a story that includes a flashback, please link to it in the comments below and give us your writerly thoughts about why you used it and if you think it’s effective.
Take a minute and read God Unties My Shoe, then come back here for the rest of the lesson.
(Of course, it bears repeating that I don’t link to my own stories because they’re in any way wonderful, but I know where to find what I’m looking for in my own list of writings. Definitely not fishing for compliments.)
Did you catch the paragraph of flashback in that story? It’s near the end, the 9th paragraph, the one that begins “Tom and I had only just…”
I could have written this story chronologically, beginning with the narrator moving into the new neighborhood and sending Christmas cards to everyone on the homeowners’ list. But putting it where I did served one of the purposes of flashbacks:
Contrast—the little paragraph describing the happy newcomers to the neighborhood, reaching out to all their new neighbors, contrasts sharply with the Jill that the readers have met—she’s selfish, even a little bit mean, not at all neighborly. If I’d started out with the Jill who sends Christmas cards to relative strangers, the reader would have to revise her opinion of Jill too many times. She’s nice. No, she’s shallow and selfish. Wait, now she’s being nice again. I wanted the “two Jills” to butt up against each other more suddenly than that.
So flashbacks can show an event, or a person, or a circumstance that is considerably different from the ones the readers have already encountered. It’s an effective little bump in the road for the readers, purposefully interrupting the flow of the narrative.
Closely related…
Character development—a flashback can fill in an episode from a character’s past that you don’t want to cover in complete detail, but that fleshes out the character’s personality. And hand-in-hand with character development is…
Motivation—a bit of flashback can help your readers to understand why your character is doing whatever he or she is doing. I’ll come back and edit this post in a few days, but I’ve got an example of this kind of flashback in my entry for this week’s Writing Challenge. If you’re curious, you can probably find it (in level 4); if you don’t have time to look for it, come back after “Bricks” are thrown and read what I’ve got to add about motivation.
Finally, flashbacks can fill out the
Conflict—by reading the flashback of the character’s life, you can more fully understand what the nature of the conflict is. In fact, a flashback might even introduce the conflict to the reader.
So…those are some of the reasons why you might choose to include a flashback. You may be wondering, then, how to write it into your story.
If you’re writing a very short story (like the Writing Challenge), then you don’t need a very long flashback; both of the examples I’ve given are only one paragraph, just a few sentences. If you’re going to do that, be sure you signal to your reader that the scene is changing. You can do this in any of several ways (or in a combination of these ways):
• Setting the flashback off with ellipses, as I did in the first example
• Or italicizing it
• Or setting it off with three asterisks before and after (you don’t need a whole line of them)
• Or setting it off with a blank space before and after
• Consider switching tenses: if the rest of the piece is in present tense, put the flashback in past tense (or vice versa)
• Or change POV—if the rest of the piece is in 3rd person, switch to 1st person (or vice versa)
The point is that you should do something to make the flashback different from the rest of the piece.
If you need a longer flashback, the above signals will work as well. But in a piece of writing that’s as short as the Writing Challenge, be careful of having a flashback that takes up several paragraphs. If it’s that important, then perhaps it deserves a story of its own.
In a novel, it would be most common for a flashback to occupy its own chapter. Again, you want to let your reader know what’s going on. I’ve seen writers give chapter headings that name the time of the new setting (and sometimes the character, too). This is actually helpful in any book that skips the reader around in time and place.
Do you have any comments or questions about flashbacks? If you’ve written a story that includes a flashback, please link to it in the comments below and give us your writerly thoughts about why you used it and if you think it’s effective.