How do you write a flashback without confusing your reader? Aren’t flashbacks bad? Don’t they screw up your story? Or can they make your story better?
Alexa posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:
How can I write a flashback scene of my protagonist without the reader getting lost?Thanks in advance
Randy sez: Knowing how to write a flashback is crucial for every novelist. But knowing why to write a flashback may be even more important.
Aren’t Flashbacks Bad?
Some people say that flashbacks are bad and you shouldn’t write them. It’s worth asking why anyone would say that.
A flashback is a scene that you show in your story in real-time, but which happened in the past. The fact that it’s shown in real-time is good. You’re not showing it in narrative summary or exposition. You’re playing it out like a movie in your reader’s head.
So where’s the harm? Why would anyone complain about that?
The only real issue is that a flashback is part of the back-story of your novel. So you’re stopping your front-story cold so you can tell some other story that happened in the past.
That’s a problem if your reader doesn’t yet care about the front-story. Then you run the risk of boring your reader. She might close your book. She might never pick it up again. Then she loses out on finishing your story. And you lose out on a reader.
But if your reader does care about the front-story, it’s a whole different game. When your reader cares about the front-story, she’s willing to stay with you through a bit of back-story, as long as it’s directly relevant to the front-story.
And back-story is often very relevant to your front-story. Your characters don’t just plop into the world on page 1 without any history. They’ve spent their whole lives preparing to live this story you’re telling. They’ve learned things. They’ve built up a personality. And they’ve been damaged by other people.
Any of those could be relevant to your front-story.
A flashback gives you, the author, the opportunity to let your reader experience that back-story in the same way that your character can experience it at any time—as a memory.
So a flashback is good, and it’s often the very best way to inject that back-story into your reader’s brain.
But you just want to be careful to make sure your reader is truly hooked on the front-story before you spring a flashback on her. A common rule of thumb is to not show any backstory in the first fifty pages of your novel, although you can violate that rule if you’re good enough.
So How Do You Write That Flashback?
A flashback has three parts:
- The segue out of the present and into the past
- The backstory scene itself
- The segue out of the backstory and into the present
Those two segues are the key to solving the problem Alexa asked about. You’ll confuse your reader for sure if you just switch straight to the backstory with no explanation.
You have a lot of options on how to do that segue. In the Harry Potter books, for example, Harry experiences a number of flashbacks involving other characters when he looks into the Pensieve, a magical device that holds people’s memories. The Pensieve is the link on the way into the flashback and on the way back out. That was a very effective way to do it.
The more usual way to do it is to have the character begin remembering something. Then have a scene break and switch to showing the memory as a flashback. At the end of the flashback, have another scene break and return to the character.
As an example, here’s how Ken Follett starts a flashback in The Man From St. Petersburg, a historical suspense novel about a Russian anarchist in the summer of 1914 who’s been sent to London to kill a Russian envoy. He knows that the envoy is negotiating an alliance between England and Russia that will drag Mother Russia into the coming war, and he wants to prevent it.
Our hero is Feliks, and we meet him about twenty pages into the novel. He’s on a train to London, admiring the view. Feliks has loads of attitude, and we pick up that attitude quickly. And then we segue smoothly into a flashback from a few weeks earlier:
And in Geneva, he had made the decision which brought him to England. He recalled the meeting. He had almost missed it…
There’s a scene break, and then the flashback begins with the phrase: He almost missed the meeting.
The flashback tells about a meeting of anarchists who’ve learned that Prince Orlov has been sent to England to negotiate an alliance that will get millions of Russian peasants killed in a stupid and senseless war. The meeting goes on for quite a while, with all sorts of suggestions. At the end of it, Feliks tells the group he knows how to prevent the war. He’s going to London and he’s going to kill Orlov.
The scene ends, and in the next chapter, Feliks is in London. Ken Follett doesn’t even need to segue back to the present, because the end of the chapter signals the end of the flashback. There’s no confusion.
The key phrase is the two-sentence transition just before the flashback: He recalled the meeting. He had almost missed it…
Those two sentences, plus the scene break, tell the reader to expect a flashback.
This flashback is very recent and it’s critical to the story. It explains why Feliks has come to London. And it radically reorients the story…
The first twenty pages of the novel have introduced us to Lord Walden, the Englishman who will be hosting Prince Orlov and negotiating for the English. So up till the point where we meet Feliks, we’ve had a rather conventional story about a dull political negotiation. Once we meet Feliks and see his flashback, we have a much more interesting story, because we see that this dull political negotiation is about to get millions of innocent people killed. And the only man who can stop it is a Russian anarchist. That’s a nice twist and it makes a great story. It becomes an even better story when you learn that Feliks knows the wife of Lord Walden. Or rather, he knew her when she was a young and wild Russian aristocrat growing up in St. Petersburg. He knew her very, very well, until the night he was arrested and she was married off to an Englishman. All of which the reader will learn through a series of vivid flashbacks.
So if you need a flashback, it’s simple: Write a sentence or two of transition, then do a scene break, then write the flashback, and then do another scene break. If you need another short transition to get back into the present, write one.
If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.
Thank you for this post. It’s most helpful because I deal with a LOT of characters, coming and going, and they all have a history. Much of it relevant to the book present. I struggle with keeping it to necessary flashbacks, though I’d not exactly thought to do what you suggest. This is great! The best part is it won’t become an info dump to leave me with hours of cleanup…Well, maybe only a few minutes of work? Much nicer.
Randy, as an artist I can’t resist the idea of a triangle-to-snowflake visual, so I’ll designing one as a mindmap of sorts for the series I’m working on, to mat and hang on my office wall. It’s challenge and you are an incredible inspiration.
My main character arrives at law school. After 2 pages of solid introduction and description of him, I want the reader to know that he used to be homeless but a famous lawyer helped him get off the street and into law school.
What do you think about using a flashback to show how this came about after only 2 pages? Thanks, stay safe.
A flashback so early in the book is almost certainly doomed to lose your reader, unless you have unusually spectacular skills as a novelist. If you do, then go ahead and do it. I never say no to a genius.
If you’re not certain you are that one-in-a-million author who can pull it off, then I’d recommend you communicate this information in dialogue. There are billions of ways to do it, and you can easily find one that will keep your reader engaged.
My female protagonist is about to meet the male protagonist. But she won’t really know that she already knows him from childhood. I thought to start off my book with the female protagonist walking around and having a flash back of someone she used to know…
Do you think it’s good idea to have a flash back like on the first page? Because, I think it will help the readers understand a little bit more of where both the protagonists stand.. What do you say?
Ah finally how to do it instead of the usual articles saying “Flashback BAD don’t do it.” Or even worse “Flash back back no kinda good here’s how bla-bla (never shows how just says why they suck again.)”
!@#$$%!
Seriously frustrating. It’s another tool and should be treated as such. Thank you for our help, I did a merge of what was shown here and had it first start with them talking (the main pov finally deciding to trust her new friends more.)
——————-
A soft whiff of pine and mountain air came through the screens, it for the moment felt so much like home. She clutched the fabric, the memories hidden away for so long… I can’t put this off any longer. Trust, just have to jump in. She pulled in two deep breaths and began.
####
Mommy and Daddy always had that scent lingering on them when they came back from their missions. It wasn’t fair.
And I end it with:
Someone screamed followed by footfalls. A soft touch of a blanket, as it wrapped around.
A soft furry touch on her back. “It’s me.” Han had come over the soft fur of his arm around her back.
I think it still needs work but am tying to make damn sure readers know it’s a flashback and trying like hell to make it seamless.
(I didn’t do the whole flash back in that chapter a few paragraphs then found a stopping point as they need to get moving.) I’m thinking next time i find a natural rest break in the story to give a little here and there in dialoge and then another short backstory. I don’t want to slow things down to much or ack.. jar readers out of the book.
Still I’ve read a lot of big name author books and never had a problem with any backstory as the writer waits a while before putting any in.
Slightly off topic:
It really irks me when articles are all cookie cutter and can’t even try thinking about backstory but instead bash the hell out of them with out even thinking about all the books they’ve read. I’m on a few online writing platforms and the reality is readers want back story (just not in huge blocks) the only thing that seems to set them off is when a writer fails with the plot, makes boring characters, bad grammar or flat dialogue. Backstory? They get ticked if there isn’t any!
I feel that the writing articles are really out of touch and should offer both options (Backstory usually suck this is why! Backstory can be done -if you’re careful- here’s how…) sure new writers are going to much things up, GOOD then they learn… just give the rest of us and damn guide.
Anyway. thank you I really appreciated the help.
Thank you! So I’m writing this book but I want a flashback in it (it’s not really a flashback it happened like two seconds ago) but this is still only the introduction to the book.
Ex: He stared at his bloody hands, how did this happen? Where did it all go wrong? Perhaps… it was when he first started going to his new school. Yeah, that was it.
Idk if I should put that in though… thoughts?
Thank you for this post. It’s most helpful because I deal with a LOT of characters, coming and going, and they all have a history. Much of it relevant to the book present. I struggle with keeping it to necessary flashbacks, though I’d not exactly thought to do what you suggest. This is great! The best part is it won’t become an info dump to leave me with hours of cleanup…Well, maybe only a few minutes of work? Much nicer.
Randy, as an artist I can’t resist the idea of a triangle-to-snowflake visual, so I’ll designing one as a mindmap of sorts for the series I’m working on, to mat and hang on my office wall. It’s challenge and you are an incredible inspiration.
I’m into a memoir as a baby boomer growing up in the sixties. My dad suffers with World War Two stresses and copes with alcohol.
I want use flashbacks of my dad’s past to explain our conflicts.
The flashbacks occur before my boyhood understanding.
Example: he is a newspaper editor. The family takes him breakfast after he has worked all night. He was asleep with his head on his typewriter. I was 8.
I now know he was pasted out.
I don’t want to make him evil in our many conflicts now that I understand.
I’ve got this character, Chase, who is arguably the most important character in my multi-book team story. The problem is, while his personal inciting incident (a car/meteor crash that’s significant to the master plotline) happens in book #2, his story doesn’t dovetail with the team (and therefore give the reader a reason to care about him) until he begins interacting with the team (and eventually replaces their heroic suicide) in book #4 or #5. Not only is this flirting with novella length, but Chase is the only one who was physically there thru the whole thing, and large chunks of his memory are lost due to the crash trauma or unformed in the first place due to drugged stupor/being unconscious.
This is the transition that takes the reader from the present story into the flashback. As discussed before, the webpage will likely emphasize using triggers like sensory details, emotions, or objects.
The Backstory Scene: This is the main part of the flashback, where you depict the past event or scene the character remembers.