Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing
I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. Our topic today is the much-maligned Flashback. Some people will tell you to never put a Flashback in your novel. Is that true, not true, or something else? Let’s start by clarifying what a Flashback is.
What is a Flashback?
A Flashback is a scene set sometime in the past, relative to your storyline.
Let’s be clear that a Flashback is a scene. It’s not exposition on what happened in the past. It’s a scene, shown to the reader as if it were happening right now. You use the same standard techniques for showing that you use for any other scene. For a review of those techniques, see my recent blog post, What “Show, Don’t Tell” Actually Means.
So a Flashback looks exactly like any other scene in your novel. But it’s special, because it’s set at a time before your novel begins. Therefore, a Flashback is never the first scene in your novel. Your story is humming along, moving forward in time, and then suddenly you inject a scene that zips the reader backward in time. When the Flashback is over, you zip forward in time to where your story was just before you showed the Flashback.
What’s the point of that? It’s simple. A Flashback is a powerful way of showing the reader a particularly important chunk of Backstory.
What is Backstory?
Backstory is the whole history of your characters and your storyworld before the beginning of your novel. The Backstory of your novel would have a gigantic word-count, if you told it all. It’s everything that ever happened. Your novel has far more Backstory than you could possibly put into your novel. You have to pick and choose the most important Backstory and leave the rest out.
Why is Backstory important? Because your characters carry all sorts of mental and emotional and physical baggage into the story. They have limitations, and some of those limitations are a result of things that were done to them in the past (or things they did to themselves or others). Those limitations may be holding them back in the current storyline they’re in, which is your novel. When that’s the case, your reader needs to know some of the Backstory.
When is Backstory Allowed?
Most fiction teachers will warn you to keep Backstory to a minimum. There is a “rule” I’ve often heard that you shouldn’t show or tell any Backstory in the first 50 pages of your novel. That’s a rule you can ignore. You can put the Backstory wherever you need it.
Here are some general principles that will serve you well when deciding how and when to use Backstory:
- Introduce your Backstory as late as possible—only bring it in when the reader absolutely needs to know the information about the past.
- Give the reader the minimum amount of Backstory possible.
- Consider Showing your Backstory (rather than Telling it) by putting the Backstory into a scene. And the way you Show it is by using a Flashback.
Backstory is a problem when it detracts from the Frontstory. Your reader bought your novel to experience the Frontstory.Your reader didn’t buy your novel to learn about what happened before the Frontstory even started.
Some novels never need a single Flashback. That’s because, in some novels, the past doesn’t have that much of an effect on the present.
But in some novels, the Frontstory is fundamentally based on what happened in the Backstory. Then you may need to show a lot of Backstory. Which means you may need a lot of Flashbacks. Let’s look at an example of a novel where Flashbacks are crucial.
Flashbacks in The Man From St. Petersburg
One of my favorite novels is The Man From St. Petersburg, by Ken Follett. The story is set in the spring and summer of 1914. Germany is preparing to declare war on France. England will be pulled into this conflict, but it knows it will lose. The English government thinks it can win if it can get Russia to agree to join Britain and France, forcing the Germans to fight on two fronts.
The Czar agrees to send his nephew, Prince Orlov, to negotiate. But the Czar insists that the English negotiator must be a man he trusts, Lord Walden. Walden speaks Russian and is married to Lydia, a Russian noblewoman from St. Petersburg. Lydia is Prince Orlov’s aunt, and she and Lord Walden are quite fond of young Orlov. Lord Walden and Lydia have one daughter, Charlotte, who is 18 years old. A Russian anarchist, Feliks Kschessinsky, has got wind of the negotiations and has come to London to kill Prince Orlov to prevent his country from being sucked into a pointless and stupid war.
The novel depends on a crucial bit of Backstory. Feliks is the biological father of Lydia’s daughter Charlotte. Nobody in the story knows this at the beginning of the novel. The reader and Feliks and Lydia discover it slowly, beginning with a series of Flashbacks that show Feliks and Lidia as they were in 1895. They meet by accident in a bookstore. They have a torrid affair. Feliks is captured by the Czar’s secret police. Lydia is married off to a young English nobleman, Lord Walden.
This Backstory puts a massive twist into the Frontstory. The initial goal of Feliks is to kill Prince Orlov. It’s a straightforward political assassination, and Feliks seems like a one-dimensional terrorist. Orlov is staying at Lord Walden’s house. Midway into the story, Feliks tries to shoot Orlov and fails, because he’s distracted by Lydia’s scream. He now realizes that his old lover is the wife of the Englishman negotiating the deal with Orlov. Soon after this, he learns he has a daughter.
From this point on, Feliks has two Values:
- Nothing is more important than saving Mother Russia from a senseless war.
- Nothing is more important than protecting his daughter.
Those Values are in conflict. And that’s what makes this a novel worth reading several times.
The Mechanics of Writing a Flashback
Let’s talk about mechanics. A Flashback interrupts the linear flow of time. How do you get into the Flashback and how do you get back out?
It’s really very simple. Typically, you need a transition at each end, a little bit of narrative glue to connect the present-day life to the Flashback.
In The Man From St. Petersburg, Feliks has just failed in his first attempt to kill Prince Orlov, because he was distracted by Lydia’s scream. Then Lord Walden wounds him with a sword, and he loses his gun and runs away. When he gets back to his cheap apartment, he can finally rest.
There’s a transitional sentence that ends with: “…and at last, Feliks allowed himself to remember:”
Then there’s a long series of Flashback scenes with Feliks and Lydia in 1895. The series begins with Feliks meeting Lydia and ends with Feliks learning that Lydia has been married off.
This is followed by a transitional sentence that says: “He learned no more for nineteen years.” And then the story resumes with a new scene at Lord Walden’s house.
That’s how you do a Flashback. Write a short transition in. Write the Flashback as a scene. Write a short transition out. Done.
Homework:
- In your current novel, how important is Backstory to your Frontstory. A little? A lot? Somewhere in between? There’s no wrong answer. It depends on your story.
- Is all the Backstory you tell essential to the Frontstory? If you told less, would the reader still understand your storyline?
- How much of your Backstory needs to be shown in Flashback scenes? Does each Flashback have a transition in and a transition out?
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