Anna Staniszewski

Yesterday I listed some rules for writing short flashbacks. Today I’m going to tackle an even trickier beast: the long flashback. When done well, longer flashbacks (ones that take up much of a scene or even an entire chapter) can be extremely effective in showing us the past instead of telling us about it. However, if done incorrectly, longer flashbacks can rip us right out of the story or make us lose track of when/where we are. That’s why it’s important to get them “just right.”

Many of Peter Selgin’s rules for flashbacks still apply here, but there are also a few other guidelines to consider.

1. Make your audience yearn for the flashback. If you give your readers all the information right away, they’ll be aware that they’re getting an “info dump.” If you allude to an event that happened in the past but delay showing that event until later on in the book, your readers will be excited to finally hear the full story. For example, if a character casually mentions that he always has a particular silver pen in his pocket, we’ll be interested to know more about it. If he later reveals that the pen is the only thing he has to remember his father by, we’ll wonder about their relationship.  If he finally tells us that he actually stole the pen from his father, a man he never knew, we’ll be dying to actually see the scene!

A word of warning: It’s important not to delay the flashback for too long; otherwise, the final reveal is likely to be a letdown.

2. Put the flashback in the appropriate place. You don’t want your extended flashback breaking up the flow of your story. If you put one into a chapter where the tension is high, for example, your readers will be impatient to get back to the real story. One trick is to put in the flashback when the main character is doing a mundane or repetitive action. Holes by Louis Sachar does this well; often when Stanley is busy digging holes the narrative brings us into a scene that occurred in the past. After the scene is over, we come back to Stanley, who’s still digging. If your flashback is an entire chapter, you want to make sure that the previous chapter ends in a place where it can rest for a moment without us getting impatient to know more. In both cases, you want us to  feel like we haven’t missed anything in the main story, but that we’ve also just learned another piece of the overall puzzle.

3. Keep the flashback short. Even in a longer flashback, you want your readers to remember that this is all part of the main story. If your flashback needs to be so long that it begins to overshadow the main story, then you might want to rethink the structure of your book. Perhaps it’s a story that actually needs to be told in two different times in chapters that alternate between the past and the present. In that case, you want to make sure that it’s easy to figure out when and where we are. Often simply putting the date at the beginning of each chapter will suffice. Also, some books, like A Northern Light, use alternating past and present tense to help differentiate between the two stories.

4. Make sure the flashback is absolutely necessary. This is probably the most important thing to keep in mind. Using an extended flashback in a story can be a gamble because it’s bound to slow down the narrative tension. You want to make sure that your story absolutely needs the flashback, that the information you think you have to show hasn’t already been revealed elsewhere. Also, consider if some of what you want to reveal in flashback could actually be put into a scene in the main part of your story; I’ve had to do this after realizing that it wasn’t worth breaking up my story in order to give information that could easily be worked into dialogue.

That just about sums up the main things I’ve learned about writing flashbacks, though I’m sure there are others that could be added to this list. If you have any useful flashback tips, I’d love to hear them!