How To Write The Perfect Flashback

Are you thinking about whether or not you need flashbacks in your story? We tell you how to write the perfect flashback.

What Is A Flashback?

A flashback is a piece of writing that shows the reader what happened in the past. The author does this by writing a scene set in the past. A flashback interrupts the flow of the current story.

Should We Use Flashbacks?

Writers love writing flashbacks. Readers hate reading them. If you insist on them, make sure you know how and when to use them. When you write a flashback, you should be careful not to ruin the pacing of the story.

Readers prefer to read a plotted story that moves from the beginning through the middle to the end. Anything that interferes with this chronology is distracting. [Suggested reading: Element 7 in The 7 Critical Elements Of A Great Book]

Flashbacks lack immediacy. They are essentially backstory and they can be a terrible distraction if they aren’t well-thought-out and well-written. You may even lose your readers.

When To Use Flashbacks

You should only use a flashback if it adds to your story. If you can get away with telling the scene in a dialogue exchange or a short diary entry, rather do that.

You can use them:

To show a character’s motives.
To fill in an important piece of the puzzle.
When something happened long ago and there is simply no other way to include it.

How To Use A Flashback

Before you use flashbacks make sure that you’ve done the following:

Engaged your reader in the protagonist’s current problem.
Established the goal of the story.
Established a threat to the goal. (This usually includes an antagonist.)
Used a flashback that compels readers to know what happened in the past.

You should be able to resume the story where you left it with no significant developments having taken place during the flashback.

Example Of A Flashback

In The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins uses a brief flashback to establish the backstory between Katniss and Peeta. Katniss remembers when she was at her lowest ebb after her father died. She was starving and Peeta, the baker’s son, threw bread into the snow that saved her and fed her family for a few days. Collins brings us back to the present immediately after this.

It works because:

We are emotionally invested in Katniss’s story (her family needs her to win).
We know her story goal (to win the games).
Peeta at this point represents a threat to that goal (he is her opponent in the games).
We need to know about this incident to show how she feels indebted to him on some level. It could not happen any other way, because Katniss is not a chatty person.

Top Tip: If you want to introduce a flashback in the first few pages of your novel, you should probably start the story when the flashback is taking place.