How to Write Fiction using Flashbacks

I'll admit it: learning how to write fiction can be a confusing business. No sooner have you mastered the novel writing basics than something new comes along to complicate matters.

One of those new things is how to present information in your novel - primarily, information about the characters' pasts. If you have read the article on Exposition, you will know that the best way to do this is to work it into the prose in small, unobtrusive chunks - a few lines of dialogue here, a paragraph of narrator's statement there.

The trouble is that, sometimes, an episode from a character's past simply cannot be dealt with in a paragraph or a brief exchange of dialogue. Sometimes the incident is so important that it needs several pages of prose to do it justice. And that is where flashbacks come in...

This article is split into two parts:

• First, I tell you what flashbacks are.
• Second, and more importantly, I explain precisely how to handle them.

What Are Flashbacks?

They are simply scenes from the past. If a novel starts at Point A and finishes some time later at Point B, a flashback is a scene that happened before Point A, usually many years before.

Notice the word scene. In exposition, you tell the readers something, but in flashbacks you show them - and that means a fully dramatized scene. (Mastering the difference between showing and telling is crucial when you are learning how to write fiction. If you are unsure of the difference, read this article: Writing a Narrative through Showing and Telling.)

Do you need to use flashbacks in a novel? Absolutely not. In fact, if you can tell the story without them then so much the better.

You see, what the readers are really interested in is the present story (which runs between points A and B). Anything which interferes with this is a distraction. So if the episode from a character's past can be told in a few lines of exposition (telling it, not showing it) then that is what you should do.

How to Handle Flashbacks in Novel Writing

If you have no option but to use flashbacks in your fiction, here are three things you must do:

1. Make It Clear you are Moving Back in Time

Have you ever read a novel and somehow missed the fact that the author has moved back in time? There you are, happily reading about a character in present-day New York, say, when all of a sudden you are in Paris in the 1960s and you have to read back to find where the transition took place.

Well, don't let that happen to your readers. (Learning how to write fiction is often about putting yourself in the audience's shoes.)

An obvious way to overcome this problem is to give a flashback a chapter all to itself, and to make the time and place crystal clear at the start of the chapter.

If a fresh chapter isn't desirable or even possible, you have to make doubly sure that the readers are aware of the time and the place - both when you move back in time and again when you rejoin the present.