How do you write a flashback in fiction? It would seem easy but it’s trickier than you might think. There are two main challenges:
Inertia. Avoiding the slo-mo, or quicksand effect that can occur when your story’s forward momentum has to stop and wait while we while we sit becalmed in time already past and done.<
Entry and exit. Signaling to the reader that we are leaving the present and entering the past.<
The instinct to go into the past and SHOW, rather than use narrative summary to TELL about what once happened, is a good one. But forward moment is something we try very hard to achieve and maintain. How do you avoid the inertia that takes a good instinct, and turns it into a momentum killer?
• Make sure the scene is throughly dramatic, and your diction is specific and full of action words.
• Keep it as short as possible: set it up with summary, then show only the crucial moments.
Even a well-written flashback will lose effectiveness if readers aren’t clear about where the past begins and ends. Here’s a student sample in which the second paragraph is a flashback. What’s wrong with it?
Kayla tried hard to keep her mind on the task at hand–finishing those thank-you notes. But the smell of apples baking somewhere nearby kept pulling her mind back to Grandma’s, and the first pie she had ever baked.<
She felt a sense of impending importance. Something big was about to happen in her life, but she wasn’t sure what. The clock said ten minutes after ten. How long did she have to wait…?
<
The intent was to use flashback to show how the prospect of baking her first pie long ago, had Kayla alive with a “sense of impending importance.” But were you aware we had shifted to the past? Was there anything in the text to signal that shift? If you answered “no,” you’re right. The lack of signal threatens to break the story at this point. But fortunately, fixing it is simple.
Kayla tried hard to keep her mind on the task at hand–finishing those thank-you notes. But the smell of apples baking somewhere nearby kept pulling her mind back to Grandma’s, and the first pie she had ever baked.<
She had felt a sense of impending importance that day. Something big was about to happen in her life, but she wasn’t sure what. The clock said ten minutes after ten. How long did she have to wait…?<
…now, as she stared at the sterile Hallmark “Thank You” card in her hand, she wished she could go back to Grandma’s kitchen and stay there forever.<
What you see is a simple formula for directing traffic between your story’s “now” and it’s “then.” Past perfect (had felt) signals into the past. “That day” reinforces it. “Now–” signals that we are back where we started, in the “now,” and ready to move forward in real story time.
Whatever tense you’ve chosen to represent “now,” the flashback should go one tense back in time. In the typical story, we use past tense to indicate “now.” Thus the story’s “then” would be written in “past perfect.” But the good news is that you will only have to utilize past perfect once or twice, to kick the flashback off. Once the past dimension is established, you can shift back to the less cumbersome past tense for the duration of the flashback.
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