When to place flashbacks?
Asked by: Chris Millard
In fiction, a flashback is a scene that takes place before a story begins. Flashbacks interrupt the chronological order of the main narrative to take a reader back in time to the past events in a character’s life.
When should flashbacks be used?
Use flashbacks sparingly. A flashback should be used only when there is no other effective way to get an important piece of information across. If you use too many, it begins to feel like a cop-out storytelling device.
How do you incorporate flashbacks in a story?
4 Tips for Writing Flashbacks
- Use verb tense shifts to move between the flashback and main narrative. Whenever your narrative or characters recall a memory from a time before the story began, you have two choices. …
- Keep them relevant. …
- Sometimes the whole book is the flashback. …
- Tell the present story first.
Should you start a story with a flashback?
Begin the story with action. Don’t begin with a flashback after spending only a trivial amount of time in the story’s present. Introduce important characters in the beginning. Begin with a scene that will introduce a major conflict.
What tense do you write flashbacks in a story?
Flashbacks take place in the past, just like the rest of your story. But there needs to be a distinction between pasts, or it will confuse your reader. If your story takes place in the simple past, the flashback needs to take place in the perfect past. The perfect past refers to a time before another past event.
Why do writers use flashbacks?
Writers love their flashbacks. And with good reason. Flashbacks are a multi-functional technique for stepping outside your story’s timeline and sharing interesting and informative nuggets about your characters’ pasts. But just as they can be used to strengthen your story, they can even more easily cripple it.
What are some examples of flashback?
Here is another example of flashback as a memory: A woman is about to get married. As she puts on her veil, she remembers her fiancé three years before, swearing he would make her his wife someday. A tear comes to her eye and she prepares to walk down the aisle.
What is flashback technique?
flashback, in motion pictures and literature, narrative technique of interrupting the chronological sequence of events to interject events of earlier occurrence. The earlier events often take the form of reminiscence. The flashback technique is as old as Western literature.