Scenes, part 3 of 4: flashbacks

Showing what happened before

Introduction

Flashbacks (and less commonly, flashforwards) are when a new scene is presented from a different time period in order to add some important information for readers.

Flashbacks are presented as live-action scenes, not narrative summary. The reader is transported to a different timeframe for a live-action scene.

Flashbacks

Like narrative summary, a flashback can provide backstory, background, context, and characterization. The difference is that narrative summary is narration, while a flashback is a full live-action scene of something that happened at an earlier time, prior to the real time of the story, even from before the story started.

In our narrative summary example from last week, the wife notes that she was the middle child, which developed her into a peacemaker who is not comfortable with confrontation and conflict. It served the purpose of the story in just a couple of sentences.

However, it might be important for readers to get a fuller sense of this.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

A scene might be inserted at some point that flashes back to the wife when she was a ten-year-old child, a scene that illustrates in live-action how she interacted with an older brother and a younger brother who were always arguing and fighting.

Maybe she tries to get them to stop, tries to negotiate a peaceful resolution, but when that fails, she just leaves them and locks herself in her bedroom to read, tormented that she wasn’t able to make them get along and play nice.

A flashback scene needs to follow all the same techniques as any other scene, with its own narrative arc: the character has a goal (get her brothers to play nice and quit fighting); there is conflict (the brothers are arguing and about to come to blows); she attempts to overcome the conflict but fails and the brothers start punching each other (climax); she goes to her room (reversal of her situation); in the scuffle, the boys break their mother’s favorite vase, so they enlist their sister’s help to glue it back together (resolution—they’re all getting along and conspiring together to keep the boys from getting in trouble).

A flashback scene like this can go a long way to developing characterization, showing readers why she hates conflict, why her personality developed the way it did, and why she now struggles to confront her husband.

Notice that the purpose of the flashback scene is to shed light on the real-time story of the wife confronting her husband. It’s not just a scene from her childhood that the author thought would be interesting.

But yes, the flashback scene has to be interesting and engaging in its own right.

Where to place a flashback

This is always the critical question.