The Five Rules of Writing Flashbacks Please welcome author
Stuart Horwitz with a guest post on writing flashbacks.
“Flashback” is a term that we are all familiar with, even if its
definition has grown a little vague. We sense that a flashback
is something that happened before… but happened before what?
Where we are now? In other words, what are we flashing back
from? This is where I think it is useful to introduce a
companion term to flashback, the reading present. The reading
present is the main narrative throughline, the most commonly
visited time period, the one whose beginning and end most
closely mirrors the beginning and end of the book as a whole.
There are good reasons to leave the reading present: by flashing
back we can deepen characterization, create suspense, or
introduce other characters and events that will eventually
matter a great deal to our outcome. But there are also bad
reasons to use flashback, not morally bad reasons of course,
just whoops-I-painted-myself-in-a-wicked-corner bad reasons.