A Flashback is not something you remember

Hiya Fellow Writer!

If you think that a flashback is something you remember, you're probably using flashbacks in the wrong way. What is the right way? Keep reading to find out.

Flashbacks in books are different than in movies​

A flashback in a book is not like a scene in a movie when all of a sudden there's a shot of the character remembering something, and then we get into the flashback.

Flashbacks don't work this way in memoir. For memoir writers, a flashback is a story from your past that is somehow relevant to the main storyline.​

In other words, your narrator doesn’t have to pause to remember the past. You don’t have to write things like, “In that moment, I flashed back to being eight years old” or “I suddenly remembered when my mother punished me for arriving late to school.” 

What you want to do instead is basically tell your reader, “Hey, there’s this related story from a while back that seems relevant to mention here.” So how do you do that?

In order to get into a flashback, you need to do two things. 

1. Something has to happen in your main storyline. 
2. You need to make a point related to what just happened, a point that is relevant to the flashback. 

Does that sound confusing? It shouldn't by the time you finish reading this email.

How to create a flashback in your own memoir

To help you better understand how to use flashbacks, let’s look at an example from Wild by Cheryl Strayed. 

First of all, I want you to spot the flashback in this text. At what point does the text  veer away from the main storyline and get into the story from the past?

The doctor shook his head sadly and pressed on. He had a job to do. They could try to ease the pain in her back with the radiation, he offered. Radiation might reduce the size of the tumors that were growing along the entire length of her spine. 

I did not cry. I only breathed. Horribly. Intentionally. And then forgot to breathe. I’d fainted once — furious, age three, holding my breath because I didn't want to get out of the bathtub, too young to remember it myself. What did you do? What did you do? I'd asked my mother all through my childhood, making her tell me the story again and again. Amazed and delighted by my own impetuous will. She’d held out her hands and watched me turn blue, my mother had always told me. She’d waited me out until my head fell into her palms and I took a breath and came back to life.

Breathe.

“Can I ride my horse?” My mother asked the real doctor. She sat with her hands folded tightly together and her ankles hooked one to the other.”

So, did you spot the flashback? It appears in the second paragraph starting with “I’d fainted once.”

Now let's break down what Strayed is actually doing here. Your first step is make something happen in your main storyline. So what is it that happens in this text? 

“When I get more bad news from the doctor I forget to breathe.” 

An event can be as simple as that. Something happens. Strayed forgets to breathe.

So what’s the point she makes related to that event to get us into the flashback? 

“Once I held my breath for so long, I fainted.” 

Another way to think of this: Your flashback is making the same point as what is happening in your scene.

Be sure to make your point at the beginning of your flashback, not the end. That way, your flashback will be relevant in your reader’s mind and they won't ask, “Why is the author telling me this?” 


Hope this helps make your good writing better!