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!

How do you include other people’s stories in your memoir? Maybe you want to write about how your parents met, or maybe you want to let me know what your grandparents endured during World War II.

Telling other people's stories in memoir is possible, but if you do it in the wrong way, you run the risk of losing your reader. Why? Subjective writing – putting us inside your narrator’s head – is the key to transporting your reader. However, you can’t put us inside someone else’s head.

If I’ve lost you, watch this intro to subjective writing.

So how do you accomplish this? First, let me show you how Tara Westover achieves this in her memoir, Educated.

“I don't know when the man in that photograph became the man I know as my father.  Perhaps there was no single moment. Dad married when he was twenty-one, had his first son, my brother Tony, at twenty-two. When he was twenty-four, Dad asked Mother if they could hire an herbalist to midwife my brother Shawn. She agreed. Was that the first hint, or was it just Gean being Gene, eccentric and unconventional, trying to shock his disapproving in-laws? After all, when Tyler was born twenty months later, the birth took place in a hospital. When Dad was twenty-seven, Luke was born, at home, delivered by a midwife. Dad decided not to file for a birth certificate, a decision he repeated with Audrey, Richard and me. A few years later, around the time he turned thirty, Dad pulled my brothers out of school. I don't remember it, because it was before I was born, but I wonder if perhaps that was a turning point. In the four years that followed, Dad got rid of the telephone and chose not to renew his license to drive. He stopped registering and ensuring the family car. Then he began to hoard food.

This last part sounds like my father, but it is not the father my older brothers remember. Dad had just turned forty when the Feds laid Siege to the Weavers, an event that confirmed his worst fears. After that, he was at war, even if the war was only in his head. Perhaps that is why Tony looks at that photo and sees his father, and I see a stranger.”

What is Tara Westover doing there? Well, she can’t channel her father’s thoughts, so she gives us her thoughts about her father.​

Look at how much subjective writing she manages to include, how many times she uses the word “I”, even though this is about her dad.

"I don't know when the man in that photograph became the man I know as my father."

"I don't remember it, because it was before I was born, but I wonder if perhaps that was a turning point." ​​​​​​

"Perhaps that is why Tony looks at that photo and sees his father, and I see a stranger."

In other words, we are inside Westover’s head even when she’s telling us her father’s story. In short, she makes this about her – in a good way!

Here is my first tip for writing your family members’ stories:

Put us inside your head.

Let me give you another excerpt that includes subjective writing in a completely different way. This is from the memoir Heartsounds: The Story of Love and Loss by Martha Weinman Lear. 

“He awoke at 7:00 a.m. with pain in his chest. The sort of pain that might cause panic if one were not a doctor, as he was, and did not know, as he knew, that it was heartburn. He went into the kitchen to get some Coke, whose secret syrups often relieve heartburn. The refrigerator door seemed heavy, and he noted that he was having trouble unscrewing the bottle cap. Finally, he rinsed it off. Cursing the defective cap, he poured some liquid. Took a sip. The pain did not go away. Another sip. Still no relief. Now he grew more attentive. He stood motionless, observing symptoms. His breath was coming hard. He felt faint. He was sweating, though the August morning was still cool. He put fingers to his pulse. It was rapid and weak. A powerful burning sensation was beginning to spread through his chest, radiating upward into his throat, into his arm. No, but the pain was growing worse now. It was crushing. Crushing, just as it is always described, and worse even than the pain, was the sensation of losing all power. A terrifying seepage of strength. He could feel the entire degenerative process accelerating. He was growing fainter, faster. The pulse was growing weaker. Faster. He was sweating much more profusely now. A heavy clammy sweat. He felt that the life juices were draining from his body. He felt that he was about to die.”

Here the author helps us feel what her husband actually went through. So how did she know all of those things? The truth is, she probably took some creative license here and assumed what her husband thought and felt. The final result is writing that works to transport her reader. Instead of telling us what her husband went through, it feels like we are there with him. 

This leads me to tip number two:

Put us inside your characters’ heads.


Hope this info works to make your prose more interesting and emotionally affecting. Wishing you happy writing!