A flashback is a scene or passage that interrupts the story's present to show something that happened earlier, usually to give backstory or explain why a character acts as they do.
Where the term comes from
Merriam-Webster defines the narrative sense as an interruption of chronological sequence, in a film or a literary work, by the interjection of events of earlier occurrence. The more formal name, according to the Wikipedia article on flashbacks, is analepsis, and it separates an internal flashback, which returns to an earlier point inside the story, from an external one, which reaches back to a time before the story began. Britannica notes that stories which open in the middle of a crisis usually supply the earlier events by flashback. On Jane Friedman's site, an editor warns that a story is mainly about its present-day action, and that backstory can often be woven in more invisibly through context or memory.
An example
Present: Calla wraps her late grandfather's chisel in newspaper and finds she cannot close her hand around it.
Flashback: At nine she had held it wrong, gripping the handle like a fist, and he had covered her fingers with his and said nothing, only turned the blade a quarter inch toward the grain.
Back in the present, Calla puts the chisel in the box marked keep. The memory took four sentences. It told us what the tool means, who the grandfather was, and why a woman who has been brisk all chapter suddenly stops. A paragraph of summary would have said the same facts and delivered none of the feeling.
Common mistakes
- Using too many. If the past is carrying the story, the book may really be a multiple-timeline story and should be built that way.
- Placing one where the present story needs a strong hook, which can leave the reader waiting for the actual book to begin.
- Starting without a trigger. A smell, an object or a question in the present gives the flashback a reason to arrive.
- Forgetting to return, or returning without a clear signal that we are back in the present.
- Packing in facts the reader does not need yet.
How to check your manuscript
List each flashback with the question it answers for the reader. If you cannot name one, the passage may be backstory that does not need a scene. For each one, ask whether a line of memory would do the same job, and try rewriting it that way. Then check the doors: the last line before a flashback should have a trigger, and the first line should anchor the time, whether through tense, a date or a changed detail. Finally, check the first chapters and mark any flashback sitting in the opening pages, since that is where it most often delays the story. The entry on pacing shows how interruptions affect momentum, and the revision guide helps place this check in a full read-through.
In Musael, the world and characters timeline lets you place events in their real order, including what the reader has not been told yet, which makes it easier to see where a flashback fits.