Don’t Let Flashbacks Break Your Novel’s Flow

Flashbacks are an inexplicably controversial topic. Many authors are vehemently against them in any situation. Many sprinkle them liberally through every story they write.

Some of this is, of course, down to personal style and taste – but I would also say that there are clear general guidelines on when flashbacks add to a novel, and when they don’t.

• There is a key past event we need to know – but it is not big enough to sustain a whole plotline

• Something in the past has impacted the present in a way which the reader must know and which has real emotional weight (that is, it matters to the protagonist in the present)

• Something is the past is a key source of tension/stakes

• The flashbacks add extra insight to current events which we cannot get in the main storyline (e.g. the protagonist doesn’t want to remember what happened or is telling a different story to the truth)

Often when I read authors’ first drafts, there are crucial point moments that happen off-page, and are only told to the reader in summary. If something is truly crucial to the story – if a certain event has to happen for the overall plot to make sense – then we need to see it happening ‘live’, not just be told that it happened. If that event is in the past, then we’ll likely need a flashback to show it.

• When they aren’t clearly explained on the page so the reader doesn’t know we’re going back in time – or where and when we’re going to

• When they interrupt the main story with information which isn’t crucial at that moment – and kill the pace

• When they’re used for world-building or character development but aren’t crucial to the central thread of the plot

• When they’re telling us something we already know

Here’s an example. Let’s say your protagonist was a champion gymnast as a child, and this is crucial to the plot because she’s going to need to perform some kind of act of gymnastic athleticism later, and you want to make sure this feels realistic.

So you weave in a flashback to her competing in a gymnastic competition and performing a similar kind of move to the one you’ll need her to perform later in your story.

Except… the gymnastic competition is irrelevant to the story. Nothing happens in that flashback scene that we need. For your reader, you’ve just interrupted the story they came to read and told them a random mini story about a gymnastic competition – and they lose interest.

Actually all we need to know is that the protagonist is a former gymnast. There are myriad ways you could show that without actually showing her doing gymnastics.

Maybe she has a pile of old gymnastics medals tucked in a drawer that she sees when she’s getting out a piece of jewellery.

Maybe she gets a twinge in her back when she sits at her desk all day, a hangover from an old gymnastics injury.

Maybe she automatically runs through the warmup routine she always did before gymnastics practice every time she goes for a run.

Little details like these can be woven into an existing moment in your story, depending on what your character gets up to – and there are a thousand different ways you might show a history of gymnastics without having to add more than a sentence to your novel.

On the other hand let’s say something vital to your story did happen to your former-gymnast protagonist during that competition. She’d lost her handguards right before she was due to compete – and her long-term rival loaned her theirs at the last minute, thus saving her competition and leaving your protagonist feeling she owes her rival something.

Now, in your main story, we’ll understand the complex relationship between your protagonist and her formal rival much better: they don’t like one another, but your protagonist feels in debt to them. When their rival needs something, or when your protagonist sees them struggling and realises she could help, it will make so much more sense to the reader that she does.

If your flashback is only character-building – if all it tells us is that your protagonist used to compete in gymnastics – it doesn’t need to be there. But if it shows us a specific event that shapes what happens and how your protagonist behaves in the main storyline, we ought to see it for ourselves.

If you’ve got this far and realised your flashbacks aren’t working, here are some alternative ways to get across what you need:

If it really is just a detail you need the reader to know, you can just… tell them.

Rather than a flashback where we see things unfold as if we’re there, you can just summarise an event in a line or two. This is useful where you want the reader to know something, but we don’t need to see it happen for ourselves.

On the other hand, if what your intended flashback will cover is vital to the plot – if not knowing it means that the story fundamentally doesn’t make sense and it is emotionally relevant to the story and seeing it first-hand is needed to give it sufficient weight and importance in the story – then you might find that actually you need to give it more space.

If your flashbacks are multiplying, and there is a whole, chronological and complete narrative arc within them… might that past storyline sustain an entire timeline of its own? If your flashbacks are big enough scenes that they work as chapters on their own, you might find a dual timeline is the right way to give everything the space and page time it needs.

No flashback will ever work if it isn’t clear to the reader what is happening – which means flashbacks need to be formatted and worded in a way that makes it obvious that they are flashbacks.

You might:

If your novel is written in the present tense, you can put flashbacks in the past tense. If it’s already in the past tense, you can switch to the perfect tense1 – though I would only do so for a few sentences to make the time change clear, and then move back to past tense.

Make it clear that a memory is being sparked and sending us back in time. Perhaps your protagonist finds an old gymnastics medal and remembers a certain competition…

Then use clear time-based tags to show us where we are. Is it nine years ago? When the protagonist was eleven? Three weeks before the accident that ended her gymnastics career? And when we come back to the main storyline, are we back in the present? Looking at the medal now?

If your flashback doesn’t transition smoothly from and back to the surrounding text, you can also use italics – but this is really hard to read, especially in large passages, so I would avoid it unless it is a small section only and absolutely vital. If it’s a larger passage – more than half a page, say – I would use line breaks or chapter breaks instead.

If your flashback scenes are weighty enough they take up whole chapters, consider whether you are actually writing a dual-timeline novel.

If they’re so slight they could be covered in a simple line of narrative summary, consider whether they should be there at all.

As always, any structural or plot element you include should be relevant to and building on the overall story you’re telling. If it’s stuck-on, irrelevant or repetitive, it likely doesn’t belong.

If you’d like to get access to all my posts, including in-depth subscriber-only posts to help you diagnose and fix what’s wrong with your novel, you can upgrade to a paid subscription here:

If you’re currently looking for an agent and would like to submit to me at The Ampersand Agency, you can find the agency submissions guidelines here, and my manuscript wishlist on my website.

If you’re looking for an editor you can contact me via my website, or book a query-package review or coaching call immediately.

Thank you so much for reading, commenting, liking and sharing. As always, please do let me know in the comments if there’s anything in particular you’d like me to write about – or head to the chat to talk about your current projects, ask questions, and get advice!

Happy writing!

Abi