Lesson #7: How to Properly Use Flashbacks 

Now you know how to flesh out a character’s background, personality, and appearance. It’s time to properly implement all of that information into your novel. You don’t want to just plop it all into the story in block paragraphs. Your character’s identity must be woven into the story to create the best reader experience.

A long, long time ago

Let’s start with their background. A common way to highlight and introduce the most important elements of a character’s background is through flashback. This is usually only reserved for your protagonist and antagonist — though often just the protagonist if the story is told from the hero’s perspective. It’s also only used for moments that truly impacted the character and relate somehow to the present storyline.

Secondary characters’ backgrounds (or less important memories) can be told through dialogue, or one or two sentences of exposition in the narrative rather than with a full flashback.

So what is a flashback? It’s when you cut away from the main plot line and immerse the reader in a scene that took place in the past. 

Flashbacks can be presented: 

• As a dream. 
• Through a character reminiscing in their head. 
• As its own chapter, with a date or some sort of prefacing line to indicate that we’re in the past. 
• In the middle of a chapter narrative, and written as if it is happening in the present. In this case, the memory is often in italics to differentiate it from the “present” of the main storyline. 

Any of these methods can be effective. The key is selecting the right memories for a flashback.

What is their defining moment?

Go through your character outline and find the answers to lesson 4’s origin questions. What moment had the largest impact on who your character became? 

Did your heroine’s rocky relationship with her mother make her run away at seventeen, forcing her to grow up faster than she should have? That would make a great flashback that would help the readers understand why she’s a hard worker to a fault, and empathize more with her. 

Did your hero have a near-death experience that resulted in a terrible fear of heights? That’s a great flashback option, too, especially if the plot will later force him into a precarious situation involving extreme heights. That’s another way flashbacks are helpful: if you set up a character trait through a flashback that makes the readers feel like they also experienced that moment, then any related stakes that occur later will be raised even higher for readers. 

Get creative with your flashback method if you want. You don’t have to stick to the dream sequence or have your character reminisce while driving. In Harry Potter, for instance, J.K. Rowling uses the ‘pensieve,’ a magical device that allows wizards to actually watch memories play out like an interactive film.

No matter how you do it, the key is making your readers feel like they’re living in that flashback scene and ensuring the flashback teaches them something new and vital about the plot or the character.

Tomorrow, we’re flashing back to the present to look at another side of implementing character.

Hannah

Recommended Resources

• How to Use Flashbacks (video)

Brought to you by Hannah Sandoval

Hannah Sandoval is a freelance ghostwriter and copy editor who has worked on over two dozen manuscripts, and a published author herself. Her guilty pleasures are Rocky Road ice cream and crime TV shows. If you would like to connect with her to discuss assistance with your manuscript or character outlines, check out her Reedsy profile.​

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