But when writers overuse flashback, readers grow impatient, losing interest in, or even forgetting, what’s happening in the now of the story. Yes, we should explore our story’s past. But at some point in revision, we need to reign the past in, selecting and shaping only those episodes that are crucial to understanding the present.

An effective flashback can:

Deepen Our Understanding Of A Character
In his classic novel Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates brings us back to a particular day in Frank Wheeler’s childhood when he accompanied his father to work. As he steps inside his father’s world, young Frank experiences a range of sensations: thrill in the bustle of New York City and the novelty of wearing his first suit and tie, a “shiver of wonder” as he gazes up at the building where his father works, pleasure in seeing his own dignified reflection in the barber shop window, dread as he rides the elevator that gives “no sense of flight, but only of confinement and nausea” and repulsion as he eats lunch with his father’s overweight boss whose mouth is “clinging and trembling with spittle.”

This flashback is significant because it contains the conflicting emotions that plague Frank Wheeler as the novel presses forward. It dramatizes the evolving struggle between his desire to break free from the job he despises and his impulse to stay.

Lend Later Scenes Dramatic Power
Early in Revolutionary Road, Frank Wheeler recalls a time his wife had told him about a particular morning at school “…when a menstrual flow of unusual suddenness and volume had taken her by surprise in the middle of a class.” He imagines how she must have run from the room “with a red stain the size of a maple leaf on the seat of her white linen skirt.”

This flashback is reflected back to us at the novel’s end when April Wheeler induces an abortion. And while Yates spares us the gory details of the abortion itself, the earlier image of blood flow, of the red stain spreading on her white skirt, resonates in our mindscape.

Bear The Story’s Meaning
Most of Said Sayrafiezadeh’s non-fiction story “The Afflicted” takes place in the present as the narrator and his girlfriend wait in the hospital ER for her wounded finger to be sutured. But the emotional movement happens as he confronts his painful childhood.

While observing a five-year-old boy who “appears far too comfortable and familiar with being in the emergency waiting room,” he leaps years back in time to a day when he was knocked unconscious after falling off his tricycle. “My father had left home long ago,” he tell us, “but my nine-year-old sister was still living with us and when I came to, she was sitting beside me.”

Having established his father’s absence early on, each visit into the past then gathers meaning, bringing us closer and closer to the emotional core. Three pages later, he gives us this:

The Andy Griffith Show is on television now. When I was child, it came on right before suppertime and I would watch it imagining that I was Opie, and that Andy was my dad, and that we lived in Mayberry and went fishing together. And then my real-life mother would break this reverie by calling me to dinner, and I would sit down with her at our fatherless table and eat a pathetic meal of frozen peas and carrots and Uncle Ben’s rice. I would spread the concoction evenly over my plate and pretend it was a pie. Then I would eat a slice of it and reshape it again, filling in the missing wedge.

The narrator’s past attempt to reshape his imaginary pie, to fill in the missing wedge, reflects the emotional void that haunts him in the present. This need to reconcile the deficits of his childhood with the yearning of his adult self is illuminated at the story’s end, when past and present converge:

I take my girlfriend’s good hand as the doctor prepares to sew. One day maybe, sometime in the future, if all works out okay, I will ask my girlfriend to marry me, and I will one day find myself sitting beside her in a hospital room, holding her hand as she prepares to deliver our baby. I will surmount the misery of my childhood and become the father I never had. I will invent it out of thin air.

Launch From The Present Moment By A Significant And Related Incident Or Image
In “The Afflicted” it is the wounded little boy in the emergency waiting room and later, a classic TV sitcom about a father and son. In Revolutionary Road it is a walk down an empty school corridor after April’s failed performance in an amateur play, and the hint of their troubled marriage.

Ideally, the image or episode in the flashback then launches itself back into the present story, adding drama and weight to the narrative. After lingering on the school day in April’s past, here’s how Yates returns us to the present:

Her face must have looked almost exactly the way it did now, as they opened this other fire-exit door and walked out across these other school grounds not many miles from Rye, and her way of walking must have been similar too.

When a story uses flashback effectively, the past and the present speak to each other, answering each other’s narrative questions and posing new ones.

These are my thoughts on a few ways to get the greatest payoff from flashback. What are yours?

Looking forward to your insights.

Recently I stumbled across an article offering advice about how to go from initial idea to story. This author’s prescription for creating compelling fiction? First, outline. Know your beginning, middle, and end. Create character sketches with a list of physical features and personality traits. Next, map out the story’s events. Think of your story as a race, with your protagonist wanting to get to the finish line. Now choose a setting. Got it? Now you’re ready to write.

While I wholeheartedly disagree with this advice, I understand the desire to plot out a narrative, however loosely, before writing the first draft. Let’s face it — first drafts can be scary; all this meandering, getting lost in a maze of possibilities, images and associations, detouring through what feel like unwieldy episodes and characters. An outline provides a blueprint. It’s safe, known territory. It would seem then that knowing where our narrative is going before we write should produce our best stories.

Not so.

Why? Because writing is largely an unconscious process. We never know what we’re going to say until we start writing. Even if you do have an idea at the outset of where your story is headed, it helps to stay open to what your story is telling you about what it’s trying to become. Maybe a minor character takes on a life of his or her own, spinning the story in a completely unexpected direction. Or you discover after several revisions that you’re really probing your relationship with your mother, not your father. If you coerce your characters into doing things that merely satisfy plot, if you pour your story into a preconceived template, the result is likely to be relatively shallow prose that’s not satisfying to you or your readers.

I’m not saying to abandon structure. Structure is essential. It shapes our prose so that a reader can receive it. But premature focus on it can stifle your voice. It can disturb the intuitive flow, the discovery or sublime truth that both reader and writer seemingly arrive at together. As Robert Frost famously said, “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

I suggest that rather than begin with an outline, write exploratory drafts. Dive in. Don’t know where you’re going. Structure is an evolving process. As you dive deeper and deeper into your material, as you inhabit your story and your characters through successive re-envisioning, you begin to see patterns and connections; you see a shape emerge. That’s when structure becomes useful.

Writing is a discovery of what we didn’t know was in us. This freefall approach might feel scary at first, but ultimately your voice will let loose. And your work will be richer and more rewarding. Narrative voice and, by extension, our stories, can only flourish if we stay open and, to a certain degree, lose control.