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Flashback examples pictures9/1/2023 ![]() ![]() Flash-forwards happen when you take the readers out of the timeline of your central plot and move them forward to a point in time, instead of back. Sometimes writers use a flash-forward, or a “prolepsis,” to communicate with their readers too. flash-forwardįlashbacks aren’t the only time disruption you might come across in literature. In a horror novel, your protagonist might be preparing their summer cottage for their boyfriend’s arrival once his holiday begins, but the readers know through a flashback that the boyfriend has already been killed on his way there.īy using past events to give the audience more information than the main characters, you create tension and suspense as they watch the inevitable play out before them. In a romance novel, for example, you might have your protagonist falling in love with his new neighbor-but a snapshot of a few weeks earlier has shown that the neighbor is still in a long-distance relationship with someone else. You can use flashbacks to create dramatic irony in any genre. To create dramatic ironyĭramatic irony happens when the readers understand more about what’s happening than the characters do. ![]() These serve to illuminate the character’s backstory and build up suspense as the hero gets closer and closer to the truth. You can use a series of scenes to reveal past events one piece at a time, casting suspicion on a range of different characters and bringing new motivations to light. Now the protagonist has to figure out what happened. For example, if you’re writing a murder mystery, your book will likely open with someone being murdered. They can be a useful tool for slowly feeding information to the readers little by little as they navigate their way through your plot. To build tensionįlashbacks are a mainstay of the suspense genre. However, a well-placed flashback might be just what your book needs to elicit a powerful, gut-wrenching reaction and make the story that much more potent. Generally speaking, it’s best to use flashbacks sparingly in your writing. You won’t want to use this literary device every time you need the readers to understand new information good exposition is a mix of different techniques that communicate with the audience in different ways. Instead of explaining that your protagonist once trusted their sibling and ended up embarrassing themselves in front of their crush, and that’s why they no longer trust them, why not show us with a memory instead? By letting the past events that underlie your plot play out in real time, you give your readers and your characters a more intimate connection that will make your reader invest in the plot. Using flashbacks can be a good tool for exposition in your story. This is a great way to bring complexity to inhabitants of your narrative who might otherwise be flat and uninteresting, and communicate a wider context for the events of the story. This insight into the character’s life will make your story even more powerful and engaging. Or if you’re writing a wicked villain, they can give your audience a sense of what made them this way, and even encourage them to begin to sympathize with them. Some examples might be if a character is recently divorced, you could write a flashback that shows how that divorce happened and how it affected your character. You can use them to explain why certain flaws or insecurities came to be and why the protagonist and other characters make the choices that they do. To give depth to charactersĪ flashback is a great way to enhance the reader’s understanding of your character’s back story. So now that we understand the flashback definition, let’s look at why we write flashbacks in fiction and some of the things they bring to our writing. An internal flashback is a throwback to something from earlier in your book that the readers have already seen once before. In other words, an external flashback is an event that takes place before the first page of your book. You might see these types of flashback scenes being called “external analepsis” (outside of the story) and “internal analepsis” (within the present story). ![]() Sometimes, however, your flashback scene might be to an earlier event in your narrative-for example, if some past event that occurred early on in the narrative was later referenced by your main character, so that it takes on new meaning. These are often events that happened before the book begins-something within a character’s past, or even the past of one of their ancestors. Flashbacks occur whenever you want to show the readers something in the past, rather than telling them about it. It happens when you take a step away from the current events of your plot to explore something that’s already happened in another point in time. A flashback is a break in the chronological events of a story. ![]()
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