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- Without the content of an Occasional Flashback, a story might make sense, but it probably won’t be as meaningful. Writers can use Occasional Flashbacks when they need to provide crucial backstory or context in the middle of a story, or at the very beginning of a story.
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Nov 4, 2016 · Flashbacks are a multi-functional technique for stepping outside your story’s timeline and sharing interesting and informative nuggets about your characters’ pasts. But just as they can be used to strengthen your story, they can even more easily cripple it.
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Sep 22, 2021 · Writers can use Occasional Flashbacks when they need to provide crucial backstory or context in the middle of a story, or at the very beginning of a story. Many popular movies begin with a Flashback and then jump forward in time to the main storyline.
- Flashbacks
- Occasional Flashbacks
- Structural Flashbacks
- Why Flashbacks Work
- What If It's The Future, Not The Past?
- Case Studies
- When to Use Flashbacks in Your Story
Gotta love it when the definition of the word is really just the word itself. A Flashback is when you flashback to the past during the course of a story. See? In all seriousness though, Flashbacks are pretty much exactly what they seem to be — a scene (or sequence of scenes) that deviates from the main story to show something that happened before t...
Occasional Flashbacks are just that — occasional. They might happen once or twice throughout the course of a movie, but they’re not woven into the underlying structure of the story. Despicable Meis a great example of a movie with Occasional Flashbacks. We jump to Gru’s childhood several times to see where his fascination with the moon comes from an...
The opposite of an Occasional Flashback is a Structural Flashback — Flashbacks that are critical to the structure of a story. In these stories, the Flashbacks function in the same way as load-bearing walls. Without the Flashbacks, the whole building (or, the whole story) falls apart. Think of how Titanicis set up: it’s framed as an 80-year-old woma...
Internal memory is the real-life equivalent of the cinematic Flashback. As we go through our daily lives, we are constantly remembering things that have happened to us in varying degrees of depth. Sometimes, like the term infers, it’s just a flash. Other times, we ruminate on an event or scene from our past for an extended period of time. Audiences...
Well, if you’re jumping ahead to the future, that’s a flashforward. And if you’re hopping over to an alternate reality or otherwise separate timeline, that’s a flash-sideways. While stories that feature a flashforward or flash-sideways may seem fundamentally different than those with Flashbacks, as plot devices, the three techniques function in ess...
Phew! Now that you’re a Flashback fanatic, let’s analyze a few examples from well-known movies and shows.
Writers who want to use Flashbacksare often met with the same advice: “Never use Flashbacks.” Given that so many movies and TV shows make good use of Flashbacks, I’d say that advice is total bunk. But it does serve as a good warning for novice writers. Flashbacks should not be used willy-nilly as a crutch for thin storytelling. So before you sign o...
We’ll discuss the pros and cons to writing a flashback, how to determine if this device is the best way to deliver backstory, and, of course, how to write a flashback like a pro… should you decide to go for it.
- Abi Wurdeman
Jun 23, 2020 · Flashbacks halt the main story and bring the reader back to another place, another time, basically to another story, and that’s a very dangerous moment because it’s very easy to lose the...
Jan 10, 2019 · Although I go along with a lot of the conventional wisdom about writing, I think flashbacks are fine. I write them, and more often than not, I enjoy them as a reader. But even if you’re anti-flashback, you still may run into issues with past tense versus past perfect tense.
Sep 15, 2016 · How to write flashbacks in novels and short stories. Sometimes writers need to insert flashbacks into a story. It might be to explain a plot point, develop a character or clarify their motivations, or give the reader some background information. It’s important that you can identify why your story needs a flashback.
