"Flashback in Writing: What It Is and How to Write One"

A flashback in writing is a scene that interrupts the story's present to show an event that happened earlier, told out of chronological order. The story stops, goes back in time, plays out a past moment as a scene, and then returns to where it left off. Writers use flashbacks to reveal a character's past, explain a motive, or hold back a key event until the reader is ready for it.

A flashback is a choice about order, not about content. The past event would happen at the same point in the characters' lives whether or not the book told it first. What the flashback changes is when the reader learns it, and so what the reader feels when they do. Every example below has been checked against the text it comes from.

What Is a Flashback in Writing?

A flashback is a full scene from the past, placed inside a story that is otherwise moving forward. Merriam-Webster's literary sense of the word is a break in the time order of a film or book to show something that happened earlier.

Two things make it a flashback rather than a passing memory:

• It is a scene. It has a time, a place, action and usually dialogue, told moment by moment. The novelist Leonard Bishop drew the line in Dare to Be a Great Writer (1988): "A flashback is a full scene that returns the character into the past of his life." And: "A recollection is more like an aside."
• It interrupts. The story has a present, which Gérard Genette called the "first narrative", and the flashback steps out of it and back in.

Randy Ingermanson and Peter Economy, in Writing Fiction for Dummies (2010), describe a flashback as "a container for a scene set earlier in the story", and add: "The only thing distinctive about a flashback is that it has two transition points, one at the beginning and one at the end." Those two transitions are where most flashbacks go wrong, and they get their own section below.

What Is Analepsis? Genette's Term for a Flashback

Analepsis is the narratologist's word for a flashback. Gérard Genette set it out in Narrative Discourse (1972; English translation by Jane E. Lewin, 1980), "designating as analepsis any evocation after the fact of an event that took place earlier than the point in the story where we are at any given moment". Its opposite, a jump forward, is prolepsis, the device behind a flash-forward and a close cousin of foreshadowing.

Genette grouped both under "anachrony", meaning "all forms of discordance between the two temporal orders of story and narrative". He also gave two measurements that are useful to any writer planning a flashback:

In his words: "this temporal distance we will name the anachrony's reach. The anachrony itself can also cover a duration of story that is more or less long: we will call this its extent."

What Are the Types of Flashback?

Genette divided flashbacks by where they fall in relation to the story's present:

• External flashback. The past event happened before the main story began. Genette's definition is an analepsis "whose entire extent remains external to the extent of the first narrative". A childhood scene in a novel set in adulthood is external.
• Internal flashback. The past event happened after the story began, but the book skipped it at the time and goes back for it later. A thriller that cuts away from the night of the crime and shows it in chapter 20 is using an internal flashback.
• Mixed flashback. It starts before the main story and runs on into it.

Writers also sort flashbacks by size:

• Scene flashback. A full dramatised scene, a page or a whole chapter long.
• Flashback chapter. A complete chapter set in the past, often with a date or a place as its heading.
• Recollection. A line or two of memory inside a present scene. Bishop's "aside". It is not strictly a flashback, and it is often the better tool.
• Frame story. The whole book is told looking back from a later present, and the "flashback" is most of the novel. In Wuthering Heights, the housekeeper Mrs. Dean tells most of the story to the tenant Lockwood, years after it happened.

Examples of Flashback in Literature

• Homer, the Odyssey, Book 19. The best-known flashback in Western literature. The disguised Odysseus is having his feet washed by his old nurse, Euryclea, and turns from the firelight because she will see a scar. As she washes him, Homer stops the scene and tells how a boar gave Odysseus the scar when he was young, hunting on Mount Parnassus with his grandfather Autolycus. Then he returns to the bath: in Samuel Butler's translation, "As soon as Euryclea had got the scarred limb in her hands and had well hold of it, she recognised it and dropped the foot at once." Genette uses this scene as his example of reach and extent, and Erich Auerbach opens Mimesis (1946; English 1953) with it, in the chapter "Odysseus' Scar".
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), chapter 6. Nick stops the summer's story to tell who Gatsby was: James Gatz, "that was really, or at least legally, his name." He then explains why he put the past there: "He told me all this very much later, but I've put it down here with the idea of exploding those first wild rumours about his antecedents, which weren't even faintly true." It is the clearest statement in fiction of why a flashback goes where it goes.
• Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; English translation by Gregory Rabassa, 1970). The first sentence: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." It is often quoted as a flashback, but it does two things at once. The firing squad is a jump forward, and the afternoon with the ice is where the novel actually starts. The line flashes forward so that the opening reads as a memory.
• Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." Billy's war, his marriage and his death are told in jumps, out of order, so no single time holds still as the present. It shows the far end of the technique: when everything is a flashback, nothing is.

Why Use a Flashback?

A flashback earns its place when the past event changes how the reader understands the present. The common reasons:

• To answer a question the reader is already asking. Why does she flinch at the sound of a car door? A flashback that answers a live question lands; one that answers no question is a lecture.
• To reveal a motive. The past explains why a character wants what they want, or fears what they fear.
• To withhold a key event. A book can open after something terrible happened and show it only later, when the reader understands what it cost. This is how an in medias res opening usually pays its debt.
• To set up a twist. A late flashback can show the reader the one thing that changes everything. It is the most direct way to deliver a revelation in a plot twist, as long as the clues were planted earlier.

How Do You Write a Flashback?

1. Decide whether it needs to be a scene. If the reader only needs a fact, give it in a line of memory or dialogue. Save the full flashback for a past moment the reader needs to see happen.
2. Place it where the reader wants it. Put the flashback straight after the present story raises the question it answers, not before. Fitzgerald waited until chapter 6, when the rumours about Gatsby had piled up.
3. Give it a trigger. Something in the present calls up the past: an object, a smell, a line of dialogue. Homer's trigger is the scar under the nurse's hands.
4. Go in with the past perfect, then switch. In a story told in the past tense, open the flashback with one or two verbs in the past perfect ("She had driven that road a hundred times"), then move to the simple past for the rest. A whole scene in "had" reads like a fog.
5. Write it as a scene. Once inside, it is a scene like any other, with a goal, conflict and a turn. Don't summarise it from outside.
6. Keep it as short as it can be. The present story is paused while the flashback runs. Cut everything the reader doesn't need for this one revelation.
7. Come out on an anchor. Return to the same moment, image or object you left on, so the reader knows they are back. Homer comes out on the nurse's hands and the scar.
8. Let the present change. After the flashback, the next present scene should read differently. If nothing changes, the flashback wasn't needed.
9. Keep the two orders straight. A book with flashbacks has a reading order and a story order. Track both, so ages, seasons and who-knew-what stay consistent. A flashback that contradicts the present is the most common chronology error in a novel.

A Worked Example

The Bridge Road is a short novel about Tom and his sister Kit. Three nights before the book opens, their car went off the bridge road. Kit was driving. Everyone, including Kit, says she swerved.

In chronological order, the story runs:

The book tells it in a different order:

1. Waking (day 3). Tom wakes and is told Kit swerved.
2. Kit's room (day 4). The note. The reader now asks: lied about what?
3. The night of the crash (day 0). The flashback. It opens on a trigger, the note in Tom's hand, and a line in the past perfect: "The argument had started at the Fox, over nothing." Then it runs as a scene in the simple past, and shows Tom's hand on the wheel. It comes out on the note again, now in a hand that is shaking.
4. The bridge (day 5). The same meeting the book was always heading for, but now the reader knows that Kit took the blame for him.

The flashback sits in chapter 3 because chapter 2 asks its question. Told first, the crash would be a fact. Told third, it is a reversal, and it changes the meaning of the last chapter.

How Do You Plan a Flashback in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app. Its Outliner shows the book as a board of cards in reading order, and its Timeline shows the same events in the order they happen. Together they show a flashback for what it is: a card late in the book with an early date.

1. Open the Outliner on the Draft and add a card for each chapter with Add › Chapter. Write what happens in each card's synopsis.
2. Add the flashback chapter, then hover over its card and drag it by its grip (Drag to reorder) to the point where the reader is asking its question.
3. Open the flashback chapter and make a label called "Flashback" (the pencil beside Status in the Inspector's Properties opens Edit labels & statuses), in a colour of its own. Switch the Outliner to its list, and every chapter is a row with its label, so you can see where each flashback falls.
4. Open the Timeline and click Add Plotline. Use the plotline's + (Add event) to open New Timeline Event in the Inspector: give each event a title, a Start (the day it happens) and its Linked chapter/scene, then Create Event.
5. The Timeline shows the events in the order they happen, to scale. Click the Reading order button in its header, and each event is numbered by its chapter's place in the book, so a flashback shows as a number out of sequence: 3, 1, 2, 4.
6. Switch to Story order. It is a column per chapter, in book order, and the flashback is a card with an early day in a late column. Drag a card to another column to link the event to that chapter.

For more on the dated board, ages and clashes, see timeline software for writers, and for reordering whole scenes, the Outliner.

Flashback vs Backstory vs Flash-Forward

• Backstory is everything that happened before the story begins. A flashback is one way of showing part of it, as a scene. Most backstory is better given in small pieces and never dramatised.
• A memory or recollection is a line or a paragraph of the past inside a present scene. The present never stops.
• A flash-forward (prolepsis) jumps ahead to an event that hasn't happened yet in the story's present.
• In medias res is where a story starts: in the middle of the action. A flashback is how the skipped part is often told afterwards.
• A prologue is a separate opening section. It may be set in the past, but it comes before the story's present has been established, so it is not an interruption of it.

Where Does the Word "Flashback" Come From? Two Common Mistakes

• "Flashback" was first a word for fire, not fiction. Merriam-Webster dates the noun to 1903, but in its first sense, "a recession of flame to an unwanted position (as into a blowpipe)". The storytelling sense came from early film. The film historian David Bordwell, drawing on Maureen Turim's Flashbacks in Film (1989), notes that the term "can be found as early as 1916", and that in the 1920s it could mean any cut from one strand of action to another, like "cut-back" and "switch-back", before it settled into its modern meaning.
• The technique is far older than the word. Writers sometimes treat the flashback as a film device borrowed by novelists. Homer was using it more than 2,500 years before cinema. Genette's book is mostly about Proust, but he sets out his terms with Homer: the opening of the Iliad, and the scar in the Odyssey.

Common Mistakes

• A flashback in the first chapter. The reader has no present yet to be interrupted, and no question for the past to answer. Establish the present first.
• No trigger. A flashback that starts for no reason in the present feels like the writer's notes.
• Too much "had". Two or three past perfect verbs to go in, then the simple past.
• A blurry exit. If the reader can't tell they are back in the present, they will reread. Come out on an anchor.
• Telling the reader what they already guessed. A flashback that confirms what the present already made clear wastes a scene.
• Inconsistent details. A character's age, a season or a scar that doesn't match between past and present. Track the dates.
• Too many flashbacks. Each one pauses the main story. If the past is more interesting than the present, the book may be starting in the wrong place.

Sources

Retrieved 30 October 2026.

• Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, translated by Jane E. Lewin (Cornell University Press, 1980), the chapter "Order", on anachrony, analepsis, reach and extent, and external, internal and mixed analepses (Internet Archive).
• Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Samuel Butler, Book 19 (Project Gutenberg).
• Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Willard R. Trask (Princeton University Press, 1953), chapter 1, "Odysseus' Scar" (Internet Archive).
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), chapter 6 (Project Gutenberg).
• Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa (Harper and Row, 1970), first sentence, checked in the translation as quoted in published criticism (Open Library search inside).
• Leonard Bishop, Dare to Be a Great Writer: 329 Keys to Powerful Fiction (Writer's Digest Books, 1988), "Flashback vs. Recollection" (Internet Archive).
• Randy Ingermanson and Peter Economy, Writing Fiction for Dummies (Wiley, 2010), the sections on flashback (Internet Archive).
• Merriam-Webster, flashback, senses 1 and 2a, and first known use.
• David Bordwell, Grandmaster flashback, Observations on Film Art, 27 January 2009, drawing on Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (Routledge, 1989).