Okay. This topic isn't really aimed to anything in particular... I just wanted to write about my scathing hatred for flash backs.

Don't get me wrong, I know why they exist. I know why people use them.

I just absolutely hate them. They can have the most interesting material in the world, but it won't change that I hate them.

Why do I hate them? Because the story isn't moving forward. At least in a literal sense. Yes, we can learn more about characters and a story can move forward in that sense, but the plot isn't progressing during a flash back and it just feels like I'm wasting my effort reading it. What's happened has happened, all I care about is the story's "now". The things characters do in reaction to what has already happened. I mean, no story truly has a beginning, you can always trace it back further and further through "time" - so we need to find a cutoff point for our stories to begin... you have to put your foot down and say, "These events will not be directly referenced or known about in detail."

Am I the only one like this? Or am I just an outlier? I'd honestly say to anyone interested in writing anything - don't write flash backs. Pick a starting point for your story with all the foreknowledge you can never go back; that if you want to talk about something that happened in the past, do it in the present. That if you want to show something about the past, show it in the present. That's what I'd tell anyone interested in writing.

But am I wrong? As I said, I know how they can be useful, but can't you substitute whatever it is you want to say about the past with saying it in the present? If the protagonist's family died in a fire, then the protagonist could dream about the fire, seeing warped fragments of the past in the present (a hallucination?). The protagonist could talk about the fire with another character. Or maybe the protagonist could visit the charred remains of the place where the fire happened - however subtle you want to lay it. Do you actually need to show the event that happened before ths story's beginning? If you do, then why not adjust where your story begins?

Flash backs just get me frustrated with the author, but maybe it's not right to demand all authors avoid them?

 

Flashbacks are quite necessary in my opinion, especially if you going about describing a very changed world than what we are used to, and there's information to be conveyed that is absolutely pertinent to the story currently taking place.

Yes you can use a character as a mouthpiece, but it starts to sound info-dumpish if it's a lot of information that's being conveyed in a single conversation. Personally I prefer flashbacks as a means of showing large stretches of past events than one character telling another stuff. I'm dabbling with using a similar method in my current fic and it seems to be working well.

So far as it doesn't detract from the story flow, flashbacks can be effective.

 

As with pretty much everything, it depends.

Flashbacks in and of themselves are not inherently bad. They're a narrative device to reveal certain pieces of information that happened in the past. Nothing more, nothing less.

When used appropriately, they can greatly enhance the narrative by fleshing out the characters, reveal important details that cannot be factored directly into the plot, and giving the reader a different perspective. All in ways that cannot be done as effectively in any other form.

It all comes down to how and where the author uses it. I will agree that they are, or at least appear to be, quite often used frivolously, but that's a problem with the author(s), not the narrative device.

 

Right, not everything needs to be sequential, though that kind of story telling is best used for shorter stories? I can't think of a long novel that has no apparent "order" (in the sense that it's constantly shifting 'randomly' through time), though I'm sure someone has written one in the past.

It's a challenge to write something in a non-linear way, I'll agree to that much.

As for "past tense stories" always happening in the past, there's always a relative "paster tense" at least from the perspective of the reader, especially if you use imperfect/perfect past.

 

Mm, I'm gonna have to agree with Chime on this one. Technically a flashback is a tool in your toolbox, but it just smacks of amateur writing. It's like a painter busting out the crayons. I don't even like them in film, they're just tacky. Like the writer doesn't trust the audience to feel emotional impact through dialogue or interaction; they have to show us the entire scene so we get it.

It's like... to use a crude metaphor, just seeing a person butt naked in the street, rather than slowly stripping away the layers in private--it takes away the mystery and allure, going instead for the shock value.

Bleh, I don't even know what I'm saying anymore, lol.

 

I personally have never really encountered a flash back that fit seamlessly within the story and didn't make me want to skip the entire thing. To me, it destroys the momentum that is created with a chronological timeline. Often it seems like the information provided by flashbacks is unnecessary - I can live with not knowing every driving aspect of a character. Sometimes it even adds appeal.

Of course, a part of my dislike for flashbacks probably stems from my dislike of most POV shifts - I've always been very focused on the main character and their situation, and shifting away from that through either a flashback or change to another character is somewhat annoying.

The one situation which I feel flashbacks could fit is when a character is about to die or going through an extremely physically traumatic event. It's (almost) realistic if the author keeps the flashback(s) to small snippets rather than lengthy dissertations.

 

True enough. When I think "Flash back", I always think of an author taking a scene from sometime in the character's past, italicizing it, and slicing it into the main work in an attempt to set a reflective tone. What you refer to is not the same thing as a flashback in my mind, but simply a natural chronological shift which doesn't draw attention to the fact that the timeline has even changed.

I see a lot of authors do something like this:

Often, this shift is accompanied by a change from 3rd to 1st person, which separates it even further as a memory and in general just breaks the flow.

I'm sure you know what type of flashback I'm talking about, but I just wanted to clarify a bit more what I was referring to.

 

Well, a "flash back" isn't exactly a rigorous term, so I should have provided a more explicit definition, but I was not talking about "micro-flashbacks" or as you showed in your example, tense changing; the order of events slightly rearranged to suit some need. Though, if you do it at a macro level, your story can get rather convoluted and messy, unless you're very meticulous about how you write.

The reason you'd want to talk about what was explicitly done in the past is to provide context to what's happening in the "now" of the story. Your protagonist is in a scene with a waiter - you might want to reference that he came to the restaurant after having had a car accident, which gives context to why he's suddenly paralyzed at the table, or something. Otherwise, the scene is difficult to comprehend, because any number of things could be the likely culprit.

When I say "flash back" as in a "normal one" I mean a shift in time, and usually perspective. The story jumps back - it flashes back to a time before the "present" to deliver some kind of exposition or clarification. My issue with this technique is the exposition is often unnecessary fat and the clarification hurts the subtly of the piece. I guess I value subtle storying telling - underplaying the elements at work - over bludgeoning ideas into the reader's head.

 

Eh. Even those kinds of flashbacks have their place. They're much, much harder to use correctly, and as such are much more commonly misused, but that doesn't mean they're inherently wrong.

A flashback of the type you are describing, as a distinct scene to provide context, etc, can, and does, be used to great effect. For example, there's a flashback to Smaug's attack in The Hobbit that is used marvelously to flesh out the details behind the dwarves' plight.

I will definitely agree that attempts at flashbacks fail far more often than they succeed, but it's not inherently invalid.

 

Okay, then to clarify what I mean (since I seem to suck at saying it):

Good "flash backs" are:

-Short
-Vague
-To the point (as in, we're not burdening our reader with unnecessary detail)

What bothers me about the usual flash back is that it occurs well after our protagonist has been established. If we're twenty thousand words in with our protagonist Larry, then chances are, we know who he is. We know why he is who he is, or at least have some inkling that shouldn't be smothered by being given too much information. We already have a sense of the fact he's crippled, we can probably guess the details of how it came to be, since it's already probably been mentioned or impllied he was in a crash or an accident. To explicitly shift the perspective back to before he had his accident serves no purpose to the reader; it's aggravating. We know the outcome, we know what is going to happen and what it all entails. Does "seeing" the crash mean anything?

In Sesc's above example, well, it reads like the entry into a story, or the entrance to a poignant scene. There's nothing wrong with referencing past events in a story, even providing some detail, which Sesc does by remarking about the moon that night, or what had been said that night. That's all fine, especially if it accomplishes something in the "now" (such as saying tonight's moon is like 'that night's moon) but the moment an author launches into a paragraph or more about what has already happened, it just feels... pointless and wasteful.

 

I don't have very strong opinions about flashbacks but I hate prequels for all the same reasons.

 

Well yea, but that seems kinda redundant to say. Of course unnecessary detail hampers a work. It doesn't matter if it's in a flashback of otherwise. If you're putting words to paper that serve no purpose, all you're doing is lessening the impact.

From what I've gathered, you're conflating "redundant flashbacks" with "flashbacks in general", and in that case, of course flashbacks are always going to be pointless and wasteful. It's redundant.

That doesn't mean flashbacks in general are. A scene from a character's past can be massively useful in conveying information that would otherwise be awkward to insert, such as little details that hint at the story's plot but most people wouldn't actually comment on (like, say, a piece of jewelry someone wore that becomes a maguffin), or just give a snapshot of exactly how the character became who they are in the story.