Hey, Portlanders: I’m teaching a super fun class at Literary Arts later this month. I’d love to see some of you in it!
Greetings, writers—
Although flashbacks get a bad rap sometimes, they can be extremely effective tricks in your authorial bag of them. Do them right and your readers won’t care that you’ve plucked them away from the present tense of the plot to dramatize something that happened in the past—i.e., a story that’s already over.
Generally, short and striking is what you’re after (you never want the reader to wonder why she’s being snatched out of the action to wallow in a memory). And you’ve got to be judicious about necessity and placement: must this flashback happen, and is it here that it belongs?
If yes, it must happen, and yes, it must be here, great. Once you’ve got your trigger—the person, idea, or thing that the character encounters to spark the flashback—how do you manage the time-travel?
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