How to include flashbacks in your writing

Flashbacks send readers back in time to events that happened outside your story’s “present”. Knowing how to nudge your readers in the right direction will keep readers engaged, instead of having them go “huh?”

What are flashbacks?

Many travel and adventure stories are written in the past tense. I went here, I did that. Past tense is a straightforward method of story-telling, and it’s what readers are used to. But often, you’ll want to share details that happened before your trip, such as a key event from your childhood, or how you met a someone you’ve bumped into again on this trip, or the history of how a particular building came to be or how an event happened. When you’re already writing in the past tense, you need a way to show readers that this flashback happened before the “present” of your story.

How to incorporate flashbacks

A subtle use of grammar will nudge readers back in time with you: past perfect.

• I had last spoken to Bob back in 2013…

• When we’d [we had] last been in Kathmandu, it had rained so hard that the neighbourhood we were in flooded.

That “had” is enough to let readers know that they’re leaving the present narrative and are travelling back in time.

You don’t need to use “had” in each sentence, either. Just once or twice near the beginning of the flashback. Overusing “had” makes the prose clunky and hard to follow. Readers just need signposts, not pokes in the chest.

The next trick is to bring readers back to the present. You can do that by giving readers another signpost when the narrative returns to the present. 

• This time when Bob and I met met…
• Three years later and there was no sign of flood damage.

Here’s another example that refers to past events while the main narrative stays in the present:

• Last time I was here, I had an encounter with a wombat that left me reeling. So when the wombat approached me this time, I was prepared, knife and all.

Tips for flashbacks

Avoid overdoing flashbacks

Flashbacks act as pauses in your story. They stop the narrative to provide backstory and context. Sometimes that backstory and context is relevant, but it can be easy to overdo flashbacks, thus overloading your story with unnecessary detail. So, as you’re revising, check how each flashback fits into the story. 

• How is it relevant to the story?
• Do readers really need to know about this?
• Could some of this backstory be told through dialogue or in another way?

If you spend too much time in the flashback, that could be a sign that that’s the story you should be telling.

Avoid introducing flashbacks too soon

Give the reader time to become immersed in your story’s present. If you introduce flashbacks too early, readers can get confused about what the story is about and what its focus is. The general advice is to leave flashbacks out of the first chapter. That’s a solid starting point.

Avoid writing a textbook

Flashbacks that provide historical context need to be relevant to the story, written in your voice, and show your understanding of that history. With most travel and adventure, you’re writing within the narrative non-fiction genre, not writing a textbook. Keep details relevant and to the point so you don’t sound like a Wikipedia article.

Summing up

Flashbacks send readers back in time. They give context and backstory to the story you’re telling. 

For a masterclass in writing multiple levels of flashbacks, check out The Lost City of Z, by David Grann. This book is part history, part adventure. While the bulk of the story is historical narrative, there are flashbacks that go further back in time to give readers context for the historical story, while snippets draw the reader into the present – the author’s own journey to discover the past. It blends history and the present excellently.