Readers are nosy.
They want to have an insight into all things – not just into the present lives of characters but also their past.
What exactly do readers want to know about?
Think faded dreams, love stories that ended badly, a secret kept in the dark for years. The list goes on.
Typically, flashbacks are the way through which readers will have their curiosity quenched.
A flashback can be defined as a narration about a character’s past, one which should help to understand ‘the character of now’.
Such narration can be told either a) by the writer or b) by the character himself.
The typology of questions which will prompt a writer to insert a flashback sounds like the following: what happened to X character before they got to this point in the story? Why is character X so cranky all the time? How did character X get to become so skilled at such and such?
While it is virtually impossible not to look into a character’s ‘before’, there are three golden rules to keep in mind in order to write flashbacks effectively.
These are:
1) Selectivity
Yes, readers are nosy. Though not so about every character that appears in your novel. Only about the main ones, or the peculiar ones which play a pivotal role in the story as a whole.
So, when deciding if to write a flashback, ask yourself this question: is it really necessary to fill the reader in on X character’s past?
If yes, do it – and have fun with it!
If no, move the story on.
2) Brevity
Good storytelling is storytelling that has good pace.
What is meant by this is that, while flashbacks are a necessary ‘organ’ of a story, they are not the story.
Therefore, when bringing a reader back to the past, make sure it is for a brief time. Either that or the reader will feel mired in pointless details.
To spell it out, your reader should have the opposite feeling. Page after page, he should feel like he’s moving forward in the story, like he is conquering more and more knowledge about the world/lives in your story.
To help you analogise, think of flashbacks as window that enables to take a quick glance. Not as the landscape to walk towards.
3) Peculiarity
Above all things, flashbacks need to be worth your readers’ time.
Readers do not want to know just to know. There has to be a certain level of peculiarity about the flashback. That is, to interrupt the pacing of the story.
In simpler terms, flashbacks need to have the ‘X factor’.
Examples? Sure!
Think a pizza deliverer who spent his youth as a spy. Or a teacher with a past as a monk. Or, even, a postman who lived a secret life as a scammer.
Make your readers feel like you thought outside the box and they will invest their time and money in reading your work.