I Hate Flashbacks

One of the worst ways to write a story is to include a ton of flashbacks. I can handle one or two throughout a story, but these days many authors (both fanfiction and original) use flashbacks to tell significant part of their stories. This bugs the crap out of me, for many reasons.

Lazy Story Telling

This is probably just me, but flashbacks seem lazy to me. Yes, they still have to write the words, but flashbacks are often plopped into a story when the author didn't do a good job of telling the story at the beginning where the information should have gone.

This is especially true when there are a ton of flashbacks riddled into the plot line.

Interrupting the Flow

I'm into the story, things are moving along, I'm loving the characters and the plot and all of a sudden: BAM! I'm no longer in the same timeline, I've been transported to some other time and maybe another perspective. It breaks me right out of the story. And then perhaps I get into the flashback, and then that too is done, and I'm plopped right back into the story.

It's messy. Perhaps I'm too linear in my thinking, but I don't want to jump around the timeline. If the flashback is done well, and doesn't interrupt the flow or better yet, is woven into the plot, I can handle it, though too many will still make the story way worse.

Nobody Does a Good Flashback

Flashbacks to me are done from the perspective of the person who was telling the story when the flashback started. If that's a narrator or the protagonist, it doesn't matter. If that's the POV we're in when we go to the flashback, the flashback better be from that POV.

That means that the flashback can't have multiple perspectives (even if the story is a multi-POV story). It means that the person having or providing the flashback can't give out information they had no way of knowing.

This inability by the author to realize that the perspective can't change is something that drives me bonkers, and further takes me out of the story. Even if I'm used to switching POVs in the story, doing so within the flashback is just messy and bad writing. It can't be done well. The problem is, many authors do this. Which has probably led to my hatred of all flashbacks.

Stories Have a Structure

Writing your story in flashbacks doesn't make you edgy or with it. It just makes you a bad writer. Stories have a structure to them. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Some deviation from this, if done well, can enhance a story. But fans of flashbacks take this much too far and think that the linear nature of story telling is ripe for disruption. They think that flashbacks make their stories stand out and their writing style more complex.

They're wrong.

Stories are written in a certain way because that's the way they work best. A little disruption can do well, but most writers are so bad at flashbacks that the disruption actually ruins the flow of the story, and then later ruins the story itself.

So instead of flashbacks, just write the information you need to pass on in the proper place in the story. If it happens before the story starts, we have prologues for that. And if you must, must, write your story with a flashback scene, do it well. Weave it into the current POV, stick to that POV, and be brief. It'll make it much easier for the reader to stomach being taken out of the story.

This is day 15 of 30 in 30, my attempt to write a blog post every day for a month.