Does anyone have any tips on writing flashbacks? I'm finding the tense a pain -- "When Jonathan was a boy, he had once run into friends at the local chip shop. "What are you doing here?" Biff had said .... But if not using perfect tense, what's a good way to transition into and out of flashbacks?
I know I've read good ones, but I can't remember how it worked (because it was "invisible")
One big issue with flashbacks is that there are so many ways to do them. That makes juggling when and where to do them a bit tough. However, there's definitely some things to keep in mind:
Don't use a flashback right before conveying information the flashback makes essential. The one is a bit confusing, but imagine this - you're in the middle of a confrontation with the big bad. Right before they start fighting, a flashback reveals the villain killed your main character's brother and therefore this is personal! ...Except that information would have been better revealed much earlier in the novel, especially if everyone but the reader knows it.
Don't start a flashback in the middle of an action scene. You could, for example, throw some quick remembrances of something that happened in the past, but if you're interrupting a critical scene to yank the reader back to a multi-page event in the past, you're killing all the tension in the story.
Don't let a flashback take over the main plot. If the flashback is more important than what's happening in the present, you're writing the story from the wrong point of time. You might want to consider shifting the narrative to that time period, and dealing with the "current" plot at a later point in the book or settling for quick, contextualizing flash forwards.
Don't use a flashback to hide things from the audience. The absolute worst way to use a flashback is to make a scene look like it happened in a way that it didn't. If your flashback is deliberately misleading in a way the characters of the story are aware of, don't use it. For example, let's say your MC flashes back to her father's murder. It's framed to look like her uncle did it. But your MC has known all along her mother was the murderer. The flashback isn't a story she's telling, it only exists for the readers, and audience she's not aware of. Even in first-person with an unreliable narrator, a flashback is not a good way to introduce doubt in a story. It makes the reader feel as if they've been cheated.
Use flashbacks to convey something essential to the story. You might have pages of past events that you've cut out of your story. I certainly do. But including them slowed down the pacing and killed the tension, and ultimately, I narrowed it down to what was essential for moving forward the plot. If the flashback tells us nothing about the character, the plot, or the world in relation to either, it's probably not necessary.
Use flashbacks for character-building. Your character is formed by their past. You will need to touch on that past in some ways. A flashback triggered by a painful memory (discovering an old toy, looking at a photograph, etc) might be a way to go about it.
To show how the character got there. Your character stumbles into a bar with a head injury. As they attempt to have a normal conversation, we flash back to the car accident they fled from.
Use flashbacks to highlight but not show the real issue. This is harder to convey, but if your character is trying to avoid the truth of an event, they might often revisit the event (a fight, an argument, a conversation), but not cover all the details. This skews toward hiding things from the reader, so you should be careful about it. However, if the narrator is avoiding the truth, there are ways to do it (flashing back but not covering the whole event, flashing back to pieces of the event, etc).
Use flashbacks to frame what actually happened. Your character tells a story about themselves the whole book, but the flashback reveals what actually happened in a moment that reveals the true nature of their character.
Mid-scene, short paragraphs. Good for characters struggling with trauma, trying to avoid the truth of something, or looking at an image or thing that jogs their memory.
A few pages of needed context. Your MCs are at a party. They're laughing it up, seemingly having a good time. The next page or so steps back into the fight they had in the car on the way there, and how they spent time fixing their makeup before going inside.
A whole chapter - maybe. As I said above, the longer you spend in a past event, the more likely that is the main story. But if you need the POV of a character from the past, or need to highlight a critical event that you deliberately skipped over when it happened, a chapter might be a good call.
How to determine what kind of flashback you need and where you need it? That depends on where you're at in the story.
Does this flashback convey critical information about your character?
Does this flashback convey critical information about your plot?
Does this flashback add to or fit into the tension of the scenes around it?
Does the flashback slow down or stop the action? (It may be in the wrong place in your story.)
On that note, is your finale flashback-free? (If you're wrapping up the story, you need to have all your cards on the table.)
There's many, many more things we could get into, but that's a decent start. Working in flashbacks is a matter of trial and error at times, so don't shy away from them when drafting. You'll figure it out!