Flashbacks

It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

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I wrote about this issue before, with a slightly different angle, but it bears repeating. I recently read a novel where all the events of the plot were rather trivial and the pacing of the story extremely slow. Anything of importance that ever happened to the hero and the heroine happened before the book started. Because of the author’s choice of the timing of the novel, she dedicated several chapters exclusively to flashbacks: the back stories of both protagonists. Years of backstories. Granted, the events in those flashbacks affected the characters’ behavior here and now, but the entire experience seemed unfortunate and somewhat boring.

I’m against flashbacks on principle. First – the events they describe have already happened, so the readers’ emotional involvement is nil. They already know or guess what transpired in the past. The characters have already lived through it. Have been shaped by it. It was already mentioned in the text. No need for the long and involved rehashing. Not much of it has a relevance to the current story.

Second – if the author feels the readers absolutely need to know every little detail of the past events, before the story properly launched, the author should summarize those events in a couple of paragraphs or sprinkle various factoids throughout her narrative and dialog, not dedicate several long chapters to them. Because during those chapters, the action of the novel, already sluggish in the case of this particular book, rolls to a complete stop. Not a good thing in fiction. The readers might close the book and never come back to it.

Another possible solution to this problem, if the author feels so strongly about past events, would be to choose a different time frame for her novel and focus her plot on the crucial points of the past instead of the banal drama of the present. If she switches the timing of her novel to accommodate the pivotal turns in the heroes’ journeys and forgets about the insignificant ‘afterwards’, she might get a winner. Right?

What about you? How do you feel about flashbacks? Do you use them in your stories? How do you handle them?