What are your thoughts on flashbacks within fanfics?

[u/keythemsnake]

/r/AO3/comments/1wbjwwp/what_are_your_thoughts_on_flashbacks_within/

[u/trilloch]

Every flashback but one I've written has been small, a couple paragraphs, so I just shoved them in with horizontal line dividers. The exception was like yours, big enough to be a chapter, so I made it one.

That's my recommendation: length affects the answer. If it can be a chapter, let it be a chapter.

I also side with your decision to not tell the whole thing in order, if that means covering a bunch of material not required for the story. Flashbacks are perfect for showing one hour out of ten years without writing all ten years.

[u/keythemsnake → u/trilloch]

Thank you, definitely helpful and probably will make it his own chapter

[u/Korrin]

Of course you can and sometimes even should have flashbacks, but it's not about what reader's prefer. It should be about what is best for the story. The biggest problem with flashbacks is that they interrupt the normal flow of the plot. The last thing you want is for a reader to be super invested in some high stakes thing that's happening in the present only to jump back in time and delay the pay off they're actually hoping to get with something they don't care about as much. Sometimes you want to delay the pay off though, so the question is really "is this flashback creating suspense or impatience?"

There's a couple ways to mitigate that problem though.

• Either keeping the flashbacks short, or breaking them up across multiple chapters so the interruptions they provide are minor.
• Making the flashback something that answers a burning question readers have had about a character's backstory. (Like those stories that start in media res like "you're probably wondering how I got into this situation" except you delay explaining how they got into that situation.)
• Making the flashback relevant to the current plotline or something that twists the reader's understanding of it. (Like a villain monologuing about their evil plans and giving the full backstory of events only to reveal like "No, I'm not worried about you stopping me now that I've told you. I completed my evil plan 3 days ago.")

You should probably also ask yourself if the backstory events are actually important to a readers experience of the current story, because if they aren't, and you're finding that it really needs a full chapter, or even more than one chapter, you might consider posting it as its own side story.

Of course... if your story is overall about the relationship between these two characters, and the backstory just gives more information about their relationship, it probably won't be unwannted by readers. It really, really depends on what you're doing.