Everyday Canvas

Flashbacks and Flash-forwards

I use flashbacks a lot, but not flash-forwards, to the best of my memory. Both flashbacks and flash-forwards are important to create suspense and add structure to the plot, although flash-forwards are used not too often, as they are hard to do and need a good amount of planning.

Although the namesakes sound like medical diseases, in literary lingo, a flashback is called analepsis and flash-forward, prolepsis. An internal analepsis is the flashback to an earlier point in the story, and an external analepsis is the flashback to a time before the story started on page.

Speaking for myself, I find flashbacks very valuable in revealing certain character elements. They also are good to show what happened to any aspect of the story, before the telling of the story started.

There are so many flashback examples in literature. Off the top of my head, most Holocaust and World War II stories contain flashbacks, as in Elie Wiesel’s Night. In the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hester's background is revealed through flashbacks. Some mysteries need flashbacks, too, since they may start with a murder or an action- committed, and they need the one or more characters' recall. Most famous for flashbacks is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald where Nick learns a lot about the characters through Gatsby’s and other characters’ recall in flashback.

As to flash-forward, which I have been too chicken to use, the best and the most well-known example is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, in which the protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge is taken forward through time to visit his funeral. On TV dramas, too, flash-forward is sometimes handled very well. For example, the last episode of Six Feet Under has an extensive flash-forward, showing the deaths of the main characters.

I am now wondering if I am going to use a flash-forward next, as the flash-forward idea in this entry is acting as a challenge to me.

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Prompt: Do you use flashbacks or flash-forwards in your fictional and true stories? How or why, do you think, they are important, if at all?