Writer's Fallout Shelter

I understand not consciously using a literary technique in the first draft, but when you're rewriting and polishing and deciding what works and what doesn't and what gets cut... then you have to make every element, every word, justify itself. That's also when the conscious work starts and I start evaluating what to change and what I should do differently. At that point, I do have to decide whether the flashback really works or whether it just seemed like a good idea at the time.