Three Days Earlier
Ralph sat drinking his coffee and reading his morning paper. The world had gone to crap in just a couple of years and headlines screamed about man’s inhumanity to man, which some applauded and some panned…
Two Days Earlier
Ralph faced down the man with the smoking gun. He had just shot Ralph’s partner and Ralph’s gun was 30 feet away on the floor. Ralph would have to make a dive for it if he hoped to live…
Yesterday
The herd of stampeding rhinos rampaged down the street crushing everyone and everything in their way. Ralph realized too late, he was someone in their way…
Too many authors have gone to the school that told them: “You have to grab your audience with the first few sentences; otherwise people will pick up the book and put it down.” The easiest way to grab the audience is with the climax of the story. After all, the climax is supposed to be exciting, so why not start there?
The answer is simple. When you start with the climax, you have no place to go but down. If you know Ralph is living three days from where your story really starts, there’s no way to build tension and to generate reader interest in the problems he faces before then. So what if someone is pointing a gun at him or a herd of rhinos is running him down in the street? The reader knows that he lives to face the bomb going off at a later date. There’s no conflict; there’s no problem that he won’t survive because he has to make it to the bomb.
If your story and your characters are so weak that you need to start the story with a traumatic event and then rewind it, maybe you shouldn’t tell the story. Authors will continue to do it. There was a TV series that was entirely built off the concept of starting with the bomb and rewinding back to before the big event. It still makes for a boring story.
Perhaps the best use of flashback has been in the series “Arrow.” While there is no question about whether or not Oliver Queen will make it off the island and what he will become, the sequences are generally shown in parallel to what he is facing in Starling City. This allows the viewer to understand how he gained his skills and how the current mirroring events might make him feel. Still, the flashback sequence itself isn’t as exciting as it could be because the viewer knows that Oliver will survive and that he will be relatively unscathed. He isn’t going to lose fingers or an arm or a leg. He isn’t going to die. But the scenes do allow the writers to develop his and others’ characters. And the scenes don’t dominate the story line.
There may be a time and place for a flashback, but most stories could do without the filler. Start the story from the place it needs to start. If the reader isn’t interested from that place, they won’t be any more interested when you put that part of the story after a cliff-hanging event.