In Favour of Flashing

One of the challenges of writing a story is the question of where you start it.  In order to hook the reader's attention, the received wisdom is that you open with a moment of drama, but that can leave you with the knotty problem of how to fill in the back story, the background information that the reader will need to understand and appreciate the narrative .

Cue flashback, where your hero or heroine  looks back (but NEVER via her reflection in a mirror, the worst of all possible cliches) at recent events.  This can be a delicate manoeuvre to pull off, partly because if you are telling your story in the past tense, you run the risk of getting yourself bogged down in the pluperfect - she had thought, he had believed - which can weigh heavily on your prose, encumbering your sentences with too many words.(To get round this, you can always explain to your reader that you have moved into a different time zone: Six months ago, when Josie first started working at Findhorn's... after that you can stick to the simplest, most accessible/recent version of the past -- she feared, he hurried etc).

A criticism levelled against the flashback is that it is undramatic -- that the real action is happening in the present, which you have already established, so that the reader knows the outcome of what you are about to describe already and that by cutting away from the immediate drama,  you risk losing narrative tension.

However, I think that often the reverse is true.  In Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, the story is told by the spirit of a young girl who has been murdered.  From the outset we know that she is dead; the fascination of the story lies in discovering how this came about. the excitement lies in the unfolding tale -- I think there is more to a plot than what happened: the reader wants to know how it happened and why.

I also think that if you outlaw the flashback you deny yourself an incredibly useful writing tool. I am constantly fascinated by the interplay between the past and the present, how what happened previously dictates the way that characters behave; how past mistakes come back to haunt them; how lessons not learned will continually trip them up. As a writer, to cut yourself off from these haunting echoes may make your story harder to tell and your writing less resonant.