In Defence of Flashback

I know that some writers – and editors – view the use of flashback with some misgivings, objecting to it because the reader is made to look back at events which have already happened and therefore knows there is a positive outcome (your heroine is still alive and compos mentis) meaning that the narrative tension is diminished.
I'm currently plotting a novel and I'm definitely going to tell some of it in flashback, for a number of different reasons.

• Looking back at something which has happened enables the writer to put a spin on events. They don't just happen sequentially, they can be viewed through the lens of the present, which gives you the potential to examine them more obliquely and add layers of subtlety. It's rather like lighting a scene for effect – do you use soft, rosie tones or go for a cool, blue hue? What you might possibly lose in tension, you certainly make up for in atmosphere.
• I don't believe that suspense is necessarily diminished. The reader knows that the protagonist has got from point A in the story to point B, but they have no idea of the route taken, the pitfalls, or the high points. In a novel written sequentially you don't know whether the heroine will make it to point B, but generally speaking they do, so it seems to me that nothing is lost.
• Writing in flashback can allow you to use an unreliable narrator, which is another way of adding tension to your work, as the reader gradually comes to see that the account given by your central character may not necessarily be accurate and unbiased.
• Using flashback enables you to exploit the full potential of dramatic irony, where the reader knows more than the characters do, thus giving a different kind of tension to the story.

It also has to be said that a number of writers have used flashback to dazzling effect. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking that Wuthering Heights opens with the ghost of Cathy outside the window and Heathcliff in terrible distress calling out to her. Emily Brontë then goes on to describe the course of their ill-starred relationship, but knowing from the outset that it ended tragically means the narrative is shot through, not just with dramatic irony, but a delicious kind of poignancy as well.
And one of the most famous opening lines in modern fiction is Last night I dreamt  I went to Manderley again...I don't suppose anybody had the effrontery to tell Daphne du Maurier to avoid writing in flashback.

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.