In what style is your story written? third person or first? do you write in the present tense or past?Anyone have any experience putting a flashback into their chapters? Do you cut, have to literally state it a flashback. I established that the character is younger and different looking but it still reads werid to me.
Thrid person.In what style is your story written? third person or first? do you write in the present tense or past?
I have one flashback currently in my story but it's written as if the character themselves were talking about what the flashback is about
It's generally much easier to make it either at the start of the chapter or separate the flashback into a completely different chapter altogether. You need to consider the transition if you make the flashback and current events exist in the same chapter.Anyone have any experience putting a flashback into their chapters? Do you cut, have to literally state it a flashback. I established that the character is younger and different looking but it still reads werid to me.
Yours sound like the most nearest my situation. It's third person right? So would the flashback,When I write a flash back in the middle of the chapter I do it via the character so I end up writing it like this:
The memory comes unbidden to his mind,
Then I'd make a new paragraph that writes out the event. Depending on what the story needs I'd either summarize the memory with a few sentence/s that stood out in the character's memory to flesh out whatever it is that made a flashback important OR i'd write out the whole scene for maximum emotion and then start a new paragraph for returning to present time
If it's in 3rd person, I use a mix of the 2 & 3, It would be a narration but I'd occasionally slip in the character's thoughts about it as the flashback goesYours sound like the most nearest my situation. It's third person right? So would the flashback,
1. Have character telling it
2. Have the character thinking about it
3. Have the narrator telling the flashback to the reader.
What William Faulkner famously did in The Sound and the Fury is just start writing the flashback in the next paragrah (he did it even in the same paragraph), but put it in italics.
It's hard to give advice without some example text to go on.
I don’t think ‘flashbacks’ are a good option. Maybe a chapter set in a time of their past but cutting back and forth between past and present like what movies do can ruin pacing. It’s best to express the past through their actions or through interactions and gossip of those around them.