On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [60]
Even in a long novel, your space—your number of words—is limited. Use them for showing the important things, and let the readers fill in the rest from their experience and imagination.
Flashbacks
Sometimes, especially when a story takes place over a period of years or has its origins in a long-ago event, flashbacks are a useful story-showing tool.
A flashback is a scene that takes a character back in time to an event, so the character actually relives what happened. The readers see the scene from the character's point of view at the time, and they hear the actual words spoken, not the character's recollection of what was said. The scene takes place just as it would if it were a present-day event; it's not just a memory.
Flashback is most often used in romance stories in which the hero and heroine have had an earlier relationship. The flashbacks show significant bits of their past interaction so the readers can see these important events for themselves and understand why the characters are still reacting to those events today.
Since a flashback presents events as they actually happened, it uses straightforward narrative. Because flashback scenes are usually relayed just like a scene from the present action, readers sometimes find it difficult to tell when they've entered a flashback. You can use a number of techniques to help make the transition clear to the readers.
• Warn the readers of what's coming. Make sure they know they're about to enter a flashback. You can do this by using past perfect tense during the shift from the current story to the flashback. During the rest of the flashback scene, use the simple past tense, returning briefly to past perfect to finish the flashback. In many cases, a sentence or two of summary at the beginning and end of the flashback are necessary to set the scene and establish place and time. (If the main part of the story is being told in present tense, then the body of the flashback also will use present tense. You can signal the start of a flashback in this case by using past tense.)
• Create a logical transition from present to past. Memories don't come out of nowhere. What brought the past event to mind? What's making the character think about it right now?
• Place the flashback in a plausible spot in the story. Does the character have time for the luxury of memory? While the heroine's being chased down the street by the bad guys, she's not likely to be reconsidering her life. If she's holed up in a closet, holding her breath and hoping they'll overlook her, she might.
• Don't use flashbacks early in the book. Never start a story with a flashback. Get the present-day story well established first. By focusing on the main story, you'll build sympathy for your characters and reader interest about what happened in their pasts. If you've done a good job of making your characters sympathetic by the time you take your readers on that journey into the past, they'll be happy to accompany you.
• Break large flashbacks into smaller portions. If your story has a great deal of important past action, it's a good idea to feed it to your readers in small chunks, returning to the present at intervals—even if only for a few paragraphs—in order to reestablish the main story.
• Finish a flashback by returning your readers to where (and when) they were before the flashback started. This helps make it apparent that the side trip is now finished and the readers are once again on the main path.
In one of my books, Promise Me Tomorrow, the hero and heroine have a vast amount of shared history, including an unplanned pregnancy, a marriage of convenience, a miscarriage, and a divorce. All of that is important because it affects what happens to them in the present-day story; the readers need to see the events and be allowed to judge for themselves what happened, rather than seeing things as interpreted much later by the now more mature characters.
To put all that powerful history into a single flashback would overwhelm any story, no matter how carefully the flashback was handled. I split