What a flashback is

A term you'll meet in narrative technique.

A flashback is a scene that interrupts the forward flow of a story to show something that happened earlier. Instead of telling you about the past, a flashback drops you into it — you watch the earlier event unfold as if it were happening now.

What it's for

Flashbacks let a writer withhold and then reveal. A story can open in the middle of the action (in medias res) and fill in the crucial earlier moment only when it will hit hardest. They explain how a character became who they are, expose a buried secret, or recontextualise everything you've read so far.

Flashback vs. backstory

The two are related but not the same. Backstory is all the history that precedes a story's opening; it can be delivered in summary, dialogue, or a single line. A flashback is one technique for delivering backstory — a fully dramatised scene rather than a mention. All flashbacks are backstory; not all backstory is a flashback.

The technical term

In narrative theory, a flashback is a form of analepsis — a movement back in narrative time. Its opposite, a flash-forward, is prolepsis. Critics use these terms to describe how a narrative's order (the sequence it tells events in) differs from their chronology (the order they happened).

How to read it

When a flashback arrives, ask why here. The placement is rarely accidental: a writer reveals the past at the exact moment it will change how you read the present. Note what the flashback explains — and what it conveniently leaves out.

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