The working definition
Craft talk calls a dramatised scene, a sentence in the past perfect and a whole retrospective design all flashbacks; they have different costs, so the chapter separates them.
A cutaway is any passage in which the narrative leaves the time of its present action to present material from an earlier point in the story’s chronology. It has two principal registers. Backstory is the past told: conveyed by summary, implication, report or dialogue, without the reader having to live through it. A flashback is the past dramatised: a scene in its own right, rendered moment by moment and subject to every rule that governs a scene. The word flashback came into English from silent-era cinema. The register of the past, in this chapter, is the manner in which past material is put on the page, from a subordinate clause to a dramatised scene to a found document; the difference between backstory and flashback is a difference of register, not of content, since the same material can be delivered either way.
The present against which the past is measured has a technical name. Gérard Genette, whose Narrative Discourse (1972; translated by Jane E. Lewin, 1980) supplies most of this chapter’s vocabulary, calls it the first narrative (récit premier): the temporal level a narrative establishes as its principal one, to which it returns and against which every other level is felt as a departure. Genette’s general term for any discordance between the order of events in the story and the order of their telling is anachrony (from Greek roots meaning “back” and “time”). Analepsis (Greek, “taking up again”) narrates an event earlier than the present point of the first narrative, and is the formal name for a cutaway; prolepsis (“taking in advance”) narrates one before its time, the flash-forward, and is treated here only where it bears on the cost of going back.
Four scales
Advice calibrated to one scale of cutaway is often misapplied to another, so the table separates four.
| Scale | Typical length | Reader’s experience | Governing question |
|---|---|---|---|
| The implication | A clause or phrase | Barely registered as a departure | Is the fact needed here? |
| The report | A sentence to a paragraph | A brief change of pitch | Told or shown? |
| The scene | 300 to 3,000 words | A full temporal relocation | Does it earn the suspension of the present? |
| The structure | A strand of the whole book | The past as a second timeline | Is the architecture declared? |
The chapter treats the third scale as its main subject, because that is where drafts most often go wrong, but the other three set its first rule of thumb: deliver the past at the smallest scale that does the job, and expect the burden of proof to rise with the scale. A clause needs no justification, a paragraph needs to be the right paragraph, a scene needs an argument and a second timeline needs a structural reason.
Adjacent terms
Exposition, in Meir Sternberg’s usage, is the information about antecedents a narrative must convey for its present action to be intelligible: who these people are, what the situation is, what has already happened. It is a category of content, and backstory and flashback are two of several ways to deliver it; dialogue, description, habit, documents and the reader’s inference from an unexplained detail are others. Not all exposition is backstory, and not all backstory is exposition, and heavy backstory is often better relocated than compressed: into an object, a habit or an unremarked assumption. The household ledger carries eleven years of a man’s life without a sentence of retrospect.
A character remembering is not the same thing as a cutaway. She remembered the argument about the pen is an event in the present, one clause long; leaving the present to stage the argument is a flashback. Nor is retrospective narration the same as a cutaway: it tells a whole narrative from after its events, so the past is itself the first narrative, as Pip’s life is in Great Expectations; in The Remains of the Day, by contrast, the first narrative is a motoring trip in 1956 and the 1920s and 1930s are analepses within it. Ellipsis is a stretch of story time passed over in silence, the gap that a later analepsis may fill. Paralipsis (Greek, “leaving aside”) is the omission of something the narrative’s own vantage should have supplied, a lateral gap rather than a temporal one and the usual material of a late revelation.
What this chapter leaves to others
The mechanics of crossing a gap belong to The Transition (Chapter 5); this chapter begins one step earlier, with whether to cross, and ends one step later, with the present on return. Where a gap falls among the chapters belongs to The Chapter Break (Chapter 6). A prologue belongs to The Prologue (Chapter 10): it often holds the same kind of material as a flashback, but comes before the reader has invested anything, so its costs run the other way. A cutaway to a scene the viewpoint character did not witness is also a viewpoint problem, which belongs to The Viewpoint Shift (Chapter 13). Books built from two or more timelines belong to Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture (Chapter 8); a withheld past disclosed late belongs to The Reveal (Chapter 15); and an ending that reinterprets the past belongs to The Ending (Chapter 16).
See also: the Reference definitions, with a table of adjacent terms; the glossary.