Down with flashbacks

As a reader I'm a lot more interested in what's going to happen than what already did.

Stephen King, On Writing

Stephen King

That is Stephen King's way of saying he doesn't like flashbacks. Neither do I, either in novels or in movies. Just tell the story. If there's a back story, maybe that should have been told first.

Later King puts it a little differently: "I'm an A-to-Z man; serve me the appetizer first and give me dessert if I eat my veggies."

I suspect many other readers and viewers feel the same way. We like our stories told in chronological order: First this happened, then this, then this. Instead we so often get: This happened, but before that this happened, and then finally this happened.

Flashbacks, King writes in On Writing, "always make me think of those movies from the forties and fifties where the picture gets all swimmy, the voices get all echoey, and suddenly it's sixteen months ago and the mud-splashed convict we just saw trying to outrun the bloodhounds is an up-and-coming young lawyer who hasn't yet been framed for the murder of the crooked police chief."

Some back story is often necessary, of course. There are usually things that happened earlier that we need to know about. But that, in most cases, can be done without an annoying flashback interrupting the story. In the two novels I wrote about a couple of days ago, Any Place I Hang My Hat and Big Stone Gap, the authors do need to fill in some blanks for their readers, telling us something about their main characters' past lives. This is essential to each story. Yet Susan Isaacs and Adriana Trigiani do this skillfully without flashbacks, introducing just a few details at a time without interrupting their stories.

Often writers of mysteries and thrillers think they need to hook their readers early with a murder or something equally dramatic in the first chapter. Then they go back and explain how the situation got to this point, thus telling readers what happened before, when readers want to know what happens next.

No less annoying than flashing back is when writers flash forward. This often happens in a prologues, which I find annoying enough in themselves. (Just start with chapter one already!) In The Limehouse Text by Will Thomas (reviewed here a week ago),  the prologue takes us to a climatic part of the story, leaving readers at the edge of a cliff. Then they have to read most of the novel to get to that cliff again. Yet Thomas makes his first chapter interesting enough to draw a reader's attention. His "preview of coming attractions" serves no purpose that I can see, other than to give away part of the ending.