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# How to Write a Flashback: Techniques and an Example
- URL: https://leventbulut.com/how-to-write-a-flashback/
- Published: 2026-10-28T02:25:23.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-28T02:25:23.000Z
- Description: How do you write a flashback? Genette's terms, Odysseus' scar and Proust's madeleine, and ways to enter and leave the past without losing the reader.
- Author: Levent Bulut
- Tags: Narrative Engineering

# How to Write a Flashback: Entering the Past Without Losing the Reader

**Conflict of Interest and Academic Grounding Statement (COI):** This article defines the flashback through core concepts of narrative theory and reading research, and discusses its relation to the Temporal Anchor working rule of Objective Projection as a writing suggestion. [Levent Bulut](https://leventbulut.com/) is the founder of the Objective Projection and Narrative Engineering methodology. The methodology's rules and dataset are openly published and open to scrutiny. The example scene in this article was written for it. The entry and exit techniques proposed here have not been tested with readers. 

### Summary and Practical Framework

A flashback is the move from the narrative's current events to an event that happened earlier. The French narratologist Gérard Genette calls it “analepsis”. This article defines the concept, summarises in a table the terms Genette uses to describe a flashback, and introduces two classic examples: the scar scene in Homer's *Odyssey* and Proust's madeleine scene. Reading research reports findings indicating that readers process time shifts in a story as event boundaries in their minds. So the main question of this article is this: how does the reader know when they have entered the past and when they have returned to the present? Our suggestion is to build the two doors of a flashback with a concrete object and a concrete time marker. Whether the reader will miss the jump has not been tested in this article.

## What is a flashback?

A flashback is a narrative stopping its current flow to tell an event that happened earlier. In film and in everyday language it is known by the English word “flashback”. In *Figures III* (1972), Genette examines the sequence in which a narrative presents events under the heading of “order”. He calls every discordance between the order of events in the story and their order in the narrative an “anachrony”. An anachrony that goes back into the past is an analepsis (flashback); one that jumps into the future is a prolepsis (flashforward).

A flashback is not the same as a sentence of memory. “Her father was a carpenter” gives a piece of information about the past; a flashback rebuilds a past moment as a scene. For a while the reader lives inside that past moment, then returns to the present.

## At a glance: Genette's terms

Genette describes a flashback by several criteria. We summarise these terms in the table below. The examples in the last column are taken from this article's example scene.

| Term                 | What it means                                                                              | In the example scene |
| -------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | -------------------- |
| Reach                | The time between the present moment and the moment the flashback returns to.               | Twenty-two years     |
| Extent               | The duration of the event the flashback tells.                                             | One afternoon        |
| External analepsis   | Returns to an event before the starting point of the main story.                           | Hatice's childhood   |
| Internal analepsis   | Returns to an event after the starting point of the main story that the narrative skipped. | None                 |
| Completing analepsis | Fills, after the fact, a gap left earlier in the narrative.                                | None                 |

## Two classic examples: a scar and a cake

### Odysseus' scar

In book 19 of Homer's *Odyssey*, Odysseus returns to his own house in disguise after many years. His old nurse Eurycleia, washing the stranger's feet as hospitality requires, sees the scar on his leg and recognises him. At exactly this moment the narrative stops and, in a flashback of more than seventy lines, tells the story of the scar: Odysseus' visit in his youth to his grandfather Autolycus, the boar hunt, the wound torn by the boar's tusk.

The German literary scholar Erich Auerbach devotes the first chapter of his 1946 book *Mimesis* to this scene. For Auerbach, the flashback is not there to build suspense; Homer's style brings everything it tells into the foreground, and while the flashback is told, Eurycleia and the scene of the scar withdraw from the reader's view. What matters for us is the form of the transition: the narrative enters the past through a concrete object, a scar.

### Proust's madeleine

In Marcel Proust's novel *Swann's Way*, published in 1913, the taste of a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea or tea takes the narrator back to Combray, where he spent his childhood, and to the madeleine his aunt Léonie gave him on Sunday mornings. The scene is often cited as an example of “involuntary memory”. Some commentators argue, however, that the narrator deliberately searches for the source of the memory, so the scene is a mix of voluntary and involuntary memory.

In both examples the past is entered not through the name of an emotion but through an object: a scar, a taste. This article's suggestion rests on that observation.

## How does the reader follow a time jump?

In cognitive psychology, readers are thought to build a “situation model” in their minds as they read a story. According to the event-indexing model proposed by Rolf Zwaan, Mark Langston and Arthur Graesser in 1995, the reader links events along five dimensions: time, space, protagonist, causality and intentionality. Time is one of these dimensions; when the narrative jumps in time, the reader has to update the model. We discussed situation models in detail in the [Situation Models](https://leventbulut.com/cognitive-poetics-situation-models-reader/) article.

In a four-experiment study published in 2005 by Nicole Speer and Jeffrey Zacks, readers produced results indicating that they process time changes in a story as an “event boundary”: right after a time change, their retrieval of earlier information slowed down and their accuracy dropped. The authors suggested that this slowdown may be a cost of the reader updating their mental model.

Interpretation: These studies examine not flashbacks but time changes in stories in general. Still, they raise a question for the writer: if the reader does not notice crossing a time boundary, by which time do they build their model?

## The two doors of a flashback: entry and exit

The two most fragile moments of a flashback are when the reader enters the past and when they return to the present. The main tools writers use to mark these two doors are:

1. **Tense:** In English, the past perfect formed with “had” (had opened, had come) can show that an event happened before another past moment. In Turkish, verbs with the “-mıştı” suffix do this work. Many writers build the first few sentences of a flashback in this tense and then move to the simple past.
2. **Concrete time marker:** a year, a season, an hour or a duration. **Temporal Anchor**, one of the four working rules of Objective Projection, proposes that a concrete time, duration or measurement be present in the scene. We discussed this rule through the way artificial intelligence handles narrative time in a separate Temporal Anchor article. In a flashback, a temporal anchor gives the reader the distance between the two times explicitly.
3. **Bridge object:** an object that exists in both times, like Odysseus' scar and Proust's madeleine. The reader enters the past through that object and returns to the present through it again.

A flashback should also be distinguished from interior monologue. In interior monologue the character thinks about the past in the present moment; the reader stays in the character's present mind. In a flashback the narrative moves into the past and the past is rebuilt as a scene. We discussed the difference between interior monologue and stream of consciousness in the [Interior Monologue](https://leventbulut.com/interior-monologue-vs-stream-of-consciousness/) article. How closely the narrator looks at the past can be thought of through the scale of distance in the [Narrative Distance](https://leventbulut.com/narrative-distance-psychic-distance-examples/) article: the same flashback can be given in a summary sentence or as a scene.

## Example: in with a pencil, out with a pencil

The scene below was written for this article. The flashback is entered through an object and left through the same object:

> Hatice pulled out the drawer under the workbench. Next to a rusty tape measure lay a short carpenter's pencil, its tip whittled with a knife. She picked up the pencil. There were two tooth marks on its side.  
>  
> Twenty-two years earlier, in the last week of August, her father had measured a door frame on this bench with that pencil held between his teeth. Hatice had been nine that summer. She had pressed the end of the tape against the corner of the frame. Without taking the pencil from his mouth, her father had said, “Don't let go. If it slips two centimetres, the door won't shut.” Shavings had filled her sandals.  
>  
> Hatice put the pencil back next to the tape measure. She pushed the drawer; the runner stuck halfway. Outside, the council truck was lifting the bin.

There are three markers in the scene that guide the reader:

- **Entry:** the tooth marks on the side of the pencil, followed by the time marker “Twenty-two years earlier, in the last week of August”. The verbs shift into the past perfect: had measured, had pressed, had said.
- **Inside the past:** the flashback is built not as a summary but as a scene: the end of the tape, the pencil in the father's mouth, the shavings filling the sandals.
- **Exit:** the same pencil is put back, the verbs return to the simple past (put, pushed), and a new sound belonging to the present, the truck outside, places the reader back in the present.

There is no emotion word in the scene. The reader builds the bond between father and daughter, and the time that has passed, from the tooth marks, the words “Don't let go” and the drawer that sticks. Seen through the planning dimensions of Objective Projection, the weight of the transition is carried by space (the same bench, the same drawer) and time (twenty-two years, the last week of August).

## Telling the same moment instead

The same transition could also be written like this: *“When Hatice saw the pencil, she remembered her father and felt how much she missed him. Her childhood came back before her eyes.”*

These two sentences also tell the reader that we are going into the past. But they do not build the past as a scene; they give the reader the name of an emotion and summarise the memory. The reader sees neither the bench nor the shavings nor the father's voice. This version is shorter and, in some narratives, for example where the past is needed only as information, it may be enough. But it does not carry the reader into the past moment.

One distinction needs to be kept here: “remembered” is not the name of an emotion; it is a mental action. What concerns the Emotion Embargo is the phrase “felt how much she missed him” in the first sentence. Opening a flashback with a verb of memory is not forbidden; Objective Projection only proposes that inside the past, emotion be built through detail rather than by name.

## When does a flashback not work?

The question most often asked about flashbacks in writing workshops is when to use one. This article does not propose a fixed rule; it only suggests a few questions writers can ask themselves:

- Is the information in the flashback necessary for the reader to understand the present scene, or would a one-sentence summary be enough?
- Does the flashback interrupt the most tense moment of the present scene? Auerbach's reading of the Odysseus example suggests that such an interruption can carry the reader's attention entirely into the past.
- Does the reader find a marker to notice entering the past and returning to the present?
- Is what the flashback tells actually solving a secret? Information withheld from the reader and given later is discussed under separate rules in detective fiction; we discussed this in [Fair Play in Detective Fiction](https://leventbulut.com/fair-play-clues-detective-fiction/).

A character can also tell a flashback in their own words, the way they remember it. In that case the reader may also question how accurate the told past is; we discussed this question in [The Unreliable Narrator](https://leventbulut.com/unreliable-narrator-definition-examples/).

## What the doctrine cannot say here

- It cannot say whether the reader will miss the time jump. Transitions built with a bridge object and a time marker have not been tested with readers.
- It cannot say that a flashback entered through a concrete object affects the reader more. The two versions of the example scene were not compared with readers.
- It cannot set a rule for when a flashback should be used; the questions in this article are a suggestion.
- It cannot claim that Homer or Proust wrote with a method similar to Objective Projection. The resemblance is a retrospective interpretation.
- It cannot say that the time-change findings of reading research apply directly to flashbacks; those studies do not examine flashbacks separately.

## Limitations

This article presents Genette's concepts and the reading research through secondary sources and summaries; the works of Genette, Auerbach and Proust were not examined in detail. No passages were quoted from the works; events were summarised. The section on tense describes a common writing practice; it is not a grammar rule. The example scene was written for this article and has not been tested with readers. The concepts and sources of the doctrine are listed in [Levent Bulut](https://leventbulut.com/graph/)'s knowledge graph, and the published works on the [Levent Bulut](https://leventbulut.com/corpus/) corpus page.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### What is a flashback?

A flashback is a narrative stopping its current flow to rebuild an earlier event as a scene. The narratologist Gérard Genette calls it analepsis; a jump into the future he calls prolepsis.

### How do you write a flashback?

The most fragile moments of a flashback are the entry and the exit. Writers often mark these two moments with a change of tense (the past perfect with “had” in English), a concrete time marker (a year, a season) and a bridge object that exists in both times.

### What is the difference between a flashback and interior monologue?

In interior monologue the character thinks about the past in the present moment and the reader stays in the character's present mind. In a flashback the narrative moves into the past and the past moment is rebuilt as a scene.

### What are famous examples of flashbacks?

In Homer's Odyssey, the moment the nurse Eurycleia recognises Odysseus by his scar opens a long flashback telling the story of the scar. In Proust's Swann's Way, the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea takes the narrator back to Combray, where he spent his childhood.

### Why might a reader miss a flashback?

Reading research reports findings indicating that readers process time changes in a story as event boundaries and update their mental models. If the transition is not clearly marked, the reader may confuse which time they are in; however, how often this happens with flashbacks has not been tested in this article.

## References

- Auerbach, E. (1946). *Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur*. A. Francke. (Eng. trans. W. R. Trask, *Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature*, Princeton University Press, 1953.)
- Genette, G. (1980). *Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method*. Trans. J. E. Lewin. Cornell University Press. (Original: *Figures III*, 1972.)
- Homer. *Odyssey*, book 19.
- Proust, M. (1913). *Du côté de chez Swann*. Grasset.
- Speer, N. K., & Zacks, J. M. (2005). Temporal changes as event boundaries: Processing and memory consequences of narrative time shifts. *Journal of Memory and Language*, 53(1), 125–140\. [doi:10.1016/j.jml.2005.02.009](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2005.02.009?ref=leventbulut.com)
- Zwaan, R. A., Langston, M. C., & Graesser, A. C. (1995). The construction of situation models in narrative comprehension: An event-indexing model. *Psychological Science*, 6(5), 292–297\. [doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1995.tb00513.x](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1995.tb00513.x?ref=leventbulut.com)
- García Landa, J. A. Structural Narratology: 3.2\. Order. [personal.unizar.es](https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/structuralnarratology/3.Story/3.2.Order.html?ref=leventbulut.com) (accessed 26 October 2026).
- Slate.fr. L'épisode de la madeleine de Proust n'est pas ce que vous croyez. [slate.fr](https://www.slate.fr/culture/68833/episode-madeleine-memoire-involontaire-proust?ref=leventbulut.com) (accessed 26 October 2026).

## Citation

```
@misc{bulut2026flashbacken,
  author       = {Bulut, Levent},
  title        = {How to Write a Flashback: Entering the Past Without Losing the Reader},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://leventbulut.com/how-to-write-a-flashback/}},
  note         = {leventbulut.com}
}
```