Flashback

macro & micro

Backstory refers to the past of a character. It can come out in many ways, but often through flashback. Scene-level flashbacks are common, but I am very interested in the use of what I call microflashback, the use of a phrase, fragment or sentence to open up crevices into characters’ pasts. It can have large power, though the word count it takes up is small, and it's especially powerful when paired with the use of larger-scale flashback. 

A text that expertly uses both macro and microflashbacks is Alice Munro’s story “The Love of A Good Woman.” It opens with a distant third-person narrator touring a museum of local history; then a dead body and possible crime scene are discovered by a group of boys; then the view changes to a woman taking care of a sick patient, a young woman like herself but with a fatal kidney condition. Though the story is in many ways about the history of the town, the backstories of all the characters are key, initially, details emerge slowly, in microflashbacks. 

First, at the museum, we learn that an optometrist whose instruments are displayed drowned in the Peregrine River in 1951. Nothing more about the incident, just the instrument.  Later, after much about the boys who found his body, we get a single line telling us that one of them, Cece Ferns -- the first boy to be named — once gave an interesting bone he’d found to another boy because he “could never take anything home unless if was a size to be concealed from his father.” Dark gyres of murder and abuse are introduced by these tiny references to backstories that we know must actually be massive. 

In the third section, we learn that a nurse has the capacity to be cruel through a largerscale flashback. Enid makes an unkind joke about her patient and is reminded by the smile of the patient’s sister-in-law how she and her girlfriends had bullied the patient’s husband, back when they were in high school together. “That was just the way Rupert would smile, in high school, warding off some possible mockery.” This flashback continues, revealing the girlish cruelty Enid took part in, opening up the reader’s mind about the range of things the kind, stolid-seeming Enid is actually capable of, and thus a window of suspense about who (if anyone) actually committed a crime leading to the dead body that was uncovered by the boys.  

PROMPT: For every large scale flashback you have, see if you can plant at least one tiny one, possibly tied to the larger one, that opens up the world of your character and implies much — without fleshing out the detail. For microflashbacks, don’t be vague, be specific — a cow’s hipbone given to an acquaintance, the chipped paint on a dead optometrist’s instrument — just do it very briefly.

Further Reading: The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro