However, they’re not easy. As an editor, flashbacks are one of the most common places I see writers struggle. If they aren’t handled with care, they may feel disconnected from the rest of the narrative or leave the reader feeling confused about where and when the actual story is taking place.

Memoir Mentors Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Mistake #1 - No clear introduction to the flashback

Here’s a crappy example I’ve fabricated:

How different we were! I was anything but patient about it and I had never learned. I stood on the deck, watching my son attempt to skip stones across the placid water. Though they sank, one after the other, he never seemed to tire of it. Dad made it look so effortless but I didn’t dare ask him for help. I was too damn proud and I knew any advice Dad would give would be full of scorn. Rock after rock left my fist—propelled by anger. But as I watched, my son’s patience paid off. A rock skipped—one, two, three times—across the water. He turned back toward the house, beaming. I pumped my fist in the air and shouted, “Way to go, Sam!”

By the end, the might see a parallel between the parental experiences, but the “Dad made it look so effortless” sentence arrives without warning. It seems so incongruous that the reader might go back and reread the past few sentences to see if they’ve missed something.

Instead, you need make it clear immediately when you’re going into flashback. Here’s a revised, slightly less crappy example:

I stood on the deck, watching my son attempt to skip stones across the placid water. One after another, they sank, but he never seemed to tire of trying. How different we were! I had been about his age when I had tried to skip rocks and I was anything but patient about it. Dad had made it look so effortless but I didn’t dare ask him for help. I was too damn proud and I knew any advice Dad would give would be full of scorn. Rock after rock left my fist, propelled by anger. I never had learned the trick, but as I watched my son, his patience paid off. A rock skipped—one, two, three times—across the water. He turned back toward the house, beaming. I pumped my fist in the air and shouted, “Way to go, Sam!”

By simply moving the sentences around and adding “I had been about his age…”, we alert the reader that we’re heading into a flashback. By moving the “I had never learned the trick…” to be just before “but as I watched my son…,” we have a transition from the past to the present.

Mistake #2 - Muddy timelines

You may have noticed something else wrong with my example. In the first version, the narrative goes back and forth between present to past to present again without clear indication of “when” we are. In this case, I added “I had been about his age when…” to indicate the shift. Some other phrases like “This wasn’t the first time…” and “And here I was again…” can give the reader the breadcrumbs to indicate where we are in time.

Mistake #3- To many “I remember whens”

While phrases such as “I remember when…” or “Then, I thought about that time…” clearly signal something that happened in the past, use them sparingly. As with anything in your writing, repetition without intent gets irritating fast. Plus, this can weaken the reader’s trust in the scene. Often, the connection between the “present” moment and the flashback is something that you realize much later, not in the moment being described.

Mistake #4 Not returning to the main story line

Unless your memoir uses a non-traditional structure, your story should have a “present day” chronological story which draws your reader through the entire book. When I say present day, it doesn’t necessarily mean current day, but it is the span of time where most of the story takes place in your memoir.

Think of that storyline as if it were a clothesline. The story starts at one end of the clothesline and ends up at the other. The flashbacks are the clothing and they must be connected to the clothesline with two clothes pins. First something must happen in the main storyline, something important enough that you want to emphasize it with a flashback. So, start with one clothes pin that gives a clear indication that you’re exiting the main storyline, then add the flashback to take the reader back in time and add color and texture to the story. But remember that the flashback is always attached and must come back to the main storyline. That last clothes pin is the transition back to the main storyline so the reader isn’t lost in your childhood, wondering why they’re there and forgetting about the reasons you took them there in the first place.

Mistake #5 - Having a flashback within a flashback

Just as you wouldn’t want to hang one piece of clothing off of an already hanging piece of clothing, it can be risky including a flashback within a flashback. It can weigh line down, confuse the reader, and break the connection to the main story.

If you’d like some more tips on flashback, check out this post I wrote about Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild. Cheryl is a master of the flashback.

And finally, if you’d like a shorter example, here’s an essay I wrote a few years ago where much of the heavy lifting was done through flashbacks. It’s called “This Isn’t About a Lake House” and was published in The Forge Literary Magazine.

And if you’re still here and looking for more advice on flashbacks, check out this video from Wendy Dale, founder of Memoir Writing for Geniuses and author of: The Memoir Engineering System: Make Your First Draft Your Final Draft.

Thanks for reading! If you think someone else might enjoy this post, please share or repost.

Feeling overwhelmed by piles of writing drafts scattered across platforms, apps, and files? You’re not alone! In this Substack Live replay, Christina Howell (Memoir Mentors) and Jennifer N. Haddock (Everyday Behaviorist) dig into the messy reality behind prolific creative output and share practical, compassionate strategies for organizing your writing life.

Join them as they swap personal stories of creative “snow-ins,” confess their struggles with version overload, and walk through concrete steps to break free from file paralysis. Whether you’re wrangling memoir drafts, daily essays, or a backlog of spontaneous poems, you’ll find tips for building a reliable system (hint: “one source of truth” saves the day!), breaking big goals into achievable steps, and being gentler with yourself along the way.

Bonus: They discuss tools like Scrivener and Google Drive, field live questions about audience engagement, and offer behavioral science insights for overcoming overwhelm.

Watch the full replay to get inspired and dig yourself out of your own “word snowbank!”

Related posts:

I had the urge to edit this or expand or compress it, but just wanted to get it out there before I overthought it too much.

Here’s the original text:

Words have power: the power to inform, the power to influence, the power to ignite, the power to transform, and more. Has this power ever touched your soul? I dare you to tell me that you have never read a passage that stirred your emotions. Have words ever made your heart race with fear or passion, or forced you to pause at the beauty, the poignancy, the joy, or sorrow? Yes, words have power, but what I really want to talk about today is not the words of others but the written words of your own soul.

I challenge you—not to think, “What can I do with words?” but instead to think, “What can words do for me?” You may say, “But I am not a writer.” And I say to you that being a writer is not a prerequisite to writing. Even if you never share your words, your words still have power and worth.

Augustine Hippo wrote: “I write as my knowledge grows, and my knowledge grows as I write.” His mind was changed through writing. Often, thoughts and feelings slide and crash against each other, coloring and muddying each other to form a swampy mess, but when the words are captured on paper, an order begins to form. Thoughts become clearer. Feelings become calmer, more sensible, and manageable when written. Fear may be a vile, dark creature when unexpressed, but writing can lasso this beast and tame the tendrils into something, perhaps not meek, but potentially less tangled and complicated and ultimately something that can be overcome when each piece is illuminated to reveal understanding and a path forward.

When facing a problem, a fear, a hope, a dream, I encourage you to set aside the voice that says you are not a writer and just write. Write any words that come to mind. Don’t think too much about them. Write as if no one else will ever read these words. If you don’t know what to write, you can start with, “I don’t know what to write.” Write until you find the why, the how, the when behind the what. The point of this activity is not to write a masterpiece, at least not in the beginning, but to unlock the power of words. In the process of writing, if you power through the questions and doubts in your mind, you may find order, calm, confidence, and clarity that you were unaware of until your words poured onto the page.

Another benefit of writing is that it frames your experiences and gives meaning. David Sedaris said it best, “You’re so privileged to be a writer… Because, normal people, [when] something bad happens to them, there’s nothing they can do except feel bad or complain or press charges.” As a writer, these experiences can be harvested into something meaningful. I have been writing about my dating adventures for years. Without writing, my experiences might be depressing, but because I write, these soul-crushing experiences are also funny and excellent material, and sometimes, in the process of writing, I have discoveries of why I am attracting these weird men into my life and why I behave the way I do.

Later in your writing process, I challenge you to think, “What can my words do for others?” You might say that you have no business writing words that others before you have written more succinctly, more eloquently, that you have nothing worth saying. Still, I challenge you, again, to rethink this because no one who has lived or died before you, no one who has written or who has been afraid to write, will ever write the same words in the same combination as you. It might just be that your words will resonate with another, and in those words, they will find precious nuggets of truth and understanding that they believed were beyond human comprehension, that they believed were unique to their own experience, and in the experience of reading your words, they may feel a profound relief or profound joy that they are not alone. With the power of words, none of us is alone.

Memoir Mentors Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.