Episode: 2522
Title: HPR2522: Flashbacks In Storytelling
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2522/hpr2522.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 04:44:32

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This in HBR episode 2,522 entitled Flashback's in-store retelling, it is hosted by Lost in
Bronx and in about 11 minutes long and Karimaklin flag.
The summary is Lost in Bronx takes a really look at the narrative technique of the Flashback.
Today's show is licensed under a CC hero license.
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Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15.
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Hello, this is Lost in Bronx and you'll have to forgive the audio quality I'm in the car right now.
But today I wanted to talk about the concept of the Flashback in storytelling.
And pretty much almost any kind of storytelling.
And virtually all types from movies to books to plays to even songs can take advantage of this technique.
And we've all seen it and we've all seen how it's been used.
But in point of fact, Flashbacks, they're a tool.
So that you can sometimes fill in narrative holes that's often what it's used for.
To give background to introduce other characters to set up early clues to a later mystery.
There are many many uses of the Flashback.
But I think one of the most important and probably the one that is least understood is setting up multiple narratives within a single story.
Essentially, when you have a Flashback, you are telling another story.
You have your regular story, whatever it happens to be.
And then we go back in time a little bit, maybe a long time depending on what's happening.
And we get some other story right now.
Usually it's related to the main tale.
And very often, though not always, it contains characters at some earlier point in their life.
Now, variation of this is the Flash forward.
While it contains elements unique to itself, by and large, it's used for the same function.
Having a story within a story is a very common technique.
And it goes back to theater is a play within a play.
That is to say, you're watching a play about actors who are performing a play.
And there have been some great stage plays and films that take advantage of that technique.
So that we come to really care about two sets of characters played by the same people.
We're following two separate storylines.
That's a play within a play.
But effectively, a Flashback often is using the very same emotional currency.
That is to say, the Flashback is fulfilling the same function within the narrative.
Very often, the Flashback, when it's used like this, will have elements of either allegorical connection with the main plot.
Or it will inform the main plot with a more literal set of tools.
We'll actually get clues to what's going on in the main plot from elements that occur in the Flashback or in the play within a play.
Now, this is a technique that can be done very well or very poorly.
Usually, if all's somewhere in the middle, we can have elements of the story that we can only find out in the past
because that's when they occurred and we have no other mention of them at any other point in the narrative.
But we can also set up the ending or events that occur later anyway in the story by going into the past.
We see certain clues get dropped.
We see certain characters get mentioned.
We see their behavior.
We see what they were going through, how they felt.
And these things can all inform what's going to happen later.
We've all seen stories that are set up like this.
The best versions of these stories truly are two separate narratives occurring within the same story.
And you can get more complex.
You can have multiple flashbacks to different points in time telling multiple stories.
Now, some television shows have used this technique to the point where they've muddled the main plot where you couldn't understand what was going on.
A famous one was the TV show Lost.
At some point or other, I don't know about you, but I gave up and said they obviously don't really know what story they're telling.
They also did flash forwards in that show and a couple of those strange techniques.
But they had plenty of time to do it in since it was a TV series.
Usually a book or a movie will not have that sort of time to go into extensive, extensive use of the flashback technique.
Now, the problem with any tool is that it can be overused.
In the case of a flashback, it can become gimmicky.
In the case of Lost, I feel that it did.
The film Momento is interesting in that the entire narrative does spin around the structure of the story.
We don't know what's going on completely until we see the whole thing.
But it doesn't really have a lot of dramatic import in any other fashion.
I mean, the whole thing was designed to be told this way.
So stories that use flashback or flash forward or play within a play or dream sequences, which can often be used to the exact same effect.
Stories that rely very heavily on these are gimmicky.
They generally are.
Not always, but generally they are.
And does that necessarily make them bad?
No.
No, it does not necessarily make them bad.
But it does not make them good in and of themselves.
You will still need everything else to hold it together.
As I say, there are exceptions.
Momento is one.
That didn't necessarily have to be a great compelling mystery thriller psychological story because of the originality of the narrative flow and the structure of it.
But you can't do that more than once, right?
You really can.
So anybody that wants to use a technique like that, you have to have a lot of other things supporting it.
I believe personally, I believe that a technique like this could be easily overused.
Even if you only use it once, because in the end, if the flashback doesn't serve the story, if it doesn't serve what's going on, then it is just a gimmick.
It's only there to have some measure of interest in an otherwise uninteresting sequence.
For instance, I recently wrote a short story called Hunter's Moon.
Now, Hunter's Moon has a fairly complicated structure.
Basically, the story is being told in three different points of time, all of which flow forward as the narrative goes along.
So we have the present tense, we have the far past, and then sort of the middle past.
So when I was writing this story just for my own purposes, I talked about present, flashback, and flash mid.
Kind of complicated, also very gimmicky.
I'm the first person to admit that it was a gimmick.
And I interwoven these pieces together in order to tell what would probably otherwise be a rather mundane story.
I'm not going to say that I don't like, and I like my own work, so I'm proud of it, and I'm happy about the way it turned out.
However, I recognize that this is not what we're going to call excellent narrative form.
That's okay, because I had an idea, and it was essentially a single idea, and I was able to spin a fairly large story around this one idea.
The story is told in an interesting fashion. It's like that old comedy axiom.
You can say funny things, or you can say things funny, right?
So Hunter's Moon was told funny. It isn't actually comedy, but I think you're getting the point.
It's how you tell the story, sometimes, that makes the story.
Now, you may decide that it doesn't ultimately matter if you enjoy the tale.
Well, I agree with you. I agree with you. However, what if every story you watched, every TV show you watched, was structured by lost?
In other words, techniques can be overdone, and if you've seen it before, the magic trick is gone.
If I know how they've done it, all I can do is enjoy their mastery of the technique, but the trick is gone.
There will be no awe, there will only be admiration or condemnation for the way it was put together.
I would like to see more people playing with the way a story is structured.
However, very often, we will get the same techniques used over and over and over, or used to the point where they render the story completely incomprehensible.
Perhaps the people writing the tale understand what's going on, but if they can't get that across, you're only conclusion.
The only thing that you can possibly take away from that experience is that they didn't know what they were doing.
And that's too bad, because maybe they had a great story to tell, and they lost it in their story structure.
So, the story structure can be used to make the tale, but it can also be used to lose the tale.
I would encourage anybody who's interested in story structure, the way stories are told, if they're told in flashback, flash forward, dream sequences, play within a play, just narrative storytelling.
That is a person telling you, if this thing happened, blah, blah, blah, that often will achieve the exact same effect.
And if you're writing a tale, if you're interested in writing a story, and again, this covers everything, including video games, including written stories, film, narratives of all sorts.
And as I say, even songs, we'll do it.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, I encourage you to look at story structure as a way of both telling your tale and possibly damaging it.
It's a very, very important tool, but it is just a tool. And in the end, very often, there are other types of tools or other variations of the same tool that will achieve the exact same effect.
At any rate, if you have any opinions about this or anything else I've talked about, I encourage you to leave a comment on the page for Hacker Public Radio for this episode, or better yet, make an episode of your own about this or any other topic.
You have ideas, you have interests, and we want to hear about it.
This has been Lost in Bronx. Take care.
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