Flashback or Backstory? What's the Difference?
A question came up the other day about Flashback and Backstory . Backstory , as you know, is considered a bad thing to include in a story—or at least in the opening pages—and yet many writers use flashbacks . If you look at Where the Red Fern Grows , which is always a great example to use when talking about how to write a novel , the vast majority of the book is flashback . We, obviously, can’t be talking about the same thing with these two terms, but where do we draw the line and what’s the difference. A Couple of Definitions Before we talk about the differences, we need a couple of definitions. Some people define backstory as narrative interjected into a story that tells what happened before the current action. That definition makes it sound an awful lot like flashback . That isn’t very helpful for our purposes. I prefer the Merriam-Webster definitions: backstory a story that tells what led up to the main story or plot (as of a film) flashback interruption of chronologic...