Flashbacks/Backstory/Character Internalization?

You usually tell a story in sequence from beginning to end. If you break that sequence to tell something that happened earlier, you have a flashback. Backstory is what happened to one or more characters before the main story of the novel; it may or may not be relevant.

There is no single right or wrong answer. Sometimes backstory is not needed, sometimes it's crucial. The same goes for flashbacks (and pretty much any other writing-related technique). Use them sparingly and find out what works.

One tip: a lot of backstory in one pile (especially at the beginning of a story) doesn't work. A flashback in the beginning begs the question. Why a flashback instead of starting with the event that happened first?

By the way, you're worrying too way too much. Finish first.

Okay, here goes - have numbered the questions for ease.

1) Flashbacks are fine, even for an unpublished writer, if used well. Flashbacks that go on for pages and pages, or that are just a rubbish way of shoving a load of backstory in, are not good. I have a couple of flashbacks in my story, as my MC is suffering from PTSD, of which flashbacks are symptoms, and everyone was very helpful and encouraging with the one I posted on SYW.

So don't be deterred, so long as your flashbacks:
a) Contribute something to the story (i.e. are not pointless filler)
b) Don't go on for too long
c) Aren't about mundane subjects

2) Flashbacks and backstory are NOT the same thing. Don't put in masses of backstory, that is bad and can turn the reader off your book. Backstory should be filtered subtly into the novel through dialogue, actions, etc. And this doesn't include any 'As you know, Bob' dialogue, such as "As you know, Bob, I'm off to visit my uncle Brian, the judge, who last year put your brother behind bars."

Backstory in great chunks, or backstory that is boring and/or obviously backstory, is not reccommended.

3) I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'internalizations' but if you mean character thoughts/feelings, then that is fine. Say you have a character with a stutter, and the new teacher, who doesn't know about it, asks her a question, then the character's 'internalizations' (if I have this right), might be along the lines of: OMG she doesn't know, I can't pronounce 't's. and the answer is ten, shall I get it wrong so I don't have to say the 't' noise, or shall I try, is everyone looking at me? Does the teacher think I'm stupid or something? Oh no, Jane is giggling with Gina, obviously they're laughing at me.

Obviously there would be other stuff going on, like dialogue from the teacher, and it would be more coherently written, but that is the character's internalization, as I understand. From that you would just say a couple of things that illustrated the character's mood and feelings.

So overal, flashbacks are fine if used well, backstory should be woven seamlessly into the story, and internalization is important but mustn't be overdone or the character will seem too internal and the novel will be one long monologue.

Hope that helped x

I’ve attempted to answer your questions but I do think you might be getting a little ahead of yourself. Your questions make me think you don’t know a huge amount about writing (which is fine and I’m not making any judgements). But it is quite hard to give complete answers to such general questions. I’d have a read of some writing books if I were you just so you know all the terms, such as backstory. And I honestly wouldn’t worry about getting everything right on a first book – I know it is hard to even consider, but you’re probably going to make loads of mistakes the first time round no matter how hard you try. It’s all part of the learning experience and everyone has been there!
Disclaimers over...Answering your questions out of order:

1) Is flashback and backstory the same thing? What is backstory? Are backstories in a story not recommended for an unpublished writer to use in a novel that they might try to query and submit to a literary agent?

Completely different things. Backstory is everything that happened to your character to make them the person they are when the book starts. Their entire life history is backstory. Of course you need backstory in a novel but, what I think you might be hinting at is that you’ve heard that large chunks of backstory (or infodumps) are generally frowned upon. This is because they are boring and readers generally like to hear about active characters. The trick is to weave backstory into the action rather than starting the book with big pieces of information. I would say always try to have the character doing something in real time when the book starts. So no long chunks of text in which you describe their life up until that point, or tell the reader things that have happened in the past.

2) Are flashbacks in a story not recommended for an unpublished writer to use in a novel that they might try to query and submit to a literary agent?

I think flashbacks can sometimes be used as a lazy way for a writer to include backstory in an active manner rather than relying on infodumps as I mentioned above. You need balance in everything so too many flashbacks can be annoying to read. What I see lots is writers who either begin with loads of backstory as above or writers who attempt to have the character doing something at the start but then move straight into a flashback. The latter can be quite gimmicky in my opinion. As a rule of thumb, I would say it is best to make sure something happens in the first few pages of the book before including either a chunk of backstory or a flashback. Try to weave the characters’ pasts into the story rather than attempting to give the reader loads of information all at once.

3) If flashbacks and backstory are not recommended, then what is there for the character to internalize about? To internalize the scenery or to internalize about the situation? The sights, smells, and taste? If I did this, someone with a critical eye might assume I'm creating "filler" material to pad my word count even though I might not be and this internalization of the character would slow the story down.

I am not sure what you mean here. The character can think about anything happening in the book. To me, their internalisations would be their inner-thoughts – all the stuff they don’t say out loud. Just keep the thoughts limited to things that matter to your plot and you’ll be fine. E.g. 'Joe wondered if Kate fancied him' versus 'Joe thought about how the weather was nice'. The first is critical to the plot, the second is boring and irrelevant. (Well, obviously both are rubbish but I’m just trying to make a point!).

4) So I'm also asking, what is character internalizations? Are internalizations by the characters necessary?

Depends how much you want the reader to get into your character’s head. Do they need to know what a character is thinking or is the story better with some mystery to your characters’ actions? I would say include some character thoughts but limit this to one characters (don’t jump between lots of characters). I would suggest looking up point of view (POV) on these forums if you don’t know anything about it – there are loads of threads around.

Good luck!

John61480 said:

Does everyone else agree with this assessment on character internalizations by LadyA?

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Sounds like good advice to me. It really depends on the type of book you are writing so do have a look and see what other books in your genre do. Young adult tends to be quite inner-thought heavy. But I would definately avoid having the character think too much - it is far more fun to read about them actually doing something.

I have thirteen novels/stories released or contracted. Everyone has both flashbacks or dreams or internal dialogue. Why? IMO its reality to the characters, whats going on in their POV, and what we all do in life. Neither my publishers nor editors have ever completed or removed any of them from a story, only defined how they are formated. I've received dozens of five star reviews on those stories and in only one case did a reviewer complain about not liking a dream sequence.

Ref use of divine or narrative voice (what I think you're calling back story), yeah, that I've had my knuckles rapped for that in my first 3 or 4 stories and definitely stay away from it.

I suggest you evolve your own voice, where every your muse takes ya. If its good and envelopes the reader, that's the goal. If a publisher is interested in your style/quality/theme and they don't like a passage, they'll tell ya (had that happened on several stories.)

JMTCW

John61480 said:

Are flashbacks in a story not recommended for an unpublished writer

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Flashback is a standard writing technique. You can use it in your early work without imperilling your chance of publication. By the time you get the other stuff right, you'll have the flashbacks right too.

That said, it's about always better to stick to dirt-simple technique instead of fancy gee-whiz stuff that looks cool but doesn't actually help tell your story.

John61480 said:

Is flashback and backstory the same thing? What is backstory? Are backstories in a story not recommended

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As an example:

Backstory = blue
Main narrative = black
Internals = red
Flashback = green

Quincy is an ex-cop from Duluth and a Vietnam vet. He's in the bleachers at a baseball game, drinking only coke, because he is a recovering alcoholic. He's red headed, wearing a blue jacket and John Deere cap. He teaches American History at the Abberdale High School and he's sitting next to the school librarian, a single mom, whose son has just come up as pitcher. Quincy dislikes her ex, the school coach. A car backfires on the street outside and Quincy has a sudden flashback to 'Nam. Suddenly guns sound around him and he smells dirt and blood. He recovers with a start, catching his coke before it spills. He controls the physical reactions, the shaking, the sickness, and pretends nothing has happened.


Backstory is information about the past or about stuff outside the current story. It is 'told', not 'shown'. It's factoids slipped into the story.

Flashbacks are a kind of scene. These scenes are constituent to the narrative. They're structural. And because flashback is structural, it is not tossed in randomly without regard for what it does to the pacing and plot.

There are reasons to choose flashback instead of backstory. You might use a flashback, for example,

-- to evoke an emotional response to an event that happened before your story line. (i.e. death of Harry Potter's mother.)

-- where the exact, detailed picture of a past event is needed. (i.e. pirates burying a treasure chest our protagonists will later recover.)

-- to simplify explanations. Can a flashback condense that necessary info into 800 words as opposed to a 3000-word, dull-as-dryer-lint narrative? This is a picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words thingum.

-- to break up pacing. Breaking the time sequences, moving to another place, or shifting to a subplot all stop the main narrative dead. Sometime we want to do this.

-- and we use flashback when the reader absolutely, positively has to remember this information for the rest of the story.

John61480 said:

If flashbacks and backstory are not recommended, then what is there for the character to internalize about? To internalize the scenery or to internalize about the situation? The sights, smells, and taste?
... what is character internalizations? Are internalizations by the characters necessary?

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Internals are what the POV character does inside his head . . .
everything he does in there, which is to say, the same stuff you do inside your head.

You don't just walk around noting what color the sofa is and what the milk tastes like. You think. You feel. You speculate. You have just a babble of words yapping inside your skull.

here's an exercise in internals and how they work into the scene.
My example here.
Other examples from other folks Here. here, here, here.

John61480 said:

If I did this, someone with a critical eye might assume I'm creating "filler" material to pad my word count even though I might not be

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We need to listen to what other people say about our work.
We just have to not care too much.

John61480 said:

this internalization of the character would slow the story down.

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Yes. It does.
This is not a bug. It's a feature.
We use this in pacing the story.

John61480 said:

The flashback in my novel occurs near the beginning, and I haven't gotten to far into the story and I want to do any structural changes now before I continue.

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Do not worry about getting the structure of the manuscript right.
Just finish the first draft.

But I don't want to do that at the expense of turning people off simply because it slowed the story down or have someone critiquing my story and say the character internalizations seemed pointless and should have been cut out.

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As has been said, you can use it for pacing...there are places where the story needs to slow down a bit, and they will work there.

You will get told to cut it out if it seems like it's too much, or if it slows down the story for too long or in the wrong place. Or if that particular person doesn't happen to like internalizations. (I do, but...subjectivity and all...)

How to tell if you're doing too much of something...I haven't figured out how to do that yet without somebody telling me outright.

But, as has also been said, you should really just write it. There is plenty of time for agony over things like this once you're in revision mode.

John61480 said:

Are flashbacks in a story not recommended for an unpublished writer to use in a novel that they might try to query and submit to a literary agent?

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It depends how the flashbacks are used. If the novel opens with three paragraphs of action then goes to flashback, then I might well suggest you change the way you're telling the story. If the flashback is in the right place to give the reader information they need at that point, I wouldn't say cut it out, no.

NEXT QUESTION: Is flashback and backstory the same thing? What is backstory? Are backstories in a story not recommended for an unpublished writer to use in a novel that they might try to query and submit to a literary agent?

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Backstory is everything that happened before your story begins. The protagonist being born, growing up, the cities being built, even the creation of the universe. Although characters are often 'born' as adults in our minds, for the sake of the story we pretend they had a life before it starts.

Backstory is essential to a novel. However, most of what you know about your characters and your world will inform the novel; it won't be directly stated in the novel. So I may know that my protagonist's life changed utterly when he was eleven years old, and I may find ways to let the reader know that, but there may not be a single scene in the novel that shows what happened at that time.

Flashbacks are one way of sharing backstory with the readers. You take them to the time and place when something important to the story happened, and have it play out as a scene.

If you encountered a backstory within a novel excerpt in the Share Your Work forum here at AW, (in a critique) would you tell that writer to cut that part out?

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Depends. Is the backstory essential for us to know at that point? Literary agent Don Maass suggests we not have any backstory for the first fifty pages of a novel, which strikes me as good advice because it forces us to keep the story moving along. What we sometimes forget is that the questions our stories raise in the reader's mind are what keeps them reading; if we answer those questions too soon, they lose interest.

NEXT QUESTION: If flashbacks and backstory are not recommended, then what is there for the character to internalize about? To internalize the scenery or to internalize about the situation? The sights, smells, and taste? If I did this, someone with a critical eye might assume I'm creating "filler" material to pad my word count even though I might not be and this internalization of the character would slow the story down.

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Flashbacks aren't usually internalised. They're scenes like any other; they just appear out of linear order. I'm not sure I get how you're using internalise here. Do you mean, what is there for the character to think about? If your character sits and just thinks about something that happened in the past, I would call that exposition (or info-dump), not flashback.

The flashback in my novel occurs near the beginning, and I haven't gotten to far into the story and I want to do any structural changes now before I continue. That way I don't continue on with a bad pattern of flashbacks throughout the novel.

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It's hard to give specific advice without seeing the novel, but I would say that a flashback near the beginning *sounds* to me like a bad idea. Are you sure you've started the novel in the right place? Are you sure the reader NEEDS to have the information in the flashback right there and then?

LAST QUESTION: So I'm also asking, what is character internalizations? Are internalizations by the characters necessary?

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Do you mean the character's thoughts? My characters think about what other characters mean or are up to, or what they're going to do next. I think they are necessary to an extent, but that extent depends on a lot of variables.

John61480 said:

Does everyone else agree with this assessment on character internalizations by LadyA?

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Pretty much. Though sometimes a character does need to monologue internally, to work through something, to put clues together, etc. But if that's the case, include some little actions to help pace it.

As to your other questions, JoB's answer cannot be topped.

John61480 said:

I'm still trying to consider what to do about character internalizations. . . . But I don't want to do that at the expense of turning people off simply because it slowed the story down.

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By 'internalization', do you mean stopping the action for paragraphs or pages so the protagonist can think about the past? I don't think anyone would recommend this as a good way to add backstory.

There is something called 'internals' but that is very different.

I like your questions. I am re-writing a story that got slammed for flashbacks. A big problem with this story is that almost all the 'action' is info. An investigator shows up in the MCs village, she's got stuff to hide, but not quite what the MC is after. The bulk of what I want to convey lies in the MCs mind. I know all the above stuff, as pointed out by Job & Lady A. But knowing the path & walking the path are not the same, right Grashopper? - wait - that got mixed up. anyway...

Good luck - wish me luck too please

John61480 said:

I do not mean to include internalizations that would stop the action for paragraphs or pages. I'm thinking one or two sentences at the most for internalizations if the story demands this from the character I am writing about.

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I don't think 'internalization' is actually a writing term, so I'm not sure what you mean by that. Are you using the word 'internalization' to mean 'internals'? Or do you mean 'Internal Monologue'? Or do you mean a silent soliloquy?

I don't think I'd be in favor of soliloquy, because it strikes me as unnecessary. Just IMO.


-- Here's an example of backstory slipped into the ongoing text. We're not in Adrian's POV, here. We have no 'internals'.

Adrian sharpened the knife. He liked his knives to have a good edge on them. All of those years of being a professional assassin had left their mark. A dull knife, he always said, is a dangerous one.


-- Here's backstory added while in Adrian's POV. We'd call most of this passage 'internals', meaning it's about what happens inside Adrian's head. We are given his thoughts, opinions, feelings.

He sharpened his knife. Always a good idea to keep the knife sharp. He'd learned that in all those years he'd killed people for a living. Nothing worse than a dull knife. It was a danger to the owner and to everybody else in arm's reach.

-- Here's similar internals, but this time we've cast some of them as what's called 'Interior Monologue'. IM is the POV character's thoughts in exact words. I represent the IM as underline. It will appear in the book as Italics.

He sharpened his knife. Keep a good edge on it, he told himself. He'd learned that in all those years he'd killed people for a living. Nothing worse than a dull blade. Damned danger to everybody in reach.


Let me give another example. This is a scene is without 'internals'. It's action and description. We get emotional value attached to what's going on, but we are not in a POV.

***
Merri screamed. The car hit the ice and skidded, slowly inexorably, toward the lake. It fishtailed, slammed through bushes. Hesitated. Almost, it seemed to stop.

Then something -- maybe the wildly spinning wheels caught on a rough patch of icy ground -- something sent the car into a last pitiful, slow-as-breath glide out onto the lake. With a long roar the ice parted and the car was gone.
***

Here is the same scene with internals from a POV character. We also have some IM.

***
He wasn't going to make it in time. Too far. Too far.

Merri screamed. He could barely hear her over the blood pounding in his ears. The car hit the ice and skidded, slowly inexorably, toward the lake. It fishtailed, slammed through bushes. Hesitated. Almost, it seemed to stop.

God. Just this once. Let me be in time just this once.

Then something -- maybe the wildly spinning wheels caught on a rough patch of icy ground -- something sent the car into a last pitiful, slow-as-breath glide out onto the lake.
With a long roar the ice parted and the car was gone.

Words kept forming and reforming in his mind. The kids are in there.
***

You do not need to budget yourself on internals. They do not slow the pacing or interfere with telling the story. They are the story.

But, as I say, I don't know what you mean by internalization.