Flashbacks vs. Dual Timeline: What’s the Difference?

For strong storytelling, we need to focus on what’s important and relevant to current story events. That means we shouldn’t info-dump a bunch of irrelevant backstory just because it’s interesting or it’s something we enjoyed developing about our character, as we instead need to keep this story moving forward.

Yet two advanced writing techniques may seem to go against this advice by focusing on showing readers events in the past: flashbacks and dual timeline stories. What are these techniques, when might it make sense to use them, and what’s the difference between flashbacks and dual timelines?

Backstory 101: Use When Necessary

While we do need to be careful with backstory (due to potentially causing pacing issues, etc.), in most stories, it’s essential to include at least some pre-story information. Well-crafted backstory gives readers the context of a character’s issues (like a backstory wound) and emotions, informing readers about what makes the character tick. Backstory often creates a character’s pain and motivation—helping readers comprehend the why.

That said, our goal shouldn’t simply be to include backstory whenever we think readers “need” information. Instead, the most important advice for integrating any style of backstory is that the information must be relevant to the current story events and readers’ understanding of the story.

In general, backstory should be shared:

• only when readers need the context for understanding a character’s current choices and emotions (that why information), such as when their actions or behaviors seem out of character or confusing – and –
• only when that technique is the best way to have readers understand why the character is doing what they’re doing.

Advanced Backstory: Flashbacks vs. Dual Timelines

Normal Backstory:

In normal usage, we may allude to backstory in just a phrase or paragraph. Rather than spelling out the details of a character’s history, we may include just a hint, just enough for readers to understand.

For the first time in years, she prioritized her needs over those of her coworker.

That opening 6-word phrase is enough to allude to a past that’s held this character back from standing up for herself. Over the course of the story, readers can get similar hints if necessary to better understand her backstory wound and thus fully understand the story’s stakes and obstacles and her choices and motivations.

Backstory through Flashbacks:

However, sometimes it’s necessary to give readers more information. Maybe during this scene, readers need to know why this is the first time she’s willing to set boundaries. Maybe they need to see for themselves what happened in the past to understand why she was so traumatized and stuck in her mindset—and thus get the importance of this scene.

In that case, rather than contriving a way to share the information within the current story, such as having the character tell someone else about the past event, we may decide to show readers the event itself in a flashback. A flashback gives us a few paragraphs—up to a full scene—to show (rather than tell) a past event.

As her coworker prattled on about yet another emergency that he’d caused—and that required her to give up her weekend off to fix, for the twelfth weekend in a row—she remembered all the hundreds of other times she’d sacrificed for others at her expense. At the front of her mind was the teenage memory of her father demanding that she spend their entire Disney World family vacation watching her infant brother.
Some of the time, sure. All of the time?
At the announcement, she had stared into her parents’ faces, watching for a hint of a wink or smile. They were joking, surely. Her heart dropped as the reality sank into thoughts. No castle, no rides, no fun.
No way.
“But that’s not fair!”…

Dual-Timeline Stories:

Many books consist of multiple stories that interrelate to create one story, such as romance stories that feature both love interests or any story with multiple protagonists. For those, we may alternate scenes or chapters between the characters.

However, what if those stories happen at different times? As an example, what if the story we’ve been using above is a case of generational issues? What if we want to explore not only this woman’s story of learning to set boundaries, but we also want to explore her mother’s history of failing to do the same until she’s inspired by her daughter’s growth?

In that case, a dual-timeline story may make the most sense. With just flashbacks, we’d struggle to create an understanding of not only this woman’s history but also her mother’s story of past situations and choices. Instead, we could create dual stories set at different times so that both timelines are fully shown and not told.

A dual-timeline story gives us any number of scenes necessary to tell a complete story that happened in the past that is somehow relevant to the “present” story. Like any multiple protagonist story, we could alternate chapters or sections, one set in the “present” and one set at the earlier time (but still worded in our usual verb tense).

For our example, we may alternate chapters with the mother and daughter facing similar challenges in asserting themselves. The story set in the past may seemingly end with the mother giving up. Then soon after the daughter finds her backbone in the present, the mother’s story may resume by jumping forward in time to show her inspired to the same, finally leaving her abusive husband.

This time jump at the end is not necessary (or even particularly common) in dual-timeline stories (and in fact, it’s possible to feature the same protagonist in both timelines), but this structure fits with this example. Either way, the dual-timeline story comes together in the end, at least on a thematic level, to illuminate a single story idea.

How Is a Dual-Timeline Story Different from Using Multiple Flashbacks?

Depending on the story we’re trying to tell, the story arc set in the past of a dual-timeline story may also inform the “present” story the same way that any type of backstory provides context to readers. For our example, the alternating chapters could echo each other with similar challenges or show the daughter learning unhelpful coping habits from her mother, explaining more about why she is the way she is.

However, it’s important to understand that a dual-timeline story is not the same as a story with a bunch of flashbacks.

Multiple Flashbacks:

• Only need to be related to current story events
• Can be—but don’t need to be—related to each other
• Are triggered by events in the current story, not the previous flashback
• Don’t need to tell a story in whole
• Aren’t leading up to their own dark moment or climax

In other words, the flashbacks aren’t there to work together to tell a separate story from the present story. Instead, the flashback scenes exist solely to illuminate the current story.

Dual Timelines:

• Each should have their own obstacles and stakes.
• Each should progress as a complete story, with their own independent structure of acts and turning points (dark moment, climax), etc.
• Each scene set in the past should follow the cause-and-effect chain of the previous past scene, not the preceding present-story chain.

In other words, even if we cut out every present-setting scene, the story set in the past should still make sense and be a complete story. The past-timeline story exists for its own reasons, and the dual-timeline structure simply allows the two stories to add meaning to each other.

Need More Understanding or Examples of
Flashbacks vs. Dual-Timelines?
Check out Jami’s companion post!

When Should We Use Each Technique?

If we need readers to know aspects of the past to understand the context of the present, our default should be to use our normal backstory techniques, including hints/phrases, characters sharing stories, etc.

• Use Normal Backstory to share tidbits of necessary context relevant to current story events with readers.

If we want to use our usual showing techniques to share a specific past event with readers, such as to create a deep point of view (POV) experience, we may want to use a flashback.

• Use Flashbacks to show a past defining moment(s), event(s), or scene(s) with the POV character to readers.

If we want to explore a story idea that integrates the experiences of two different timelines to create a single understanding, we may want to use a dual timeline.

• Use Dual Timelines to show two stories set at different times that work together to illuminate each other.

Final Thoughts about Backstory Techniques

With the right writing techniques, we can ensure our backstory elements don’t slow down or interrupt our current story or feel like information dumps to readers. At the same time, appropriate use of backstory techniques can make our story and characters—and our readers’ connection to those—stronger and more compelling. *smile*

Want to learn how the new Fallout TV series juggles both flashbacks and dual timelines? Visit my companion post!

Have you struggled to understand how to weave backstory information into your story? Have you used flashbacks or written a dual-timeline story and have other insights to share? Do you have any questions about these techniques or how to approach backstory, flashbacks, or dual-timeline stories?