/scene-craft

Flashbacks and Time Skips

Flashback entry and exit mechanics

A flashback must feel like entering and leaving a room, not like a footnote. Use a two-step entry and a two-step exit:

Entry:

1. Sensory trigger in the present — a smell, a sound, a phrase that the POV character actually perceives right now. The trigger belongs in the present scene.
2. Clean break — a scene break (---) or a hard paragraph transition. Then start the flashback in media res of the past moment, not with "She remembered when..." (that is a filter-word entry — see deep-pov.md).

Exit:

1. Echo the trigger — return on the same sensory detail, now changed by what the flashback revealed.
2. Resume present motion — the present scene continues; the flashback must have cost something (time lost, a reaction seen, a decision changed) or it was free information.

Record flashbacks in the scene record with flashback-to: {when} (a freeform scalar validated by story validate and preserved by the CLI) and the characters appearing in them under mentions (not characters), per the story-init convention — this keeps story continuity from flagging posthumous or temporally-impossible appearances (continuity checks use mentions, not flashback-to).

Give a flashback scene its real, earlier date. story continuity then warns <scene> timestamp runs backward. That finding is deliberate, so do not "fix" the date: record it in continuity/exemptions.md (create the file if it does not exist) with the finding's code (clock-backward, in brackets at the end of the warning) and the scene's file, and rerun story continuity ., which now reports it as dismissed:

---
type: exemption-log
exemptions:
  - code: clock-backward
    file: scenes/chapter-04-scene-02.md
    reason: "Deliberate flashback to the 1921 wreck."
---

Always give the file (or the chapter) with the code, so a misdated scene elsewhere still shows up; story validate rejects an entry with only a code.

The flashback-as-tension-cheat warning

A flashback placed at a cliffhanger is a cheat: it pauses the present tension to spend cheaper past tension. Test every flashback placement:

• Does the present scene lose urgency because the flashback interrupts it? If yes, move the flashback earlier (plant the memory before the crisis) or later (let the memory arrive when the character is safe enough to have it).
• Does the flashback contain the actual stakes of the story? If the most dramatic events live in flashbacks, the story's timeline is wrong — the story should start later.

The legitimate use: a flashback that deepens the present stakes (the ambush matters more because we now know who taught her to fight) placed at a moment of relative calm, not at a cliffhanger.

Time skips

When the story jumps forward (days, months, years):

• Bridge with a single decisive detail — one line that shows what changed: "By spring, the orchard was a field of stumps." Not a summary paragraph of everything that happened.
• Update continuity/state.md for every skipped interval: character state, object custody, and knowledge that would have changed. Skips are where continuity errors breed.
• Update plot/timeline.md with the skipped period marked explicitly (Day 40 → Day 120: {what the skip covers}), so later agents don't assume nothing happened.
• Record the skip in the chapter frontmatter as time-skip: {from} → {to}.

Flashback discipline

• One flashback per chapter is plenty; two needs justification.
• Never open a chapter with a flashback (see openings.md — the first page must establish present-tense instability, not past context).
• A flashback longer than the present scene around it has become the real scene: rename it and restructure.
• Backstory delivered because "the reader should know" belongs in the character file, not on the page. Backstory delivered because the POV character needs it now to make their decision belongs in the sequel (see scene-sequel.md).