As a reader, I find few things as annoying as a protracted, slow-moving, data dump of a flashback. For me, flashbacks tend to halt the progress of the narrative — as in, I hear the sound of screeching tires right before the thing hits an immovable concrete wall. For this reason, early on in my writing, I committed to a zero tolerance policy when it comes to flashbacks.

I have recently become more tolerant. As I discussed in an earlier post, I now ascribe to an approach that uses flashbacks for instantaneous, intense illumination. While writing the Tracking Jane series, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to come to the decision fork: flashback or no flashback?

Why? Lucky me, my protagonist — who also happens to narrate the story in first person — is a veteran suffering from PTSD-induced flashbacks. This adds a separate challenge, that of the trigger. The present ongoings must provide a connected on-ramp for the flashback, and on the way out, an off-ramp to come back to the present.

This added challenge also represents an advantage. This type of flashback will naturally fall in the instantaneous and intense camp, with the added benefit of having a clear so-what attached to it. In other words, the reader won’t have to ask why the text has jumped into a flashback. She’ll know why the flashback is taking place, and why it matters — or more to the point, why it must happen.

Here’s an excerpt of a sample flashback of this type from my recently released, Rover, episode 2 of the Tracking Jane series.

I’ve seen this before. Not much to guess at here. We got us a suicide bomber.

I keep walking. With every step I tell myself I’m in Denver. In Denver, dang it, not over there with crazies blowing themselves up. But wherever I am, something inside me threatens to give way, again, for the thousandth time. I may be in Denver, but I’m still in this world, the one where people unleash unfathomable cruelty for reasons only they can convince themselves they understand.

I press on, past three more bodies and sundry body parts. On the walls below windows that no longer have glass, I see the embedded shrapnel. Nasty stuff from the looks of it, like thin, jagged slices of metal.

In the universe of flashbacks, that’s a pretty quick one. One, maybe two sentences, and yet I hope to give the reader the cues to see that the protagonist may be walking along here in Denver, but she’s flashing back to a place half around the world the whole time.

Here’s another example from the following chapter. Again, we see glimpses of the flashback rather than a long narrative off some past event.

He reaches out with his arm and points me to the staircase. “We got this.” He walks me to the door, opens it up for me, gentleman-like and adds, “You done good. No shame at all in stepping off. You did your job. Now we do ours.”

“Yeah, sure,” I say feeling awkward.

“And thank you for your service to our country. Now, get.”

I freeze for a moment, and I’m back somewhere else, in Iraq, where Shadow and I have just found a bomb, and some other guy is telling me to get the hell out of there. It ain’t right. It doesn’t feel like it, anyway, me leaving now, them having to face the bomb head on while I scurry away.

Nunez pushes me into the staircase, and that snaps me out enough to climb the steps, even if I’m shaking and sweating as I go.

There you have it. Sometimes it turns out that way, sometimes it’s a little more laborious. How do you like your flashbacks?