Flashback trouble

[the_wolfs_howl]

Okay, so I'm hoping to get some advice about a flashback I'm doing in a story.

See, most of the story happens in the "present time," but there's this really important stuff that happened to the main character several years before, which has vital impact on what's happening "now." So I was going to do a flashback. But this is a rather long flashback (the better part of a chapter, or possibly two chapters depending on where I break it up), so when I italicized it all to show the difference...that's a lot of italics. And I'm not sure it would work as a prologue, because the way it happens is the main character meets a guy she met years ago, which sparks the memory of this flashback, and then after the flashback's done there's a scene with them in "present time." So I'm not really sure it would work as a prologue and then the scene.

Anyone have some ideas? How do you do flashbacks?

[Esoteric]

For the longest time, I wasn't terribly clear on the fact that 'flashback' tends to refer specifically to someone's memories, and so by default they occur inside someone's head. This is what you're talking about, yes?

If the content of your flashbacks truly requires that much space, then yeah it's not advisable to insert it into a scene. Could you make it a separate chapter (which you've led up to in terms of relevance) with a time stamp to tell the reader this is taking place in the past, and have it not be so much a personal flashback, but just an external scene (like the rest of the book)? More like a small story within a story....

If you really want to keep it in the text as italics, you're going to need to boil it down to a few key bits of information woven into the text. This is far more economical, but more challenging to do well, and you'll have to be willing to sacrifice some details/let the reader surmise some stuff.

[FllMtl Novelist]

Depending on how much you need to tell about what happened in the past, you might be able to slip in enough details through dialogue, either between your protagonist and this man, or between your protagonist and some other character she might speak with about it (friend, relative?). Judging by what you've said, it doesn't seem likely you'll be able to use this, but I mentioned it anyway.

I think Esoteric has some good advice.

But instead of making it a whole new chapter, you might type "Seeing him triggered old memories...", then separate the flashback scene from the present day one by using either a couple asterisks (or some such thing), or just hitting enter twice before typing the flashback scene.

Whichever you do, though, I recommend doing after you've completed the first draft, so you don't get hung up on this one detail. ^^

[Lil_Ninja]

I've seen long flashbacks done very well in the Karen Kingsbury/Gary Smalley series.
She has the character thinking of the past event, and then it starts explaining in more detail about the event. The character would remember the conversations, and it would start playing it out as if it was happening again. The whole time the scene was playing out though, everything was explained in past tense so it was clear that it was a memory.
For example, she would have the character (lets say her name is Kari) think about the event and then she would write something like: Kari remembered how she had reacted to John's announcement that mid summer day. "It's not fair!" She had said, a hundred emotions assaulting her heart.
"But this is the way it has to be, Kari." John had replied, willing her to understand his position.
It was that moment that she had realized the truth of the situation, and for the rest of that summer, she had kept her distance from John.
But now, some odd years later, he had decided to finally confront her on what she had figured out those years ago.

Because the writer had the character remembering the event, and she used past tense to explain details, it wasn't necessary to use italics. Plus, if long scenes are done in italics, it looks overdone in most cases.

I hope that made sense to you! My explaining isn't the best, lol.
If anything, you could just look up the Redemption series by Kingbury and Smalley. She writes flashbacks a lot throughout the books.

[Midori]

Because the writer had the character remembering the event, and she used past tense to explain details, it wasn't necessary to use italics. Plus, if long scenes are done in italics, it looks overdone in most cases.

I think you mean past perfect tense. But I agree; having a whole page of italics is generally not a good idea. For letters and things, you usually indent them, but for long flashback sequences you either have to use past perfect like Lil_Ninja says or insert explicit notices in your story around it, something like: "Bob thought back to the first time he went fishing." and "Bob snapped back to present reality when the boat's engine turned off." Adding extra whitespace around the scene may also help in this case.

[the_wolfs_howl]

Thanks for your suggestions, guys! Don't worry, I'm not fiddling with it till I'm finished with the first draft, but I was thinking about it and decided I might as well get some input for future reference. I suppose the easiest way would be just to drop a line break, go "Three years ago..." and continue with the scenes. We'll see.