Thread: When scene breaks become vague, what to do?

Hi fellow writers. I have a question that's been bugging me.


When we show scene breaks in manuscript formatting, we use a # with a line of space above and below it. While it's very clear how we are to use such a scene break normally when we have distinct changes in location or time, there are situations where I'm not sure if a scene break is necessary.


For example, what happens when you have a scene such as:


A girl is alone in a room, pacing around, waiting for a boy. She thinks about the object he's supposed to bring back to her, and a few paragraphs explains the history of her relationship with the object and why it's so important to her. Then, the focus is back to her in the room, still waiting.


Now, this is where things get a bit tricky. While the detour of explaning the history of her relationship with the object is fairly short (a few paragraphs), and the switch back to her in the room is smooth enough to not require any scene breaks, the next one is a bit different.


Next, I describe how the girl's stomach is feeling heavy from the junk food she ate that evening, and this starts a 2-page flashback describing how her father's unhealthy eating habits have been a source of headache for the girl all her life. Because he controls her life, she has to eat whatever unhealthy junk he buys or starve, since she's only a child and has no way of getting food herself. After the flashback, I switch back to the girl in the room again, still waiting for the boy, but it feels a bit disjointed, as if there should be a scene break before returning to the girl in the room.


So what is the normal convention when it comes to formatting long flashbacks or detours such as elaborating on a character's relationship with another? Should they be formatted as separate scenes with scene breaks, or do they stay inside the scene that sparked the flashback/detour, and when resuming the present scene, you just continue normally by starting a new paragraph, without any scene breaks?

Thank you for the reply. Did you have an answer for my question regarding usage of scene breaks for flashbacks though?

The reason why I do long flashbacks in this particular book is because the timeline jumps around quite a bit. There's the present timeline that continues moving forward through an entire person's life from puberty to old age. There's also the flashbacks telling the stories that happened right before the present timeline began in the book.

The approach you took, which was to work past information casually into the present timeline, while works for more mainstream commercial fiction, I'm afraid it might feel a bit too slick for a more introspective approach. In this story, I delve into the girl's inner struggles and how she deals with her father's eating habits and how it constantly makes her feel like she's not going to make it through puberty properly due to lack of nutrition. She worries that she'll not end up tall enough, strong enough, smart enough.

I can't really work that kind of inner thought into just typical conversation with another character, nor can I "show" it instead of "tell" it since to write that particular past history between the father and daughter would take too long and screw up the pacing. Essentially, the food thing is just the tip of the iceberg. Later we learn there's also cruelty and violence, and things just get darker and darker.

I have one, don't use them. There are two main types of flashbacks, ones that are snippets that go right into the narrative:
She remembered years ago the time she had first found the necklace, and how much she loved it. When would he get here with it?
This is a small bit of information from the past that could have another line or two, but is quick and provides a brief bit of background on something. They do well because if used the way they are intended, they don't distract the reader from what is going on but adds a bit of background that is brief enough to not interrupt the flow.

The full blown, going back in time to dish out things that happened in some prior time, flashbacks are used all to often. Done well they can be ok, but too often they are used as a form of info dumb that is usually just dull. I think the fact you don't like how it flows is a good indicator that you need to drop the flashback and move on with the story. Details should be blended into the story over dumped out into places...like flashbacks...to break the flow of the story completely.

Yes, flashbacks have been used in good ways by many authors, but flashbacks should never be a first choice, and if you are doing on in the first two pages, you need to fix your beginning.

One other minor point, if you plan on preaching the evils of junk food, remember that to get an upset stomach, you have to over indulge in most of them (I speak from experience). So if your main character is overindulging and then preaching, you'll lose most of your readers very fast.

Thank you for the reply. That still doesn't answer my question about proper usage of scene breaks involving long flashbacks. I'm asking a simple technical question regarding formatting, not one about whether long flashbacks are appropriate for this particular story (though I appreciate the comments).

Short of posting the actual outline/synopsis, I can't fully explain why the multiple timeline approach has to work the way it does in this book, and why specific flashbacks are important. If you start the story when a character is 12 yrs-old, and you want to fill in on the history of her father and mother, why the mother left, and why the father is abusive, then all of that are technically flashbacks, especially if the main current story is the relationship between the girl and a boy, and how the boy fits into her current life. The boy has his own past too that needs to be uncovered, and while some of it could be conveyed during conversations between the two children, not all of it should be--that's where the flashbacks are used.

As for the junk food bit, it's not about preaching--it's about her obsession with being healthy and feeling oppressed by her father's lifestyle choice. He shops for the groceries and she has to eat what he buys (and he seems to only buy unhealthy food), for she is only a child and has no say in the matter. She's anxious that she's not getting enough nutrition for proper development through her puberty. That's the point. It's about fear, helplessness, and insecurity.

I've seen a long flashback done in a novel, and it was done as its own separate chapter (not the 1st chapter).

EDIT: double post

BTW, I don't know if you guys have read The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, or Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg, but those two books are similar to what I'm talking about. There's a present timeline that moves forward, but there are lots of flashbacks to what happened prior to the beginning of the book, and they are vital to the story because they are the emotional backbone of the entire narrative.

If Smilla's Sense of Snow didn't have all those flashback memories of her relationship with the little boy, or her memories of her mother, or her father's love for her mother, then the novel would have been just a standard sci-fi thriller.


If The End of the Affair didn't have the flashbacks of their entire relationship, then the present timeline wouldn't matter at all, because the point of the narrative is riding on whether the reader can find out why she seems to be betraying him, and the flashbacks are the only real clues that are helpful.

There's no reason a lengthy flashback has to be an info dump or set off as separate chapter -- and there's no reason to avoid them. They simply need a device to shift the time frame. Anything after that can include all the elements that make for interesting reading -- action, dialog, description etc. and then another device to shift the time to the "present."

Rather than get hung up on a lot of advice, you're better off considering the examples you've cited -- thinking those through and then trying it your own way.

I just found an example in Kathryn Harrison's The Binding Chair, where she had a character on a train writing a letter, and then get into her past with her brother's tragedy and her father's cruelty, and then when shifting back to the present, a scene break was used.

That’s a more obvious device, and it sure sounds like something that could work. Sometimes it can be something simple like, “Fred first met Lisa in the cafeteria on his first day at the University.” And that launches you into the flashback.

Very often, the answers are on your bookshelf. It’s fine to ask for advice, but when people start to prioritize solutions as one being the best way etc. -- or if they use the word "never" -- take it with a grain of salt. Especially when in the next breath they say something like, “it can be done well, but…” That’s actually the bit you should focus on. Why limit yourself?