Flashbacks

Do you use flashbacks to inform your readers of important or relevant information about your characters or the plot?

I have recently finished watching Better Call Saul on Netflix. What an amazing story and piece of television! It would be so easy to spend all this post, and every other post, extolling the virtues of the acting, writing and directing of this six-season epic. But, to stick to the point of this post, in the TV episodes they start each with a short scene which might or might not be relevant to the main episode about to play out. Sometimes these little scenes are flashbacks or flashforwards which explain why or how a character arrived at the present point in their development or at a certain point in the storyline, or how things may work out in the future. The one that springs to mind is where we go back and see Saul with his brother Charles at their mother’s deathbed. Saul goes out to get coffee and while away his mother regains consciousness and calls out for Jimmy (Saul…long story). She dies before Saul/Jimmy gets back and when he asks Charles if she said anything before passing away, his brother says she didn’t. It reveals a great deal about the brothers’ relationship which is one of the main cruxes of the whole story.

So, the reason I write this post is to think about whether I, you, we, as writers can use the same device to fill in detail about our characters. Other ways would be to tell the entire story in chronological order, or have a character describe what happened in the past. Both seem potentially long-winded and not very exciting. I guess the key is to not have too many flashbacks otherwise the reader may get lost with or not remember all the new information being given to them.

And, of course, what works successfully on TV might not flow so well on paper.

And how do you format the flashback? In italics? In separate mini chapters? With a big FLASHBACK heading?

Anyway, I am trying the idea with my current piece of writing and will probably only see their worth once I finish enough to see their effect when read together with the main story.

Any thoughts?