What Is a Flash-Forward?
Quick answer: What is a flash-forward? A scene that jumps ahead of the story's present to show a future event, creating dread or anticipation. Definition, examples and uses.
A flash-forward is a scene that jumps ahead of the story's present to show an event from the future, then returns. Where a flashback answers how did we get here, a flash-forward asks how do we get there: it shows the reader a wedding, a courtroom, a burning house that the present-day characters have not yet reached. The device manufactures anticipation and dread, because every subsequent scene is read as a step toward the glimpsed future.
Flash-forwards are rarer than flashbacks and harder to justify, since a narrator who can show the future raises awkward questions about who is telling this story and when. Handled well, though, the device gives ordinary scenes a charged double meaning: the reader knows where the road ends, and the characters do not.
The longer answer: what showing the future does to a story
A flash-forward converts suspense from what will happen into how it will happen. Once the reader has seen the future funeral, the question is no longer whether someone dies but who, why and by what chain of choices. Many writers consider this trade a gain: how questions produce dread and attention to detail, while what questions produce page-flipping. Show the crash, and every seatbelt buckled or ignored becomes freighted.
The device also carries a claim of inevitability, which is why tragedy has always used its equivalent. When the future is shown, the story becomes fatalistic machinery, and readers watch characters make small free choices inside a fixed outcome. Some writers subvert the effect: the glimpsed future turns out to be partial, misleading or wrongly interpreted, so the flash-forward becomes a narrative trap rather than a promise.
Distinguish the true flash-forward, a scene from the story's own future that the narrative later reaches, from prophecy or vision inside the story world, which characters experience and may resist, and from the flash-forward's cousin, the flame-forward opening, where a story opens at its climax and then rewinds. The opening-at-the-end structure is really a frame built from a flash-forward, and it is the form most short fiction uses.
Where you have seen it done
Charles Dickens supplied the prototype in 'A Christmas Carol' (1843): the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge his own neglected grave, and the entire final act runs on the energy of a future glimpsed and refused. The story even keeps the escape hatch, since the vision is a warning rather than a verdict, which lets Dickens have his dread and his happy ending too.
Gabriel García Márquez opens 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' with one of the most quoted forward-leaning sentences in fiction, the colonel facing the firing squad while remembering a distant afternoon, a single line that holds future and past in one clause and sets the book's fatalistic clock. His 'Chronicle of a Death Foretold' goes further, announcing the killing on page one and spending the whole novel arriving at it.
On screen, 'Breaking Bad' made the cold-open flash-forward famous, teasing images of wreckage that whole seasons then explain. Television's habit of opening on the disaster and cutting to 'three weeks earlier' is the same architecture, and its overuse there is a caution for prose writers: the device dazzles, and dazzle dates quickly.
How to use a flash-forward in your own fiction
Decide first what the glimpse buys you. The strong justification is reframing: you want the reader to experience the coming scenes under a specific shadow, so ordinary moments read as causes. If you only want a hook, be honest about it, and make sure the story between the hook and its fulfilment can survive the raised expectation. A dazzling promised future that the middle cannot pay for is a loan at high interest.
Choose your grammar and placement deliberately. Prose flash-forwards commonly ride future-tense signposting, 'Years later, she would remember this kitchen', a construction narrators of retrospective stories can use freely because they already know the ending. Alternatively, open the story inside the future scene, cut back, and let the narrative climb toward it. Keep the glimpse partial: show the burning house but not who lit the match. The withheld detail is what powers the middle.
Then keep the promise honestly. When the story finally arrives at the glimpsed scene, it must match what was shown while meaning more than it did. Contradicting your own flash-forward without design reads as a cheat; fulfilling it with interest, the same image now fully understood, is one of the most satisfying clicks available in fiction, and structure judges score exactly that click.
Common mistakes with flash-forwards
The commonest failure is the unearned tease: opening on a spectacular future purely to disguise a slow first act. Readers feel the bait once the present-day story sags, and the borrowed excitement converts to resentment. Almost as common is over-revealing, a flash-forward so complete that the middle has nothing left to disclose; the glimpse should be a keyhole, not a window.
Writers also mismanage the logic of the teller. In a close first person past narrative, flash-forwards are natural, the narrator knows the future, but in tight third person present tense, a sudden leap ahead can feel like the author elbowing in. Match the device to a narrative stance that can plausibly hold it. Finally, resist multiple flash-forwards in short work; one promise, kept with interest, is worth five teasers.
What poets can take from this
- Use a flash-forward to change how scenes are read, not just to borrow excitement.
- Keep the glimpse partial; the withheld detail is the engine of the middle.
- Match the device to a narrator who can plausibly know the future, or use 'would' constructions.
- When the story reaches the glimpsed scene, fulfil it exactly and make it mean more.
- One flash-forward per short story; multiple teasers cheapen each other.
- If the middle cannot survive the raised expectation, fix the middle before adding the hook.
Try it yourself
Write a story that opens with a one-paragraph flash-forward: a character standing in the rain outside a hospital at 3 a.m., holding someone else's shoes. Cut back to the previous morning and write toward that image, making it mean something the opening paragraph could not have suggested.
Questions
What is the difference between a flash-forward and foreshadowing?
Foreshadowing hints at the future through mood, imagery or detail, a storm gathering, a knife mentioned. A flash-forward shows the future directly as a scene. Foreshadowing whispers; a flash-forward makes a promise the story must later keep on the page.
Can a short story open with its ending?
Yes, and it is a proven structure: open inside the climactic moment, cut back, and let the story climb toward it. It trades surprise for dread and works best when how it happened is richer than what happened.
Is a prophecy in a fantasy story a flash-forward?
Not strictly. A prophecy is an event inside the story world that characters hear and may resist or misread, while a flash-forward is a structural move by the narrative itself. Prophecies can lie; a true flash-forward, once shown, is a promise to the reader.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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