Reader Question: What about a flashback as a ‘flashpresent’?

An open forum question via email from Raag Harshavat:

Thanks for the blog, it has been helping a lot. I have a question if you are able to get to it. I am writing a script now and I have an flashback sequence to the characters experience in the war that I am trying to implement as the b-story throughout the second act. Maybe I have just been watching too much Lost, but I was wondering if there is anything severely wrong or dangerous with trying to convey theme and character transformation through flashback. I have pieced together that it is important to treat flashbacks as “flash presents,” as mentioned by Syd Field (http://www.writersstore.com/article.php?articles_id=926). I was wondering if you had any thoughts about this structural decision?

Raag, not knowing the specifics of your story and just speaking theoretically, my short answer to your question is no — there is nothing inherently wrong with conveying theme, character transformation, or anything else through flashbacks. Flashbacks are merely a narrative device. If you write them well, that’s a good thing. If you execute them poorly, that’s not so good.

But while we’re here, let’s take a look at flashbacks as discussed by Syd Field in the Writers Store article you referenced. After giving an historical perspective of film and how flashbacks have changed — from the lengthy Paris sequence in Casablanca to the shard-like quick cuts of The Bourne Identity — Field gets into this:

Which raises the question, when is it appropriate to use a flashback in the storyline? I hear this all the time in many of the workshops and seminars I conduct around the world. When does it work the best and when is it the most effective?

Flashbacks are a tool, a device, where the screenwriter provides the reader and audience with visual information that he or she cannot incorporate into the screenplay any other way. The purpose of the flashback is simple: it is a technique that bridges time, place and action to reveal information about the character, or move the story forward.

Field raises an important point here that I think goes a long way toward helping writers use flashbacks effectively: Grounding the narrative device in character.

Flashbacks are really a function of character, not story. Waldo Salt, great screenwriter of Coming Home and Midnight Cowboy, told me that he thought a flashback should be thought of as a “flashpresent,” because the visual image we’re seeing is what the character is thinking and feeling at that present moment, whether a memory, or fantasy, or event; a flashpresent, he remarked, is anything that illuminates a character’s point of view. Take a look at the hockey scene in the first Act of The Lookout. What we see in flashback is shown through the eyes of the character, so we’re seeing what he or she is seeing, thinking or feeling in present time, at this particular place or time. The flashpresent is anything we see the character thinking and feeling in the present moment, whether a thought, dream, memory, or fantasy, for time has no constraints or limits. In the mind of the main character there is no time and the flashpresent could be a particular moment in the past or present, perhaps even the future.

That feels right to me — and I like this articulation of flashpresent because it forces the writer to focus the flashback on the character’s experience, not the plot which is where writers tend to get into trouble:

Many times, a writer throws a flashback into the screenplay because he or she doesn’t know how to move the story forward any other way. Sometimes, the screenwriter decides to show something about the main character that could be better stated in dialogue, and, in that case, the flashback only draws attention to itself and becomes intrusive. That doesn’t work.

If, however, we write a flashback with the character clearly in mind — their experience of a flashback or flashforward in the moment as a flashpresent — then we (A) provide illumination to the reader about the character, (B) make the moment personal, and © ground the narrative device in the character’s emotional reaction to it, all while moving the plot forward.

In a way, this seems obvious, right? But maybe so obvious that we sometimes overlook it in our writing.

So to restate the takeaway: If you use a flashback or flashforward, be sure to ground the writing of it in the character’s experience — a flashpresent — not just as a narrative device to move the plot forward. And to the original question, you can use flashbacks to do anything — as long as you execute them well.