There will be no zombie flashbacks

I meant to do a lot of things today - go to the gym, deal with some short film business, pay some bills, do some laundry - but right after I woke up I decided to start working on my rewrite of Not Dead Yet instead. So I ended up doing that pretty much all day because it was one of those situations where you get started and then you can't stop.

Like cleaning. You know how you decide to do the dishes, then you realize the floor is dirty, then you realize the bathroom is dirty, then you realize you hate the way the furniture is arranged?

No? Just me? Okay then.

It all started with the flashback. There are two characters who talk to each other via radio for a good three pages. It's an extremely important scene for exposition. I need these two characters, who have never met in person, to become close over this conversation. I also need to bring up the problems they're having in their respective relationships and explain how they got where they are now. So like I said, a really important scene.

For the first draft I did this through flashbacks. Yes, flashbacks, often the mark of a lazy writer. The characters tell each other stories of how they got there, and I was concerned that all that dialogue with no visual would get really boring so I popped in a flashback to give everybody something to look at.

Except you can't just have one flashback. So I had to go through the script and toss in a couple of other flashbacks. It wasn't hard and I actually felt a place where the flashback fit nicely.

But they still felt forced, and the best I could do was stick them in a couple of places. They didn't seem necessary.

Group agreed. They were not too terrible, but they didn't seem to add anything either. Take them out, they said.

So I yanked them. But then I had to figure out how to make my characters more interesting in their conversation over the radio.

I sat down and deleted the flashbacks then stared at my screen. And I let them talk. And I dropped the past. The story one of them tells in the flashback? I dropped it entirely from the script and considered it backstory. Instead I had one of them tell a joke that made the other one laugh, and that set off a series of jokes where instead of serious discussion about their problems, they told jokes that brought them together through humor. I managed to lighten the mood while bringing them together.

So when they finally meet in person they're happy to see each other and have an inside joke or several to share that nobody else understands.

You know that old lesson about flashbacks? How you shouldn't use them unless they're absolutely necessary? How telling your story without them makes it stronger?

Yeah.