Exercise for the day, August 7: Fix

Well, my process kind of works sideways. I never really think about taking on an issue or writing about a certain thing. It’s more about trying to find a voice that is fun to do and in which I can feel some sort of power. . . And then at some point you look up and you’ve made a person, who is in a certain fix. . . 

—George Saunders

George Saunders is a popular author (once had an essay featured on a Chipotle bag) and a writer's writer (lots of us love hearing him talk about his process, as here). His approach is literary: humane, intuitive, exploratory, character-focused. All things that feel familiar from my years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. 

I was surprised and thrilled when, years later, I read my first book on screenwriting. The blunt talk about plots, the nuts and bolts of creating momentum and excitement, hooking the audience, controlling pacing, raising stakes . . . these were things we were practically forbidden to talk about in graduate school. Why? The emphasis there was on creating literature, on some kind of search for truth that could not be hemmed in by prescriptive approaches. 

But really, when you come down to it, all of us have to navigate the same waters. We all have to deal with art and craft, character and plot, logic and mystery, creation and revision. 

Anyway, there's a short, fun screenwriting book called Save the Cat by Blake Snyder which I refer to a lot in my classes. It's incredibly prescriptive. In Snyder's carefully laid out theory, your story must have a handful of specific beats, and there's an actual page number where each one has to occur. Everything can be neatly plotted out on index cards. Very comforting. Even though it's an illusion. Even though I know that in reality Snyder had to trek through the same swamps as the rest of us, his thoughts about plot can be very useful.

Here's an exercise I like to do in class:

Six things that need fixing. This is my phrase, six is an arbitrary number, that stands for the laundry list you must show — repeat SHOW — the audience of what is missing in the hero's life. Like little time bombs, these Six Things That Need Fixing, these character tics and flaws, will be exploded later in the script, turned on their heads and cured.  

—Blake Snyder, Save the Cat 

Take ten minutes and brainstorm about your main character at the beginning of your story. What, in their life, needs fixing? Or in Saunders' words, what kind of fix are they in?

Note: Brainstorming means you write down any crazy idea that comes along, even if it makes no sense. You can always cross them off later. Don't stop writing till the timer goes off.