Dustin Hoffman as Michael Dorsey, the unsuccessful actor.
Though my last blog post talked about this, it wasn’t (of course) the last word on the topic! And I’ve thought of something I’d like to add. And that is: Don’t try to do too much at one time. If you’re not sure about certain plot developments — what they are, and what order they should come in — don’t also be fretting about details such as how you should present a scene or how much of a character’s psychology you should reveal. Stick to the basics, the current need-to-knows. And by that I mean not even what the reader might need to know, but what you the writer needs to know.
Michael Dorsey as Dorothy Michaels, the successful ‘actress’.
It’s really hard to make any progress if you’re foggy on plot or on character motivation. So before you try to hash out any other aspects of your story, get yourself clear on what happens. Split yourself mentally in two: half of you is going to provide answers, and the other half is going to ask questions. The half asking questions is going to say, at the start: Tell me what happens. Note that the question isn’t about anything else — it isn’t asking how your detective discovers what happens, or what the emotional consequences are for your characters, or how the dénouement comes about (for instance). We’re not at that stage yet. All that your questioning half wants to know is: what happens?
If your story is, say, Tootsie, then what happens is that an actor, getting all the worst jobs or no acting jobs at all, decides that he has to make a radical change if he’s going to keep going as an actor. What change does he make? He decides to audition for a part as a woman. How does he manage to audition for such a part? He applies for a role that his more nervous female friend didn’t get, and he gives himself a makeover so that the show will accept him as an actual woman. And so on. This isn’t about feelings as such, or personal interactions as such, or funny moments: it’s nuts and bolts. It’s one- foot-in-front-of-the-other stuff, without which you can’t get into the deeper, higher, funnier, more complicated stuff.
If you’ve got writer’s block and it just won’t budge, ask yourself: Do I know what happens?