Missing Missing Missing

I had a boss when I worked in advertising who used to call together the Creative Group (four two-person teams of copywriter and art director) just before he would submit a pitch or proposal to a client.

He would pin the ads and TV storyboards to the wall and ask the group, “What’s missing, missing, missing?”

(I’m not sure why he repeated the word three times. Maybe it was an ad slogan from an earlier era.)

What was interesting was there always WAS something missing. Often, a lot of somethings.

Maybe we’d forgotten a “call to action” in a TV commercial … or we’d failed to justify a claim in a print ad.

But always there was something. When we got it fixed, we’d all go, “Whew! Glad we didn’t send this stuff out the way it was.”

I perform this same drill now … for fiction or nonfiction. 

As I write this, I’m finishing a first draft of a novel. It’s still raw as hell but the basic elements are there (I think.)

Just this week I read it all over, asking myself, “What’s missing, missing, missing?”

Sure enough, there was a lot.

What I’ve found with fiction is what’s usually missing is the Deep Stuff. “What does this all mean?” “What’s the metaphor?” “What’s the theme?”

I ask myself, “What scenes am I missing?” “Am I missing an entire sequence?” “An entire act?”

One exercise that helps every time is I’ll draw a diagram of all the major characters and ask myself, “Does each character have at least one scene with every other character?” Or “Am I missing moments with three or four characters together?”

Maisie Williams as Arya Stark in “Game of Thrones”

One of my favorite scenes (actually four or five together) in Game of Thrones was when Tywin Lannister, the big bad patriarch, took on thirteen-year-old Arya, one of the daughters of his arch-rival family, the Starks, as his personal servant and wine-pourer. Tywin had no idea who Arya was (he thought she was the child of a stonemason) but she knew him … and more than once had a knife in her hand, waiting for the chance to have a go.

This was a great pairing of wildly disparate characters that could easily have never even been thought of by the writers. Did somebody ask, “What’s missing, missing, missing?”

It helps!

The post Missing Missing Missing first appeared on Steven Pressfield.