According to Steven Spielberg the structure of a 3-act drama goes like this: in act one you get her up a tree, act two you throw rocks at her. Act three is getting her down from the tree. I’ve never had a great pitching arm and, maybe consequently, I don’t like throwing rocks. Particularly at my main character, whom I adore. It’s mean. And I’ve really struggled in the past with maiming my heroes and heroines who never did anything to deserve it. I’ve come to realize what’s really at the crux of this fear is . . . I don’t want anyone throwing rocks at me.
Nobody likes to be in act two of their own drama. Act two sucks when you’re the main character.
I had never changed a tire prior to last summer. The offending tire with the screw in its heart was sitting, attached to its mother Prius, in my driveway. I could have waited for my husband to get home—he’d changed plenty of tires before—but a big part of me wanted to know if I could do it on my own. And at the house seemed fairly low risk a setting in comparison to, say, a freeway—both on the embarrassment and danger scale.
It was disastrous. I did not install the jack properly and at one point the conniving little Prius hopped right off of it, leaving me with a very lopsided three-legged beast of a problem. I watched all the wrong YouTube videos only to discover later that the owner’s manual really is the best go-to in this situation. Not one, but two neighbors on their morning walks mentioned to me that I ought to be able to call AAA for help while observing me in my struggle. There were things I didn’t know that I had to figure out, and not everything went my way, but when I was done, and I’d successfully traveled—on the freeway—to the tire center unscathed on my one-man hack job, I was proud of myself. And what’s more is the next time something on the car needed fixing, I knew I could do it. Still wasn’t perfect at it, but I messed up less. Doing hard things increases our capacity to do other hard things. And that’s what builds character, both in fiction and in reality.
The whole point of a novel is that your character experience growth between page 1 and page 301. If we don’t do the hard things, which requires a pelting of rocks along the way, then what’s the point of act three?
