It’s not often that I find I can start a post by saying that it was inspired by hearing Irene Cara singing “Flashdance … What a Feeling” on my car radio. But it’s true, although we’ll come on to the reason for that later. What I really want to talk about is problem solving in writing, and how the most creative thing that can sometimes happen to you as a writer is to get stuck, because it’s often how you get yourself out of a tricky situation that can be the difference between a dull piece and something that’s truly inspired.
A classic example of this is in Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” As you may remember, Adams – who was possibly the most disorganized writer of all time – ended the first episode of the original radio series with Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect being blasted into space with only seconds to live. It made for a fantastic cliffhanger ending, but it presented Adams with something of a problem, because he’d painted himself into a corner.
The problem was that any way of extricating his two heroes from this situation would be so improbable that it would immediately be dismissed as an amateurish “deus ex machina.” So what Adams did was to turn the problem on its head and invent something that relied on the very improbability of the situation. The resulting concept of the infinite improbability drive is possibly one of the most inspired ideas to have come out of speculative fiction in the late twentieth century.
Here’s another example. The writers of “Back to the Future”, Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis, made a problem for themselves when they decided that their two key characters were going to be a schoolboy and a mad professor. But here’s the conundrum: how on earth could they establish some kind of link between these two disparate characters? The solution was that classic opening sequence where Marty McFly breaks into Doc Emmett Brown’s lab, plugs his guitar into that massive speaker, turns the volume up to 11, plays a single chord and gets thrown right across the room.
And so we come to Irene Cara. As soon as the song came on the radio, I immediately thought of that wonderful sequence in the film “The Full Monty”, where they’re sitting down to watch “Flashdance” to pick up some dancing tips, and Mark Addy’s character misses the point entirely and starts complaining about the quality of Jennifer Beals’ welding. The joke is so perfect that I started to wonder if it contained a clue as to how the entire film came about. I have no idea if this is remotely true, but what if Simon Beaufoy, the writer, happened to watch “Flashdance” one day, and thought to himself: wouldn’t it be hilarious to do a film like “Flashdance” except set in England, and about a bunch of male steelworkers who took up dancing?
So let’s look at the problems that this implausible scenario presents, and how solving them might have created the movie. First of all, why do they take up dancing? Because they’re broke. Why are they broke? Because the steel industry’s collapsed (and already we’re getting a much richer concoction). But why would anyone pay to watch them dance? Because they’re really good? Nah. Won’t work. Because they’re going to do something special? Maybe. Like what, though? Stripping? And at that point, you have the bare bones of the entire film.
Now I’m only guessing that it happened like that. But it strikes me as highly plausible. So don’t run away from problems – seek them out. The solution that you come up with to get yourself out of a hole might just be the thing that takes you to a different level.
