You’re cruising along on schedule and then stuff happens. This morning I discovered someone had thrown a rock through the laundry room window. I called my AAA Glass & Mirror Repair people and they came out instantly and fixed it. But then I discovered another broken window in the bathroom on the second floor and got mad. I called the police –  who will be here soon. There’s not much to do with this experience except write out checks for glass repair.

But it got me thinking about our characters in fiction, and how we need to keep throwing things at them to see how they deal with unscheduled stuff – like rocks through windows. If you’re writing fiction have someone throw a rock through another character’s window. See what happens. It doesn’t even have to be part of your story (though it may turn out to be) but it’s an exercise to learn more about your characters – both the rock thrower and the person writing out the checks for repair. If you’re writing non-fiction, write about a time there was broken glass in your life.

As I write this post I realize I wrote about broken glass in A Year of Writing Dangerously (and also realize I seem to have a history of broken glass.)  Here’s the excerpt from the book written about four years ago:

124. Breaking Glass: Metaphor and Symbols

In the past two years I’ve had windows break in my house, my car, and my cabin. What does this mean? One was a weird fluke of wind that blew out a French door that then smacked into an outside light, shattering panes of glass. Another was caused when I clicked my garage opener at the wrong moment and the rear window of my car splintered; and the third was vandalism, a rock into my cabin window. I’ve cleaned up all this broken glass and discussed it with insurance companies, though I’m not sure where the metaphor of broken glass can go. But if I keep coming back to it, keep it in my head, it will eventually connect with something else. Metaphor is about connections, and that’s what writing is all about too, connecting the dots. Figuring it out, finding patterns, even in shards of glass. Or maybe all this glass is simply a symbol of fragility; nothing is safe. Or maybe it’s actually about windows.

Or maybe like Gertrude Stein’s rose, broken glass is broken glass is broken glass.

I never try to make metaphors. My flag is staked on the turf of the literal. Metaphors are things people make out of the literal stuff of life. They are abstractions. They are expressions of language which unite two otherwise disparate things.

— Richard Ford