I broke my ankle a year or so ago, so I ended up in the gym after six weeks of going crazy at home. I don’t tend to watch TV or music videos, but I happened to be on the stair-master one morning when this video caught my eye.

Now music videos are directed like movies, little 3-minute movies. It’s just like a short story or an essay. The producer (or is it the director?) has to capture meaning in a very few frames. Everything shown on the screen must count.  Everything has to serve one or more purposes.

What caught my interest were the individual scenes that were glued together in a “framed” timeline. We enter the scene at the highest emotional state, then we go back in time to learn what happened, how we got to this stage. Finally, we end with the punch: the death of this loved one. We don’t start at the beginning and move sequentially in time to the end.

Each of these scenes is like a Lego block. The editor could have stuck them together any number of ways.

What would happen if you started thinking of your writing project in terms of Lego blocks, little bricks that could be stuck together in an assortment of ways?

Think of a Lego block as one scene, one vignette, one backstory.

After all, only after you have enough of these bricks can you build a chapter, then a section, then a book.

Often, when we’re working on a book, we tend to get caught up with the timeline. We tend to write sequentially: first this happened, then this, then this. And because we’re so busy trying to move along the timeline, we throw in stuff that doesn’t need to be there, stuff that’s merely filler. Our audiences don’t want extraneous material either. They want everything to count.

I invite you to free yourself up by thinking of your scenes like individual bricks. Bricks that can be put together in all sorts of weird ways along the timeline. Just like the producer did in this music video.

Go MTV. Way to teach a lesson. And one more reason to explore other mediums to snag great ideas for your writing.