Tag: Ideas

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Focus

I should know better.

But no, I go and brag about Things I Have Done and how a sweet idea just fell in my lap – and now I find myself standing in a growing pile of recycled A4 sheets peppered with handwriting. These aren’t notes on just that one project but (counts titles) – holy moley:

  • an opening for a one-act theatre monologue that’s all atmosphere and not a single word of dialogue;

  • an opening scene and some random character- and concept-notes for a TV drama;

  • pages of bullet points listing wants and not-wants for a feature;

  • a concept document and anaemic scriptment for a play;

  • and – oh yeah – pages and pages on that ‘sweet’ project.

And that’s not all. There’s more where those came from. I’m serious.

‘S nothing like the early-early-early days of development where the promise of the concept seems within easy reach and all those querulous voices in the back of your head are easily silenced with, She’ll be right.

I know.

I know.

I’ll choose one – the ‘sweet’ proj’, natch – to actually write. With another project as a fallback. And another to develop in between times.

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Making Stuff Up

Nothing can surpass Alan Moore’s description of where ideas come from in his ‘Behind the Painted Smile’ article that accompanies the V for Vendetta trade paperback. The boys at How to Write Screenplays – Badly have an outrageous methodology which is just begging to be taken up en masse.

But for me, it usually starts with ‘what if?’

What if a bunch of ninjas were to arrive in some suburban kitchen, intent on silent death, but are thwarted by a teenage girl and her grandfather?

What if our story starts with some crazy-eyed guy running down city streets, going faster and faster, until he dead-ends in an alley… and his gasps for breath turn into sobs of despair?

What if… yeah, you know the drill.

For every idea that I explore, countless others don’t make it onto the page. There’s any number of reasons why they don’t get used: it’s a cliché; I’m being lazy (and I know I’ll pay for it later in the story); I’m being wanky; it adds nothing to the story; and whatever other reason I make up at the time.

The cliches and stereotypes I try to forget wholeheartedly. The straight-up stupid ones do a fancy dance and flash a bit of leg before they’re exposed to be straight-up stupid ideas.

And the rest of them, including homage-worthy situations, conventions, archetypes and stereotypes, they go into a holding pattern, waiting for a story for which they’d be the perfect ingredient.

And a few of those morph into ‘what if?’-type ideas. At first they’re patient, pacing back and forth, unwilling to be ignored, until some other ideas attach themselves, elevating their combined mass into A Story.

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