{"id":16,"date":"2006-11-24T00:00:01","date_gmt":"2006-11-23T12:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/?p=16"},"modified":"2012-07-27T13:26:32","modified_gmt":"2012-07-27T01:26:32","slug":"making-stuff-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/making-stuff-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Stuff Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> trade paperback. The boys at How to Write Screenplays – Badly<\/a> have an outrageous methodology<\/a> which is just begging to be taken up en masse<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But for me, it usually starts with ‘what if?’<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

What if… yeah, you know the drill.<\/p>\n

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 clich\u00c3\u00a9; 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And a few of those<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Making Stuff Up”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[285,116,296],"class_list":["post-16","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scriptwriting","tag-how-to-write-screenplays-badly","tag-ideas","tag-v-for-vendetta"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2667,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions\/2667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}