Ideas are not precious
Many writers, aspiring and otherwise, will say, “I had an idea for a story, but then someone else stole my idea.” This usually means that someone else produced something similar—not that the idea was literally stolen, but that someone else had a similar enough idea that my idea seems redundant now. I find this particularly interesting: an idea can be so precious that we think of it as “stolen,” but also so commonplace that two people can have the same idea without ever talking to one another.
Getting a great idea for a story is exciting. It feels precious. And yet you haven’t “gotten” anything—no one comes up with an idea for a story. They just arrive. Sometimes it seems a certain idea’s time has come, and everyone seems to have the same idea at once. In some way, every idea is “stolen,” as all our stories are variations and elaborations on stories we’ve heard or seen told before. A producer once told me, when I asked her what makes a script attractive to her to produce, that you want the idea to be 15% new. The rest should be something we immediately recognize, something familiar.
Two problems I hear from writers, especially aspiring writers, are that either they don’t have any ideas or that they have too many ideas and they don’t know which one to work on. I think these are really the same problem. They don’t know what would be a good idea for a story. First of all, it’s important to say that a good idea for a story is one that grabs you. It’s the idea you keep thinking about. And a good idea for a story probably includes a main character that’s meaningful to you, and you have some idea how it begins and how it ends. Maybe you don’t know how it starts or how it ends but you know a fair amount about the middle. This is great. If you just have an idea for the beginning of the story and you don’t know much about the main character or how it ends, it might not really be a story yet. It might just be an idea, and not all ideas are stories. They can become stories, but stories often start out as an image, or a question, or an idea for an interesting scene. An idea for a scene is not necessarily an idea for a story, but the one can come out of the other.
So it’s important to know the difference between a story and an image, and it’s important to know what grabs you, what makes you want to write. But other than that, we don’t necessarily know in advance what’s a good idea for a story. We often don’t even know after we’re done writing the screenplay. We don’t know even while we’re making a movie. Evidence indicates that while they were making the movie Jaws, their main concern was whether the movie would be acceptable. Not whether it would be the greatest movie of all time. They didn’t want people to think it was ridiculous. They were afraid it would be embarrassing. They were worried they wouldn’t be able even to finish the movie, that they wouldn’t have anything worth showing. They were rewriting the script the whole time they were shooting. One of the actors wrote his own monologue because none of the writers working on the script was doing a good enough job. This was an adaptation of a hit novel—they knew it was a good story, but they still didn’t know whether they would tell it well. Some people consider Jaws one of the greatest films ever made, but they didn’t know that at the time. They just hoped it wouldn’t be a disaster. Telling the story well is easier when you have a good idea, but it’s not guaranteed. Having a good idea for a story is helpful, but it’s just the beginning.
One of the exercises I have used when trying to generate ideas for a screenplay is to come up with 100 ideas for a screenplay. Write them down, one after another. Each one should be no more than a sentence or two. It can be something simple: Dog turns into a human, falls in love. Sad ending. That’s an idea for a story. The story has a main character with a problem to solve, and I have some idea how it ends. There’s more work to do, certainly, but it’s an idea for a story. Now come up with 99 more. They can be a bit more involved than that example, but the point is to get the ideas down, one after another—not to flesh them out or judge whether they’re any good. For some people this exercise seems impossible, but try it. Maybe you only make it to 20 before you give up. That’s still 20 ideas for a story.
The point of the exercise is to take away the fear and anxiety around getting ideas. There are enough ideas. We aren’t running low. When you finish the exercise, do not go back and search the list of ideas like you are searching the surface of the ocean for a whale. Put the list away. Go to a museum and look at art. Go to a movie. Spend time with people you love. Spend time with people who irritate you. They are the same people. You are surrounded by the stuff stories are made of.
Then wait to see what grabs you. Something will. And start writing.
