Developing Story Ideas Read online

  You and Your Resources: Novice writers often humbly assume that nothing has happened to them worth writing about, and so they emulate the ideas and styles of favorite writers. But this is working from the outside inward and leads to paralysis.

  You think you have nothing yet to write about? I disagree. Directly or indirectly, you have experienced victory, defeat, love, hate, being thrown out of Eden, death—everything. Thus, what you lack is not dramatic experience, but knowing how to recognize, value, and shape it.

  A key lies in what Herman Melville called “the shock of recognition,” those moments of piercing clarity when a special truth or meaning has risen up to hit you between the eyes. This book shows where to look for these and what to do with them when you find them.

  Other people are an important part of your resources. Classmates or other writers in a writers’ group are part of your support system, and you are part of theirs. It is important to get collective as well as individual responses to your work.

  With collaboration in mind, the first assignment concerns role-playing and is an excellent icebreaker. One or two rounds of this assignment at each meeting will let each class member’s individuality emerge. Although described in a class setting, it can take place in practically any gathering or group.

  Assignment 1–1: Who Am I?

  A class member becomes the focus of the class’s attention as he or she impersonates someone especially important (the “model”) whose identity remains undisclosed.

  Step 1: When your turn comes, carry an object associated with your model, or wear an article reminiscent of his or her favorite clothing, and sit in front of the class ready to answer questions.

  Step 2: For perhaps ten minutes your audience poses probing questions to find out about you. Staying in character, you respond to their questions from your sense of your model’s history and in his or her mood and manner. The object is twofold: That you “become” your model and answer truthfully and in character wherever the questioning leads.

  That the audience finds out all they can and develops ideas about the model’s significance and relationship to you, the actor who reincarnates the model.

  Step 3: After ten to twenty minutes of interaction, the class leader calls “Cut,” and the interviewee now listens to a discussion in which the audience: Collectively reviews their impressions,

  Guesses at the kind of person portrayed, and

  Decides the likely relationship between actor and model.

  This exercise is excellent for group bonding, and can reveal unexpected depths in participants, no matter how inexperienced. One performance in a workshop I gave in Norway was electrifying: Svein, a man of around thirty, played a quiet, reticent woman whose life contained a traumatic secret. When “she” referred to “my son” we guessed he was playing his late mother, and the room seemed to fill with the gravity and sadness of her ghostly presence. Obliquely, his mother’s life-tragedy emerged: during Norway’s occupation in World War II, when Svein’s mother was a young single woman, she had fallen in love with a German officer. He was killed or otherwise lost to her, and afterward she was cruelly shunned as a collaborator. The experience left her scarred and stigmatized, and (as I privately guessed) her son too.

  Few “Who Am I” exercises reach this haunting degree of authenticity, but most are intense and keep the class rapt. Usually a class can handle only one or two performances per meeting.

  Ideation and Originality

  Most writers agree that the single prerequisite to becoming a writer is to keep writing, no matter what. Talent is a myth in which few working writers believe. They will tell you that most ideas are initially banal and similar, and that one has to work incrementally and patiently toward originality. It’s not about going where no man hath trod, but rather about working tenaciously at realizing all aspects of an idea’s potential. Because so little is evident at the outset, many beginners hurry forward to write their “finished” version, thinking that problems will vanish during completion. They do vanish—but only from sight.

  Ideation should include finding and developing all the events and ideas that underpin a creative endeavor. Like a building’s foundation, a good story idea must be singularly appropriate for what it must support.

  To test how far any idea has evolved, pitch it to anyone who’ll listen. From the teller-and-audience experience, you will sense the next round of necessary improvements. Keep pushing: tenacity never goes unrewarded.

  Writing in Outline Form

  Nearly everything you write for this book’s assignments will be in scene-outline form, which is good for everyone. By concentrating on action and plot details, and leaving dialogue and mood-setting elements for a later stage, ideas stay compact, quick to read, and easy to modify. Outlines also make a great foundation for developing pitches.

  As you learn ever more about the potential of your story idea, an outline is easily changed, and your improvements show up quickly and clearly. When several audiences find the whole of your outline uniformly promising and persuasive, you can turn to expanding it into a short story, novel, play, film—whatever narrative form you have in mind.

  Identifying with the Main Character

  Many beginners identify wholly with their protagonist, who just happens to share their age, gender, background, and outlook. This is dangerous because the writer is enclosed by the thoughts, feelings, and outlook of their protagonist and lacks critical distance. Inevitably, audiences see flaws in their work that the author cannot, and the author may take criticism as a personal attack.

  How, then, to create a range of believable characters, people unlike yourself, when in life we never wholly enter another person’s reality? Whether you are a friend, relative, or bystander, you often sense other people’s interior feelings and motivations. To paraphrase the acting teacher Constantin Stanislavski, “There is no interior human state without its exterior manifestation.”2 The actor’s job, and the writer’s too, is to discover those particular actions that open windows on a person’s heart and mind. Your job is to provide what encourages us to interpret what your characters feel and want, and to make us intuit their thoughts and motives. By creating characters we see more through their actions than their words, you endow them with truly revealing circumstances and behavior. Actions, they say, speak louder than words.

  Jump-Starting the Imagination

  Imagination, like an old car, does not work well from a cold start. It prefers jump-starting from examples and associations. This book’s practical assignments will show how naturally writing flows when you work from life or play improvisational games. Through completing assignments you will confirm the nature of your artistic self through pursuing the artistic process—that is, making art as you alone can make it. For this, paradoxically enough, you will need help from your peers. An important part of writing—one many writers delay—is showing it to others for their reactions. The secretive writer is the fearful writer who won’t show work until it is “finished.” This delays the imagined pain of criticism, but also defers the object and gratification of all artistic endeavors—acting upon your audience and considering all the ways they react.

  Concerning the Writing Samples and Critiques in Chapters 13–21

  While you read and absorb the first dozen chapters, be ready to jump straight into the early writing assignments in Chapters 13–15. Each asks that you develop an idea for a story in outline, one ready for discussion. You should find their methods uncomplicated and their demands straightforward. Further development would take place at a later date, after you choose whether to expand your idea into literary fiction or nonfiction, film, theatre, or broadcast media. Good story cores work in multiple platforms.

  Accompanying the assignments are student samples from a New York University film school class. These not only allow me to discuss the ideas and principles covered in Chapters 1–12, but in the context of actual student writing. Should you need alternative approaches or further information, many chapters ha
ve alternative assignments and/or a select bibliography appended under the rubric, “Going Further.”

  Enjoying Your Audience’s Reactions

  Using today’s resources, you can e-mail outlines to interested friends around the globe and get feedback almost immediately. When your critics apply the tools of dramatic analysis to your work, and you apply them to theirs, you get important practice at discerning the balance and interaction of story elements. This helps to reveal each tale’s optimal identity, effectiveness, balance, and meaning. If you are lucky enough to be part of a writers’ group or class, the mood while doing this work is usually one of excited enjoyment. What can be more convivial than making discoveries together?

  An Important Reminder

  Whenever you write, try to create freely and analyze later. During composition, use any and every writing method that lets you play freely. Grant yourself freedom to generate material and ideas any way possible, for your mind won’t work freely if you let it be a censor. Wear but one hat at a time; don’t let your growing critical knowledge trample your instincts and personal voice. You can sit, stand, lie down, or float in the bath; you can write at the computer, scribble in an exercise book, talk into a recorder, or mumble to your granny. Revel in the chaos that the improvising author produces. Afterward, move into editorial mode, organize and refine what you have produced.

  Do read ahead to see where the work is leading. A book has to present things in linear form, but learning and creating is circular, with many repeats and returns.

  Starting Your Resource Collections

  Each chapter brings new work, so make an early start at collecting writers’ resources:

  Picture File: Save any imagery that strongly appeals to you from the Internet, magazines, or newspapers. A powerful inspiration can come from a war photograph, a human interest portrait, a silly fashion ad, or a fabulous landscape.

  Dream Journal: This, used for the Dream Sequence project, is private and something you keep at home. Place a notebook and pen by your bed and write down your dreams as they occur. By the way, when you wake up and recall a dream, lie very still until you have retrieved all you can. Often you start with just a remembered fragment, but from quietly contemplating it, more will return, and more still until you have a complete record, which you write in your journal. Before you go to sleep, you can train yourself to wake up and record a good dream by telling yourself, “If I have a good dream, I’ll wake up and write it down.” Keep up the self-instruction nightly until you awake spontaneously.

  News File: Save good news stories in a folder for use in the News Story and Documentary projects. For projects that do not depend on being current, go through old magazines and papers, because there you’ll find old material that no one else will think of using. A fantastic source of free newspapers and magazines is a recycling center. Most fiction ideas start from actuality, and old actuality is as good as new.

  Writer’s Journal: Keep a small notebook with you at all times to record the thoughts, sights, or ideas that spontaneously appear in daily life. Recording the actual is your apprenticeship in observing life more closely and astutely.

  Making records and squirreling away whatever attracts your notice is a quintessential writer’s habit. If you are using this book in a class, your instructor may ask to see your Writer’s Journal at set times during the course. In the future, time spent traveling, waiting around, eating, or even sleeping (if you dream) can always be turned to good account.

  Figure 1–1 A typical CLOSAT card, this one for a character.

  Preparing for the Game Called CLOSAT

  Your journal notes are your bank of ideas, and the best will become playing cards for a fabulous instant story-making game in Chapter 5 called “CLOSAT.” To play it, mount your best observations on index cards as in Figure 1–1. Ronnie is a character, so he’s coded C. To make items in your journal accessible by type, tag each with these CLOSAT categories:

  C = description of Characters who could be used in a story.

  L = interesting and visual Location.

  O = curious or evocative Object.

  S = loaded or revealing Situation.

  A = unusual or revealing Act.

  T = any Theme that intrigues you, or that you see embodied in life.

  Definitions and Examples

  C (character) is anyone whose appearance, mannerisms, occupation, or activities suggest potential for a character in a story. You might see somebody momentarily in the street and discover that their image persists afterward, or you might sit down to distill all you know about an acquaintance of many years. The characters you “collect” become your repertory cast, whose potential depends on the resonances you uncover as you start working with them. You may decide they are major protagonists or only bit-part players. Some people will be unlike anyone you have ever seen before, but many will be types. You know a type-description is good when it summons a smile of delighted recognition from listeners. The examples here are brief thumbnail descriptions.

  Character Examples:

  Ruddy-faced factory maintenance man with a little pug dog as his companion.

  Rapt little black girl with tongue out as she reads.

  Man and woman biker couple with identical gray ponytails.

  Woman whose yellow running outfit makes her look like a pantomime chicken.

  L (location) is any place that makes a rich setting for something to happen. Often characters and places go together, but it can be interesting to shake things up and make your runaway urban teenager hide from the law in a smelly chicken farm, or pressure your wan bank clerk into proving himself on a doomed Russian trawler.

  Location Examples:

  Harbor bridge with a single street lamp.

  Run-down stationery store.

  Attic room with a grubby, unmade bed.

  Country garage with yellowing pinups next to a rack of fan belts.

  O (object) is any that is eloquent of place, time, situation, or owners.

  Object Examples:

  Pottery pig for storing cookies.

  Battered straw hat with red, white, and blue ribbon.

  Valentine card that plays a squeaky tune.

  Set of partially melted plastic soldiers.

  Woman’s makeup kit left on a park bench.

  Pair of running shoes dangling by their laces from a dead tree branch.

  S (situation) is a conjunction of circumstances or a predicament that puts its characters under some special pressure.

  Situation Examples:

  Being the poor guest of a wealthy family.

  Car breaking down at night in a scary neighborhood.

  Being X-rayed wearing a paper gown that gapes open at the back.

  Finding that one’s neighbor in a packed cinema is an indigent person with an overpowering smell.

  A neighbor digging what looks like a human-sized grave in his yard.

  A (act) is any human deed or action that seems freighted with meaning or potential.

  Examples of Acts:

  Narrowly avoiding a driving accident and texting your way into the next world.

  Setting up an elaborate practical joke, then relenting.

  Running fully clothed into the sea.

  Avoiding a friend.

  Chopping firewood.

  Improvising a bed for the night.

  Drawing a lot of money from a cash machine.

  Maintaining a smile while being threatened.

  T (theme) is the central or dominating idea, seldom stated directly, that underlies the subject of a story and that comments on it. If the subject of a story is a homeless teenager, its theme might be “the importance of kindness to strangers.”

  Examples of Themes:

  Breaking boundaries.

  Revenge.

  Love conquers all.

  Jealousy.

  Betrayal.

  Sibling rivalry.

  Guilt.

  Atonement.

  Forgiveness.

 
Note

  1Sonia Moore, The Stanislavski System (New York: Viking Press, 1965).

  2 About the Creative Process

  The Journey of the Self

  Discovering the stories you are best qualified to tell means looking into unfamiliar aspects of your own life, and grasping the nature of things you may have felt deeply but whose primacy you may not have unrecognized. Such a source came as a true “moment of vision” in my own life. Working on a capsule autobiography for a degree program, I wrote that, “The twenty or so documentary films I have directed are all different, and have nothing in common.” No sooner had I put the words on paper than I realized with a premonitory shock that exactly the opposite was true. All my documentaries explored one theme—that of imprisonment and the will to break out of it. True, they had a wide range of subject matter and outcomes, but present in them all was the same underlying concern.

  How could this be? As my mind raced to grasp this, the answer arose just as mysteriously. I saw how I had been marked out—first as the sole middle-class boy in a hostile English village, then as the child of a foreigner. Always I had felt like the odd man out—in schools, in my family, in an England besieged and at war, as a conscript in the military, as self-educated among Oxbridge grads in the BBC. Feeling different, however, was such a constant that I had failed to consciously register it. How logical, then, to make a string of films later about captivity and breaking out!