Developing Story Ideas Page 4

We learn many of the hardest lessons through interaction with our family while growing up. The family is the great crucible for drama. Why else are all the Greek gods related to each other?

  To a person, group, or class,

  Step 1: Describe in two to three minutes the main drama in your family. If there are many, pick one that most affected you (e.g., the impact of the family business going bankrupt, discovering that Uncle Wilfred is a cross-dresser, or the effect of a dictatorial parent wanting all the kids to become musicians).

  Step 2: Say what you learned from the way the family drama played out, and what kind of subjects and themes it has left you wanting to tackle as a result.

  Discussion

  Listen to the presentations as quietly, supportively, and nonjudgmentally as you can, because the presenter feels exposed and vulnerable. Even if you detect self-defense or self-promotion, try to absorb and commit to memory all that the person says. Try to store in memory the following:

  Moments in the presentation that moved you.

  Moments of discomfort—yours or the writer’s. What might be at stake there?

  Connections inside the presentation that the writer may not have seen.

  Whatever you learn about the writer that is new and interesting.

  Consistency or connection between the writer’s choices of Formative experience and chosen themes.

  Character types and what else interests the writer.

  Story type and chosen themes and characters.

  Preferred work and what else he/she has said.

  When you react, limit your discussion to what is constructive. This is a time to build confidence in other people, not risk tearing it down.

  Notes

  1David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking (Saint Paul, MN: Image Continuum Press, 1993), p. 116.

  2Socrates, c. 469–399 BC.

  Going Further

  To locate books in print, use Amazon.com, and check for discounted or used copies at AbeBooks.com, the international online booksellers’ marketplace. Some works about the artistic process as writers, artists, filmmakers, and choreographers experience it are the following:

  Bayles, David and Ted Orland. Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking. Image Continuum Press, 2001 (Although geared to graphic art, this book deals with common misconceptions about art in general and with removing the obstacles that stop people from making it).

  Cameron, Julia. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, 10th ed., Tarcher, 2002 (Highly prescriptive and addressed to those suffering “blocks, limiting beliefs, fear, self-sabotage, jealousy, guilt, addictions, and other inhibiting forces.” Following this seminal work are numerous spinoffs that may be of interest).

  Dannenbaum, Jed, Carroll Hodge, and Doe Mayer. Creative Filmmaking from the Inside Out: Five Keys to the Art of Making Inspired Movies and Television. Simon & Schuster, 2003 (How to minimize inbuilt messages of social and ethical bias).

  Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Knopf, 1995 (Funny and engagingly personal description of the stages a writer must go through and of the wracking neuroses so many suffer).

  Tharp, Twyla and Mark Reiter. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. Simon & Schuster, 2005 (The famous choreographer shares a lifetime of discoveries about how to prepare for, maintain, and deliver on one’s creative potential. Directly and personably written, and relevant to any difficult endeavor).

  4 Autobiography and Influences

  This chapter is about constructing a detailed self-profile. Its work will help you recognize the most significant marks you carry, and the highly significant people who have made a special impact. They can be friends, family members, or even characters in fiction. Each has helped liberate an important aspect of yourself. Some you will already know about, others may come as a surprise. Each such person leads us to discover aspects of ourselves and to fulfill our innate potential.

  Though it is important to recognize and use your core experiences, this book asks you to write very little that is directly autobiographical. Whenever you find indirect ways to explore issues of personal importance, however, your work will probably become charged, authentic, and fascinating.

  Assignment 4–1: What Influenced You?

  Using the prompts below, make brief notes of whatever experience left a strong mark on you—good or bad. Don’t feel you must find an answer to every question; deal only with what elicits significant information. Whatever emerges from this survey can be thoroughly honest since nobody else will see it.

  Beginnings: Year and place you were born, special circumstances and conditions, any special religious or social conditions, any unusual circumstances concerning your parents.

  Health: Special events, accidents, diseases.

  Early influences: Special friends, visitors, neighbors, local characters.

  Relations: Siblings, cousins, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and so on, who played a special role in your life.

  School: Schools you attended, special courses, influential teachers, special events or traumas, special friendships or antipathies.

  Special activities: Jobs, tasks at home, membership in group activities or sports.

  Journeys: Memorable travels, holidays, migrations, escapes, or quests by your family or yourself.

  Adolescence: For most people this is a war zone. What was most at stake for you?

  Major conflicts: What have been the major conflicts in your life?

  People you have loved: These can be family members, your first love, or those you fell in love with subsequently. What did you learn?

  People you have hated: People for whom you’ve had a strong aversion. When was it, and why? What did you learn?

  Work: Work you trained for or were made to do.

  Avocations: Work that you wanted to do, such as hobbies, crafts, special interests.

  Arts: Special experience or influences that turned you on to the arts—music, graphic art, plays, books, poetry, authors, movies, movie directors, and so on.

  Beliefs: Religious or philosophical ideas or believers that influenced your path.

  Celebrations: Any memorable special events, festivals, or reunions.

  Life’s lessons: Experiences, whether troubling or uplifting, that have deeply marked you and have altered your direction.

  Future: Plans, hopes, and fears that you have at the moment.

  Keep your answers in mind as you do the next assignment, which involves making a short oral presentation on people who left their mark. One person at the top of my list would be Margaret Powell Lesser (Figure 4–1), a former nurse who appeared in one of my films. She volunteered to go to Spain during the 1936–1939 Civil War. Newly trained and very young, she found herself triaging dozens of seriously wounded soldiers, having to decide alone who should see the only surgeon and who was beyond help and going to die. In a single ghastly experience, her youth vanished, and haunted by the story thirty years later, she wept to remember it.

  Figure 4–1 Margaret Powell, a nurse marked for life by an appalling wartime responsibility (photo courtesy of Ruth Muller).

  Assignment 4–2: Who Influenced You?

  Who has deeply moved you? The goal here is to supplement what you learned from the previous assignment.

  Step 1: Make a short list of people known to you who have made an impact on you. Include those exerting a bad influence as well as those whose mark was good—but leave out immediate family members, as they usually overcomplicate the exercise.

  Step 2: List four characters from literature, cinema, or theatre with whom you feel a powerful connection. That affinity can be hero-worship, but it becomes more interesting when you respond to darker or more complex qualities. Arrange your characters by their importance to you.

  Step 3: Do the same for four public figures (such as actors, artists, politicians, sports, or historical figures).

  Step 4: Speak for
no more than five minutes, describing your top person in each category. Focus on the particular qualities to which you resonate and anything they have in common.

  Discussion

  Try using these issues:

  Were there any common themes?

  Did some seem specific to the speaker’s gender?

  What stays in your memory as special and unusual?

  Who did you find yourself admiring for their frankness, and what particularly impressed you?

  Who did you come to know best from their presentation?

  5 Playing CLOSAT and Pitching Ideas

  Scheherazade in the Thousand and One Nights puts off her execution by enchanting the king with a different tale every night. She does not reveal how she keeps going, but her inventiveness makes her indispensable to the king’s happiness.

  Improvising

  Actors, comedians, and other performers fascinate us with their quick-witted talent for invention. In Chicago, where I live, there is Second City, a theatre school for would-be comedians. They practice until they can make up scenes on the spot. From any chance combination of situations and identities yelled out by the audience, they create something meaningful—and have enormous fun doing it. Some alumni have become very famous.1

  We call this a talent, but anybody with enough courage can learn to do it. Think back to an occasion when your friends howled with laughter because you somehow became effortlessly funny. Improvising is like a kite taking off, a situation when our unconsciously stored experiences spill out under the right situation. This is your intuitive self, your native aptitude at work. But this fluid intelligence is as perverse as a donkey; try to strong-arm it into delivering, and it digs in its heels and refuses. Only when you relax and trust it does it work. There are no advance guarantees. The optimal conditions seem to be that you:

  To improvise means to act spontaneously and intuitively in relation to stimuli of some kind. We improvise best under pressure and when we trust our instincts to sustain us.

  Confront a situation of risk that you may or may not overcome.

  Plunge into action without plans or forethought.

  Know you are sunk if you stop to think, so you don’t.

  Stay in the moment and trust that your intuition will make good choices. It does.

  Sports players know that submitting to trained instinct is vital to winning. Thus players in top form can simultaneously relax, act on intuition, and perform extraordinary feats. It is a psychological state because the watching spectators help intensify their focus. However, when players get rattled and lose their nerve, you see it immediately. They are like construction workers: one falls from the steelwork, and the others lose confidence and follow.

  Maintaining Focus

  Paradoxically, you maintain focus by abandoning everything that calculates risk. To stay focused, you must stay in the here-and-now, says the great acting teacher Konstantin Stanislavsky. Never look ahead at where you are going or back at where you have been. Stop your ego judging how well you are doing, for then you become a divided being: one part tries to go on playing your character, another part subjects you to the imagined scrutiny of the onlookers. Then you become painfully self-conscious, self-judging, and dysfunctional. Everyone has been there.

  For a writer, improvising is a valuable skill. Becoming at ease with anyone around, taking risks, and elaborating ideas on the spot takes a headlong trust that you will emerge bruised but elated. And of course with practice you mostly do. The occasional spill helps you come out less afraid.

  Practice improvisation in daily life by making yourself act upon each new situation with something spontaneous and a little unexpected, something made up on the spot. That way you enliven the routine of cashiers, train passengers, students trudging to school, and old people sitting on park benches. This is your practice for composing and presenting stories, and whenever you do it, people will remember you because you entertained them.

  Pitching

  To pitch a story idea means orally presenting its essentials in just a few minutes. You aim to move your listeners with a brief description of your intended story’s attractions and purpose. Ideally you leave them wanting to hear more.

  Being a salesperson for yourself is never easy, but it’s important to break down the walls of shyness so you can demonstrate what you carry inside. You do not have to become showy and egotistical. Simply work at shucking your phobias while remaining the same simple, direct person you really are.

  As you pitch a scene, you’ll quickly sense whether your audience is taking to your idea. A warm audience extends an indefinable glow while a cool audience holds back and challenges you to draw them out.

  A scene is an episode or a sequence of events that usually takes place in one locale or during one stretch of time.

  When, conversely, someone is pitching a story and you are in the audience, support the person making the pitch by giving them your undivided attention, and by signaling appreciation for any risks they take. In jazz concerts, the audience applauds when something special takes place—an exchange between the players perhaps, or an inventive solo. In pitching sessions the audience cannot be so expressive, but their support is always tangible. Whether you are giving or receiving support, you’ll feel it taking place. Speaker and listeners become an ensemble, with the whole joyously greater than its parts.

  If You Are Working Alone

  If you are using this book solo, you will need people to whom you can pitch your ideas. Stories are living, growing, changing seed organisms whose soil is an audience. Thus, the more people you can find to work with, the richer your feedback will be. It’s fascinating to see how differently each person or group reacts to a similar pitch, and what a broad spectrum of possibility emerges.

  Assignment 5–1: Five-Minute Self-Introduction

  Step 1: Introduce yourself in 5 minutes or less by giving what personal interests, obstacles, or difficulties have led you to be interested in developing story ideas.

  Step 2: Say what type of work specially attracts you (such as short story writing, documentaries, electronic or website journalism, or writing feature films) and why.

  Assignment 5–2: Trying the CLOSAT Game

  Here is some introductory experience at improvising a CLOSAT scene, using some of the twelve ready-made sample cards at the end of this chapter. This will work a little differently depending on whether you are working alone or in a group.

  Step 1: Picking randomly from the specimen cards at the end of this chapter, select until you have as “givens” one location, one object, and two characters. Divide into groups of three or four persons, choosing one person as secretary.

  Step 2: Taking no more than ten minutes of discussion, the group improvises materials for a short scene making use of the givens. The secretary takes notes.

  Step 3: At presentation time, each secretary chooses what to pitch to the audience, describing a scene invented by his or her group from the common ingredients.

  If you are working alone, your auditors can choose the cards and give you feedback about your improvised scene. You can turn the tables and invite them to improvise a scene from cards you deal them. Improvising scenes under the gun is a lot of fun and shows how stories that develop from a common starting point can be wildly different and imaginative.

  Discussion of CLOSAT Scenes

  What elements of the presentations were most effective?

  What tellings could you most clearly see in your mind’s eye?

  What seemed a particularly ingenious and effective use of the givens? (See sidebar.)

  Which pitch did you most like, and why?

  The givens of a scene are the who, what, when, and where that frame the action and determine aspects of the scene’s content.

  Assignment 5–3: The Group Develops Its Own Pitching Guidelines

  Based on the experience you just had as an audience member and/or as presenter, take fifteen minutes for each group to imagine guidelines for anyone making the
ir first pitch. Try using these prompts:

  What made the stories most effective?

  What helps a presenter get story essentials across quickly?

  What kind of critical feedback is most helpful for writers after their pitch?

  Discussion of Pitch Guidelines

  What differences in criteria did people adopt?

  Did the guidelines consider: Presenter’s manner or pacing?

  The way time was used?

  How the pitch was structured?

  Ideas for the etiquette of criticism?

  What feedback enthuses a presenter to do more work, and what discourages?

  What main ideas and principles stand as an overall statement?

  General Discussion

  Explore any or all of the following:

  In which stories did the characters come alive, and why?

  Which stories had some kind of conflict—that is, something for the main character to push against?

  Did anyone in any story change or grow?

  Which stories had a satisfactory conclusion or resolution (see sidebar)?

  Which stories or parts of stories were fresh and managed to avoid stereotypes?

  Which story most left you wondering, “What will happen next?”

  Conflict, the struggle between opposing forces, determines the action in a drama. External conflict exists when the struggle is between characters, or between a character and natural law or fate. Internal conflict exists when a character experiences inner struggle.