Ideas & Simultaneous Creation
September 6th 2006 13:52
Well, assuming you want to write, you must have ideas.
Stop. Right there.
It just popped into your head. You think it would make a great film or TV series. But is it original? Well, original enough? There’s been a couple of times where I’ve thought it through a little further, and thought, “Hang on that’s just Show X with a female lead”, or similar. It gets harder to come up with something unique as time goers on, and there’s the resistance from people with the go button accepting anything too original, that might lose an audience instead of finding one.
But I, as usual, digress.
Truthfully, ideas are the easy part, the fun part. You read something, see something, and the brain goes off on a little jaunt that usually begins with the words “what if…?”, and builds like a crazy thing from there (if you’re lucky!)
What if we had zeppelins instead of aeroplanes?
What if we already had interstellar travel?
What if Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated?
And those are just the flights-of-fancy ones. There are dozens you can come up with in a day. The secret is to recognise the ones that you can share with others, in the shape of a story, confident that they’ll get it.
The thing I like about that moment of… not creation, but perhaps recognition of a sequence of commonplace ideas and subjects that gel into something bigger than the sum of its parts.
Seen the trailer for the new ‘Rocky’ film? Not, it isn’t ‘Rocky 7’ or 8 or whatever. Just ‘Rocky Balboa’. Simple, direct, we know who the guy is, and the past, mostly, is another country. And it starts with the simple premise, “what if Rocky was still fighting today?” And it builds from there. A video game matchup between old Rocky and the modern champ. Add age, injury, the pressure of the money in modern sport, that need to come back and do it just once more. Starting from a simple “what if?” William Goldman once said that sequels are movies by whores, but these days I don’t think so, we as an audience are prepared to reach out for a good story wrapped around characters we already know. It should do well. And sequels are for a different post.
What I will add here is a brief note about simultaneous creation, and it’s basically this: it happens.
I’ve had it happen to me. Back around ’98 or ’99, I read Robert Hughes’s ‘The Fatal Shore’, and in it was a one page description of the Mary Bryant story (if you’ve missed it, look it up but… I’ll get to that in a minute). What fascinated me was the story of one of her fellow travellers, Samuel Broom, as soon as he was released in England, applied to join the NSW Regiment, the guys that guarded the convicts, was turned down, changed his name to John Butcher, and returned to Australia to, in effect, do what had been done to him. This fascinated me, what on earth was he thinking?! Apparently later he quit the regiment and became a businessman in Parramatta, even joining a militia against a convict uprising!
So I worked on this story, gradually gathering up as much data as I could, because (and this is crucial), I wanted to stick as closely to fact as possible. If you’re going to tell a true story, I think it should be as close as possible to the real thing – it’s the amateur historian coming out,. Finally, as explained in another post, I dashed off the final article, and waited. And was deeply cut when Channel Ten announced they were making a miniseries of the exact same story!
Now, did they somehow get wind of my idea and decide to do it themselves? I thought about it, asked a few people, and came to the conclusion it was virtually impossible they knew of my script. For one thing, their writer had been developing his script for about a year, in England. And obviously, I hadn't known about his, or I would have spent that time working on something else. It was a definite case of simultaneous creation.
That’s why sometimes you’ll see two hurricane films, or two alien invasion films, or two shark films, come out at the same time. Sure there is a slight spoiler element in some cases, but I’m willing to bet that when the scripts were being written, in over 96% of cases, that the writers had no idea someone was on a parallel journey. It happens all the time. Sometimes, an idea’s time simply comes.
Don’t take it personal. If you’re any kind of writer at all, you’ll have other projects to pursue, other “what if?”s to stick in the blender of imagination. The best thing to do is put the whole thing aside, but not too far away, because somewhere down the track, you might get another idea, and think “hey, if I combine it with that idea I couldn’t use, I’ll get something pretty cool!” And when that works, it’s really good.
So go, make copious notes about the kind of stories you want to tell. And don’t worry, we’ll be getting to the real stuff soon.
Stop. Right there.
It just popped into your head. You think it would make a great film or TV series. But is it original? Well, original enough? There’s been a couple of times where I’ve thought it through a little further, and thought, “Hang on that’s just Show X with a female lead”, or similar. It gets harder to come up with something unique as time goers on, and there’s the resistance from people with the go button accepting anything too original, that might lose an audience instead of finding one.
But I, as usual, digress.
Truthfully, ideas are the easy part, the fun part. You read something, see something, and the brain goes off on a little jaunt that usually begins with the words “what if…?”, and builds like a crazy thing from there (if you’re lucky!)
What if we had zeppelins instead of aeroplanes?
What if we already had interstellar travel?
What if Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated?
And those are just the flights-of-fancy ones. There are dozens you can come up with in a day. The secret is to recognise the ones that you can share with others, in the shape of a story, confident that they’ll get it.
The thing I like about that moment of… not creation, but perhaps recognition of a sequence of commonplace ideas and subjects that gel into something bigger than the sum of its parts.
Seen the trailer for the new ‘Rocky’ film? Not, it isn’t ‘Rocky 7’ or 8 or whatever. Just ‘Rocky Balboa’. Simple, direct, we know who the guy is, and the past, mostly, is another country. And it starts with the simple premise, “what if Rocky was still fighting today?” And it builds from there. A video game matchup between old Rocky and the modern champ. Add age, injury, the pressure of the money in modern sport, that need to come back and do it just once more. Starting from a simple “what if?” William Goldman once said that sequels are movies by whores, but these days I don’t think so, we as an audience are prepared to reach out for a good story wrapped around characters we already know. It should do well. And sequels are for a different post.
What I will add here is a brief note about simultaneous creation, and it’s basically this: it happens.
I’ve had it happen to me. Back around ’98 or ’99, I read Robert Hughes’s ‘The Fatal Shore’, and in it was a one page description of the Mary Bryant story (if you’ve missed it, look it up but… I’ll get to that in a minute). What fascinated me was the story of one of her fellow travellers, Samuel Broom, as soon as he was released in England, applied to join the NSW Regiment, the guys that guarded the convicts, was turned down, changed his name to John Butcher, and returned to Australia to, in effect, do what had been done to him. This fascinated me, what on earth was he thinking?! Apparently later he quit the regiment and became a businessman in Parramatta, even joining a militia against a convict uprising!
So I worked on this story, gradually gathering up as much data as I could, because (and this is crucial), I wanted to stick as closely to fact as possible. If you’re going to tell a true story, I think it should be as close as possible to the real thing – it’s the amateur historian coming out,. Finally, as explained in another post, I dashed off the final article, and waited. And was deeply cut when Channel Ten announced they were making a miniseries of the exact same story!
Now, did they somehow get wind of my idea and decide to do it themselves? I thought about it, asked a few people, and came to the conclusion it was virtually impossible they knew of my script. For one thing, their writer had been developing his script for about a year, in England. And obviously, I hadn't known about his, or I would have spent that time working on something else. It was a definite case of simultaneous creation.
That’s why sometimes you’ll see two hurricane films, or two alien invasion films, or two shark films, come out at the same time. Sure there is a slight spoiler element in some cases, but I’m willing to bet that when the scripts were being written, in over 96% of cases, that the writers had no idea someone was on a parallel journey. It happens all the time. Sometimes, an idea’s time simply comes.
Don’t take it personal. If you’re any kind of writer at all, you’ll have other projects to pursue, other “what if?”s to stick in the blender of imagination. The best thing to do is put the whole thing aside, but not too far away, because somewhere down the track, you might get another idea, and think “hey, if I combine it with that idea I couldn’t use, I’ll get something pretty cool!” And when that works, it’s really good.
So go, make copious notes about the kind of stories you want to tell. And don’t worry, we’ll be getting to the real stuff soon.
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Comment by Cibbuano
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But on the other, there's so much tedious dialogue and scene construction. Bah!
Comment by Australis
The Scriptwriting Blog
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Mind you, I fnid having to work in a framework forces me to be more creative, to make the story flow in between all the INTs and EXTs and (OPT)s and so on.
Or look at it this way. IN your novel, you can have yourmain character being gripped with fear while hunted by a wild animal. You can either hammer out much detail on the character, his fear, the woods they are fleeing through, the colour of the animal, or you can go Shakespeare's way, and his famous stage direction:
"EXIT, pursued by a bear".
Simple, direct, open to a range of director's interpretations... what's not to like?
Comment by PokerPro