More On Ideas
September 11th 2006 13:44
Apologies for not posting sooner. I try to post each Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but last wee illness and a broken net connection overcame me. Mea culpa, I am but human, and all that. Moving on…
Further to Ideas and Simultaneous Creation, you have to come up with a story that has the contradictory impulses of ‘familiar’ and ‘new’ – that is , it has to be in a place that the audience can recognise a bit, or have characters it can recognise a bit. Even a story set in deepest space bears a resemblance to, say, a crew stuck on an oil rig in the middle of an ocean, or a field office far from the corporate HQ in a strange place.
What you have to give them is something they can hang on to, a character they admire or relate to, or a situation they’ve been in, that in the end informs them a little more about who they are, something they can take into themselves and make them a little richer. We admire Rocky’s tenacity, Jack Sparrow’s insouciance, Jed Bartlet’s integrity in the face of hard odds. These characters have to strike a note, so the audience is willing to go with them.
So again a contradiction, you have to give them a character who’s an everyman yet a little bit different in his own way. Then you have to find the plot to drop him/her in. I once heard of good drama described as ordinary people in extraordinary situations (to which I usually add, science fiction drama is ordinary people in really extraordinary situations).
But where do you find your ideas? I hear you cry. Robert Sheckly and Harlan Ellison both famously said they get them on subscription from an ideas factory based in Schenectady, they arrive in the mail each Friday. In truth, ideas are everywhere, you just have to pick the right ones. Each day I must come up with between 10 and 20 flickers of ideas that get discarded as impractical, dull, or too plain weird. But every now and then…
A trick I sometimes use is to find two unrelated news stories and imagine how they could be tied together – what do they have in common? What might they have in common? You flesh out fictional lives and send ribbons of narrative interweaving between the two until you couldn’t imagine a story of the two separate events.
Okay, here’s an experiment. Let’s take the above idea of an oil rig deep in the ocean. I went to Wikipedia and chose their Random Article button. After popping up a bunch of unsuitable items, it displayed the story of Pa’ao, a Polynesian priest who didn’t like what he saw there and brought a king from Tahiti to rule them (that’s the very bare bones of the story, you know where to find the rest).
Cool. How can I combine them?
And that leads us into developing an idea, to see if it can be turned into something worthwhile, which will be Wednesday’s post. See ya then!
Further to Ideas and Simultaneous Creation, you have to come up with a story that has the contradictory impulses of ‘familiar’ and ‘new’ – that is , it has to be in a place that the audience can recognise a bit, or have characters it can recognise a bit. Even a story set in deepest space bears a resemblance to, say, a crew stuck on an oil rig in the middle of an ocean, or a field office far from the corporate HQ in a strange place.
What you have to give them is something they can hang on to, a character they admire or relate to, or a situation they’ve been in, that in the end informs them a little more about who they are, something they can take into themselves and make them a little richer. We admire Rocky’s tenacity, Jack Sparrow’s insouciance, Jed Bartlet’s integrity in the face of hard odds. These characters have to strike a note, so the audience is willing to go with them.
So again a contradiction, you have to give them a character who’s an everyman yet a little bit different in his own way. Then you have to find the plot to drop him/her in. I once heard of good drama described as ordinary people in extraordinary situations (to which I usually add, science fiction drama is ordinary people in really extraordinary situations).
But where do you find your ideas? I hear you cry. Robert Sheckly and Harlan Ellison both famously said they get them on subscription from an ideas factory based in Schenectady, they arrive in the mail each Friday. In truth, ideas are everywhere, you just have to pick the right ones. Each day I must come up with between 10 and 20 flickers of ideas that get discarded as impractical, dull, or too plain weird. But every now and then…
A trick I sometimes use is to find two unrelated news stories and imagine how they could be tied together – what do they have in common? What might they have in common? You flesh out fictional lives and send ribbons of narrative interweaving between the two until you couldn’t imagine a story of the two separate events.
Okay, here’s an experiment. Let’s take the above idea of an oil rig deep in the ocean. I went to Wikipedia and chose their Random Article button. After popping up a bunch of unsuitable items, it displayed the story of Pa’ao, a Polynesian priest who didn’t like what he saw there and brought a king from Tahiti to rule them (that’s the very bare bones of the story, you know where to find the rest).
Cool. How can I combine them?
And that leads us into developing an idea, to see if it can be turned into something worthwhile, which will be Wednesday’s post. See ya then!
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