Tag Archives: writing

Write Down Your Bad Ideas

I had a bad idea this morning over breakfast. A ridiculous bad idea that started out from a fun high-concept premise, but that I found to have a variety of potential plot holes and red flags.

I added it to my idea notebook anyway.

Bad ideas can become good ideas over time. You may eventually come across solutions to the problems you see in the idea and want to run with it. Or, part of this idea might fit better with something else you come up with. A bad idea can still be stripped for parts.

But some bad ideas will stay bad ideas. There’s nothing wrong with that. By writing it down, you already know you’ve had that bad idea before. You can see the problems you had with it. The idea gets out of your head and into a more tangible place where you can look it over a little more objectively.

It’s good to make reasoned judgements about what stories to take from idea to execution, but that same filter can stifle your creativity if you apply it too early in the process. Keep that idea notebook (or app) handy. Fill it up. Get everything out of your head, no matter if you know for certain you can use it.

All your characters are going to die

Just maybe not during your story.

How do they feel about that? Do they think about it at all? Is it a constant fear? Is it something they acknowledge but don’t strongly internalize?

What do they think death is? Do they see it as an end? A beginning? A transition in a cycle?

Where do they define death? Is it clinical, or is there some kind of loss that to them seems close enough to count as death?

What they think of death, or if they think of death, has a profound impact on how a character makes decisions. This isn’t just about stories that deal with death outright. Just because a character isn’t racing to complete a bucket list or facing imminent annihilation from an alien horde doesn’t mean their feelings on death don’t play in to how they live.

Almost There

How would you change the way you behaved if you thought your goals were within reach?

Would you get frustrated at fewer things? Would you be more mindful of your time? Would you be more eager to take action?

You could replace “I’ll get to that later.” with “I’ll make time for that today.” You could replace “I’ll never get this done.” with “What’s next?”

There’s a time and place for critical assessment of your work. It doesn’t need to be how you start your day.

So why not behave as if you’re almost where you want to be? Why not start each day choosing to believe you are closing that distance?

On not knowing what it is

Per my previous post on avoiding writer’s block, I’m working on more than one project right now. One of these scripts is brand new, though some of the ideas have been percolating in Evernote and a previous script for a while now. And it’s at this point, where I’m making the transition from idea to actual pages that I’m running into an issue:

I don’t know what this script is for.

It could be something low-budget. Possibly even something I’d want to produce myself. It could be a little more action-packed and blockbuster. It might not even be the story that I thought it was when I committed to figuring this one out.

This is the part where I bring up the fact that I’m bad at Buddhism. This kind of thinking is focusing on the end result and not on the act of writing. It’s a less mindful approach than working to discover the story and see where it needs to go as opposed to figuring out what kind of box I’m trying to place the finished script in.

Coming from a film school background, there were plenty of late nights working with specific limitations. “We only have 15 seconds worth of film left.” “What do you mean we can’t shoot on the shoulder of the freeway?” “How can we show that in a way that doesn’t involve 1,000 animated paper cranes?” These were concrete obstructions imposed by the need to have something to turn in by the end of the semester.

Sometimes a lack of constraints can be a frustration. I need to be reminded that in this draft I can write literally anything, and that’s OK. It’s all wide open. It’s a time to remember that if the first draft shows promise, external constraints will come soon enough.

Plain Text

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent among undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors find most impressive. In an article titled “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly,” he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.

-Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow

Much like the study cited in the above quote, showing how much you’ve retained from your SAT prep work will not impress the reader of your script. It’s not about prose writing vs. screenwriting, or cluttering the page with unnecessary description, or slowing down the speed of the read.

It’s about showing that you are confident as a writer.

This isn’t an argument for writing simplistically. A screenplay should read well above a first grade level. Sometimes there is no better word for what you are trying to say than the complex, specific one. It’s important to be able to make the distinction and be able to know when to bring in those words out of necessity.

Writing plainly shows that you’re confident that your story is interesting and dynamic without having to pretty up the page with purple prose, that you are efficient and clear in your thoughts, and that you’re aware of how to best communicate what’s in your mind. You believe that your story, not your vocabulary, will convince the reader to take you seriously as a writer.