Murder Your Internal Editor and Start Writing

filmmaking

I was pitching my latest slasher horror script, “Straps,” to a friend not long ago.  I got to the part about how the serial killer covers himself in straps, and that on the inside of the straps are numerous pins, tacks, small nails, and fish hooks that constantly dig into his flesh, causing him to be in unending pain and bleed constantly.  I was so engrossed in the explanation that I didn’t realize the look of horror that was consuming her face, until finally she blurted out “How do you come up with such messed up ideas?”

I had two reactions to that.

  1. I was flattered that she thought it was truly messed up – I was worried it was a bit too tame for some reason.
  2. It might be neat to let people know where my ideas come from. 

The Comic Toolbox

Taking my first real writing class at Second City Los Angeles was a blessing.  Sketch comedy writers need methods for generating a lot of story ideas fast, and the assigned reading, “The Comic Toolbox: How to Be Funny Even If You’re Not,” (https://www.amazon.com/Comic-Toolbox-Funny-Even-Youre/dp/1879505215/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492389565&sr=8-1&keywords=the+comedy+toolbox) had a multitude of ways to keep the ideas flowing.  I’ve taken one of the methods from it, modified it over time, and it’s quickly become one of my favorites.  I’ve used it to write an award winning screenplay that I turned into a novel, a short film about a living painting, and my latest screenplay in development about a serial killer who covers himself in straps.

It’s a method that I like to call:

9 Very Bad Story Ideas

Here’s the short explanation, the tl;dr if you will:  Come up with, as quickly as you can, 9 ideas.  If that’s all you were here for, you can stop reading now.

Here’s the long explanation….

You have an Internal Editor that lives in your head.  This editor tells you that every idea you come up with is dumb and stupid, and not only that, you are dumb and stupid for coming up with these dumb and stupid ideas.  The entire goal of 9 Very Bad Story Ideas is to get that bastard to shut up!  

But how do you do that?  Simple.  You start by thinking of a story idea and you immediately lower the bar for what’s acceptable.  Lower.  Lower than that.  Don’t just lower the bar to the ground, dig a hole in the ground at least 9 feet deep and drop the bar down there.  That’s how low you lower the bar.

Once you have the story idea (which doesn’t have to be longer than a sentence or two), you write it down.  Is it a cliche story idea?  Doesn’t matter, write it down.  Is it hack?  Doesn’t matter, write it down.  Is it boring?  Is it mundane?  Did you just see something like it on Netflix?  Is it so trite and overused that you want to vomit?  And most importantly, is your Internal Editor screaming at you, “Don’t write it down for the love of God it’s so terrible what are you thinking aaaaaaaaahhhhhh!”

Doesn’t matter, write it down.  Soon the Very Bad Ideas will be flowing!

Noun + Twist = Story Idea

If you need an assist at constructing a basic story idea, I can help with that too.  

  1. Start the idea with a noun, such as a person, place, or activity.  Activities are my favorite.
  2. Add an unexpected twist that the person has to face, that happens in the place, or how the activity goes wrong.
  3. Write it down.
  4. You don’t even need to write down how the unexpected twist gets resolved.  Just keep it simple.  

Soon, you will have a blank page no longer, but a page filled with 9 Very Bad Story Ideas.

But we’re not done just yet.  Go back over those 9 Very Bad Story Ideas, and see if maybe, just maybe, one of them isn’t so bad.  Maybe one of them kinda catches your interest a little bit, makes you wonder how the hell it can be resolved.  Play with that idea for a while, see if you’re interested in the characters involved in this story seed, if you want to know how this situation plays out.  Tweak the idea, mess around with it.  Do this for a while and, if you’re actually getting excited about the idea, then congratulations – you might just have the premise for a story.

And if you don’t have any ideas in the list you like?  Happens all the time!  Just put the list aside and try again tomorrow.  Personally, I’ve never been able to play the game more than two times before I came up with one or more ideas I liked.

Example

I’ll take you back a few years ago to when I started playing 9 Very Bad Story Ideas because I had 0 ideas for my project for my first semester of film school.  I started my list of Bad Story Ideas.  For one of them, I had this noun (activity):

Guy is about to hang himself in the middle of the woods, _______

I immediately felt it was such a freaking cliche idea that I shouldn’t write it down, but that’s not how the game is played!  With a sigh, I wrote it down.

I still needed the twist.  After a moment of trying to think of a very unexpected occurrence that could happen to this guy, I wrote:

Guy is about to hang himself in the middle of the woods, but before he does, a hiker comes across his suicide note and starts laughing at how bad it was.

Instantly, I was hooked.  Who was this woman?  Why would she be so callous as to start laughing at his suicide note when he was right there?  How bad could that note possibly be?  How was this going to resolve???  If these are the types of questions that start rocketing through your brain, then by golly, you might have a winner on your hands.

I was so enamored with this story idea that I had to write it and eventually shoot it.  You’ll forgive the poor production value (it was my very first semester at film school, like I said), but the result was still good enough to win me second place at our Best of the Semester Screening.  I give you, “Rough Draft.”

 

I still use 9 Very Bad Story Ideas to this day and have even found it useful if something like a plot element isn’t working in a script and I need to start coming up with alternates.  

Silence the Internal Editor, unchain your brain, and let the ideas flow.