Recently I received an email from a young writer who said he has trouble coming up with story ideas. Here's a method I find useful:
Do a little brainstorming every day with some what-if's. You can use a newspaper or magazine to give you the seed of some ideas. Start with a headline and think about:
- Who would be the most interesting person in this story?
- What does he or she want?
- who or what is in the way?
- How could this conflict escalate?
- What could be the moment of truth, the big showdown scene in which the conflict comes to a head?
- How could it end?
Of course the kinds of ideas you come up with would be influenced by whether you want to write a comedy, a thriller, a drama, a science fiction or fantasy film, etc.
For instance, in the New York Times today there was this story:
Kansas Town Promotes Its Role in Lincoln’s Rise
By JOHN ELIGON
A publicity campaign in Lecompton, Kan., seeks national recognition of the tiny town’s crucial role in the election of President Lincoln and in the Civil War...
The main character might be the town historian who has discovered what seem to be some new documents that show this town was instrumental in Lincoln's election.
What he wants is to put the town on the map, which would also help him get a publisher for his book on this topic.
Who or what is in the way? This could be a reporter from the New York Times who suspects that the historian forged the document and is going to expose him.
How could the conflict escalate? The historian takes more and more drastic action to foil the reporter. (You'd have to decide whether the historian did forge the document, or maybe somebody else did)
What could be the "moment of truth", the big showdown scene? If this is a thriller, it could be the scene in which the historian kills the reporter and then has to cover it up. Maybe an innocent person is arrested and he historian has to decide whether to let this person go to jail or even be executed for what the historian did.
In a comedy, he might just knock the reporter out and when the reporter wakes up he has amnesia. Or maybe if the historian is a women and the reporter is a man, she starts a romance with him, just to distract him but then finds herself actually falling in love with him.
How could it end? Again, this depends on the kind of film it is. In a romance maybe the historian has to confess in order to show the reporter she loves him and values that more than getting a big book deal. In a comedy, maybe it all comes out but the historian still becomes a celebrity as a result and writes a confessional book that becomes a best-seller.
You can do this all in your head with just about any kind of feature news story, to practice coming up with story lines. Do that for a while. When you come up with one that you get really excited about, that might be one to develop further and then write as a script or novel. Don't expect every idea to be great; like mine above, most of them will be mediocre at best but it will get you into the groove of story-building and once in a while you'll hit on a tale you can't wait to write.
(What would Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Ray Bradbury, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Ernest Hemingway advise you about writing? You don't have to guess. Their advice and that of another 100 successful writers is in my book, Your Creative Writing Masterclass. It's published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.)
