Black List writers on the craft: Story Concepts (Part 2)
“I devour information like crazy, and I’m always running across interesting ideas. Being open and being curious brings so many great ideas to your doorstep.”
Over the years, I have interviewed 50+ Black List screenwriters. Over the next four weeks, I am running a series featuring one topic per week related to the craft of writing.
This week: How do you come up with story concepts?
With this next set of responses, we see writers who take a more proactive approach to generating and developing story concepts, here most notably using what they read as source material and inspiration:
Barbara Stepansky: I read a lot. I surf the internet. If there’s a post that interests me, I think about it and see if there’s a story there.”
Carter Blanchard: “I read the news every morning. I look for ideas in there.”
Stephany Folsom: “I’m an avid reader. I’m constantly reading articles. I’m constantly reading books. I devour information like crazy, and I’m always running across interesting ideas. Being open and being curious brings so many great ideas to your doorstep.”
David Guggenheim: “They come from everywhere really. For example, I had read a bunch of articles about narco trafficking and reading about these narco subs, I just said, ‘Well, that’s a movie.’ Right then and there I knew that’s a movie. I was going to do a story about transporting drugs on narco mini‑submarines. The concept that drug cartels had submarines blew my mind. That got me really, really excited. The idea of doing a twist on the submarine genre. Run Silent, Run Deep scenario, but with drug lords.”
Ashleigh Powell: “I was an English major, and I was a total bookworm growing up. So I’ve read a lot of stories over the years and I’m fascinated by this trend of taking classic mythologies or classic stories and finding new ways to reimagine them or reinterpret them. I think there’s something very cool about that.”
Seth Lochhead: “I’ve been inspired by great books (I turned ‘Turn of the Screw’ into an action movie and wondered what would happen if the creatures in the Island of Dr. Moreau spawned and became a sub-class of humanity). I’ve been intrigued by news items. In all instances, it’s not necessarily a concrete idea. It’s more like a starting point, a drive to articulate something that could not possibly be articulated.”
Justin Kremer: “I find myself consistently attracted toward source material, not just because there’s stuff already there for you. I think it’s just the most rewarding to crack. There are a bunch of sites I like to read every day that just kind of stimulate the mind and get you thinking about stuff. One of those that has been an invaluable resource is a site called Longform, which posts these amazing long-form articles about everything from crime to science. It has everything from that initial “Wired” article that inspired Argo, to the more contemporary stuff. It really gets you thinking about character and story in a different way.”
Source material. Whether it’s magazine or Internet articles, news stories or books, there is a whole world of preexisting content writers can adopt and adapt into a story concept. All it takes is for you to have part of your brain in a state of awareness so that every time you read something, you think, “Can this be a movie”? Hell, any article or news snippet can become source material for a hit script idea.
That said in my interviews with Black List writers, they shared a lot of other ways to generate story concepts including observable real life experiences, something we will delve into in tomorrow’s post.
How about you? Do you use reading news items and books to inspire your creative process? I’d love to hear from you, so please head to comments and share your thoughts on the subject.
For Part 1 of the series on story concepts, go here.
Tomorrow and for the rest of this week, we will learn how other Black List writers I have interviewed generate story concepts and the variety of ways they engage in that practice.
