Dispatch from “The Quest”: Concepts (Part 1)
Last week, our focus in “The Quest” was concept. The Questers had some great reflections on the subject in their script journals which I will share with you over the next three days. Today: Emma Millions and Scott Reynolds.
Emma Millions
Today I will be doing some thinking. Just thinking. Sitting round thinking. Lying down thinking. Walking round thinking. Having a bit of a dance and thinking. I’m full on in the thinking phase which is, probably, my favourite phase. I’m good at it. I can disappear fully into a good think that lasts for weeks. Sometimes I find that I have gone to the shops, bought my weekly food supply and come back home with no memory of doing it. I’ve been on auto pilot for the real world stuff while I hung out inside my head thinking. I used to panic that I was doing too much thinking and not enough writing when I started a project, especially if deadlines loomed and everything was still just a big lump of thoughts in my head and nothing on paper. But then I learnt to ‘trust the process’ and that doing a bit of thinking is not procrastination or just being a bit lazy. It’s essential to writing a good script. And being on The Quest has given me lots of great things to think about. Not just things specific to my idea but things about writing scripts in general. Interesting things that other Questers have thought. Links to good stuff online to add into the mix of thoughts. During this phase I like to fill my head with as much material as possible — real-life news stories, overheard conversations, writing theories, inspirational movies and scripts, TV shows, weird stuff that you find intriguing and have no idea why or if its even relevant — anything that might help me create the world of my idea and form it into a cohesive story. Then you just let all that stuff mill about in there, jumbling around, stewing and, lo and behold, at some point you find yourself ready to get it out of your head and on to the page. Like a great big creative vomit.
A clip from The Big Bang Theory about thinking which I think is spot on…
Scott Reynolds
This week is all about concept and ideas so I thought I’d talk a little about how I generate ideas.
You always need tons of ideas whether you’re writing a script or a sketch or a stand-up routine or a business plan. You need ideas for plots, scenes, characters, jokes, one-liners, dialogue, beats, runners, everything.
Not only do you need a lot of ideas, but you need the best ones. Not the obvious ones or the easiest ones, but the smartest most clever most funny ones. Piece of cake, right?
So you sit and think. And surf the web. And tap your pen on the pad. And you lay down on the floor tossing a soccer ball up in the air. And tap your pen on your forehead. And pace around talking to yourself. And jab your pen into your eye just a little, just so you know you’re still in there. Oh, that’s just me?
Point is, if you focus on finding those few great ideas, you almost never will. That’s because there’s a little sadistic asshole living inside your brain that wants to make sure you know that none of your ideas are good enough, and if you start from a standpoint of ideas as scarce resources, he wins.
I don’t know about you, but I have no control over this guy, so the only thing I can do to get him to shut up is drown him in ideas so he can’t possibly keep up.
I’ll run “idea sprints”. They take a couple of different forms depending on what I’m trying to generate ideas for (script/stand up routine/etc) but the basic gist is this. I give myself X minutes to generate Y ideas.
For instance: just a few minutes ago I completed an idea sprint for a sketch show I’m writing. I needed 5 sketch ideas for a full half-hour show. The little jerk in my brain was like “you know they have to be amazing sketches, right? It can’t just be whatever you come up with first. It has to be really good, or your show will never get a run. So, you know, good luck with that. I’ll be waiting. To shoot down your ideas. Because they’re awful. And you’re stupid. And gaining weight.”
In the olden days, I’d have listened to him, and given up, and played a video game or live-tweeted the Olympics or something. Instead, I drowned him in a flood of ideas.
I needed 5 ideas. So I gave myself 10 minutes to come up with 50. Ready….GO!
What this exercise does is it forces you to just generate ideas like a machine, without evaluating them. The first couple out on the page, the little guys is like “yeah I got this, come at me bro!” but once you get into the flow he can’t keep up and you’re free to just generate ideas. You know that in 10 minutes there’s no way you could come up with 50 pieces of solid gold, so you don’t bother worrying about it. All you need to do is hit that number with as many half-formed, poorly worded proto-ideas as possible in the allotted time.
When you’re done, the little critic gets to take over and look at the list. He’s probably surprised how many of the ideas are good. Or have a tiny nugget of good in them. Like Darth Vader.
Another fun game for silencing the inner critic is to just fill a page of a notebook with whatever you can free-associate off a topic in 5 minutes. Just single words or short phrases, whatever comes to mind, write it down. You’re not even looking for full sentences. The goal is filling the page.
I have a page in front of me from doing this exercise a few months ago off the topic “Apocalypse”. In 5 minutes I probably wrote 150 words and phrases associated with apocalypse. It’s just one big comma-separated list of words taking up about 3/4 of a college ruled page.
They ranged from expected: “zombie, mayans, 2012” to a little esoteric: “pony express, roving cannibal tribes, Godzilla” to, well: “when do you masturbate in a post-apocalyptic world, would i find time to live-tweet the apocalypse, how would I find food in a world without yelp”.
I guarantee I wouldn’t have come up with any of those last three if I had just said “I need to find 3 funny topics about the apocalypse to write jokes about”.
So that’s how I do idea generation for whatever I’m writing. I blast the inner critic with volume, then I let him play in the result, tasking him with finding something funny in the mess. It works for us, and we’ve managed to reach somewhat of a balanced working relationship with my writing. He’s still a complete dick about everything else.
When dealing with stories, everything from generating concepts to working out scenes, sometimes we have to be acutely intentional about the process, focusing on a specific goal, “put our minds to it” as they say. Other times, we need simply to give ourselves over to our thoughts and follow them wherever they go. It’s all part of the creative process.
How about you? Have you learned anything recently in thinking about concepts? If so, please share your insights in comments.
Tomorrow: Another Dispatch from “The Quest” about working with story and story concepts.
About Emma: British based writer of ‘the funny’. Lover of cats and bad TV. Often found in pyjamas a bit drunk or a bit hungover. Occasionally does burlesque. Twitter @emmamillions
About Scott: Brooklyn based writer and comedian who bailed on software to focus on writing words that humans could read. Twitter: @scottadhoc
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