Generating story concepts
Scott Smith at the blog Screenwriting from Iowa posted some background on the movie Back to the Future. Here’s a money quote from that movie’s co-screenwriter Bob Gale:
We outline the story on index cards before we start detailing the individual scenes. And we come up with our index-car structure nonlinearly; we always like to know what the ending’s going to be before we really got started. You can’t take a trip if you don’t know where you’re going…The (Back to the Future) script was rejected over 40 times. Nobody read it said, ‘Oh, we’ve got to make this.’ You know there had been no time-travel movies that had made that much money prior to Back to the Future, and again the mashup of genres was confusing for some people. We’re talking 1981, 1982…Porky’s was around that time, and that’s what everybody’s idea of comedy was — fart jokes and naked girls.
Then Scott found this interview with Gale in which he talks about how he came up with the idea for the movie:
The inspiration for making the movie, for coming up with the story is that I was visiting my parents in the summer of 1980, from St. Louis Missouri, and I found my father’s high-school yearbook in the basement. I’m thumbing through it and I find out that my father was the president of his graduating class, which I was completely unaware of. So there’s a picture of my dad, 18-years-old, and I’m thinking about the president of my graduating class, who was someone I would have had nothing to do with. He was one of these “Ra-Ra” political guys, he was probably Al Gore or something. Captain of the debate team, all this stuff. So the question came up in my head, ‘gee, if I had gone to school with my dad would I have been friends with him?’ That was where the light bulb went off.
God, I love stories where we get to see that single moment of inspiration. It’s perhaps the most confounding and yet rapturous part of the writing process: coming up with a great story concept. You can go about banging your head against the creative wall for months, generating one marginal conceit after another, then — BAM! Something hits you just the right way and you know you’ve got it: a killer story idea.
I’m just now finishing up some lectures for an upcoming Screenwriting Master Class course “Core I: Structure and Concept.” Everybody gets all hot and bothered about screenplay structure, which is hugely important and why we teach it as the first part of our four Core classes. But concept is equally important. A marginal or only so-good story concept can sink a script project before you even type FADE IN. Fortunately there are proven ways to generate story ideas, which we get into in the Core I class, as well as a method to assess the viability of a concept. The 1/3–1/30/11 section of the class is sold out. But we’re offering it again February 28-March 27, 2011.
To check out all the course offerings at Screenwriting Master Class, go here.
For more of Scott’s post on Back to the Future, go here.
By the way, you remember my A Story Idea Each Day for a Month extravaganza I did last April where I gave away 30 story ideas? I’m doing it again this April. Already have 25 ideas stored and ready to post.
If you’re not thinking up story ideas each day, you’re not doing yourself any favors. The best way to come up with a great story concept is to come up with a lot of story concepts.
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