How to determine a worthy story concept?
GITS reader Nigel A sent me an email. I asked if I could paste the relevant comment here and he agreed:
My situation is probably fairly typical in that I have a good solid roster of ideas which I think could really work, that are not whimsical but which I think would make good or even great movies. But I can only write them one at a time, the problem being which one do I work on next? It can take months to go from conceiving of an idea to executing it. Once complete there are quite a few avenues to get feedback on the finished draft (included peer review on TriggerStreet and suchlike), but what if the feedback is you just wasted x months? That you should maybe have done something else?
What I think would be extremely valuable would be a form of early intervention. Some kind of service where you pitch something in a couple of hundred words or less and can get some kind of assessment as to its dramatic potential, its marketability etc., even more active feedback such as “For this to stand out from others in its genre you would have to…”.
I try to be very disciplined with myself when evaluating my own ideas, but the problem is they are my own ideas, and an outside opinion could be very instructive, and I’m sure it could be for a lot of people.
Nigel, here’s to you for recognizing how absolutely critical the story concept is to the marketability of a screenplay. With marketing costs over $50M on average per movie, and so much of marketing a movie is based upon selling the story concept to consumers, if for only that reason a writer must set a terrifically high standard in choosing which story to write.
It would be great if there were a public forum in which writers could post loglines or ideas in their conceptual stage, however it is impossible to protect (legally) a story in such an amorphous state. So one reason I’m posting Nigel’s comment is to ask any of you if you know of any way around this issue.
I suppose there are script consulting outfits who will assess a story concept, but I don’t know of any off-hand. And then you, the writer, would have to feel confident that these people knew what they were talking about.
In the past, I’ve held my ‘door’ open to students, both current and former, to lob me a quick logline if they wanted my opinion on it as a story concept. But I’m so damned behind now on my script reading, please don’t dare lob me anything just now!
No, the best I can do — beyond asking your opinion per above — is to go to my default mode: teaching. One of the skills a professional screenwriter needs to develop is the ability to distinguish a great story concept from one not worthy of writing as a script.
For starters, go here. These are five posts titled “Is my script big enough to be a movie?” And one of the five questions is: “Does my script have a big enough story concept?”
Next if you haven’t checked out these posts “A Script Reader Speaks”, you should do so because there are a number of times where D.C. Mar, the script reader who so kindly answered a series of questions I put to her, talks about the importance of a story concept, even providing some ‘tools’ for analyzing concepts.
Then you can go here in which I reference three projects that got set up last July that each had good story concepts. And I provide in that post three links back to posts I had about ‘similar but different’ which is a key aspect of current Hwood thinking re movies, story concepts, etc.
Beyond that, let me toss out this question: How do you determine if you’ve got a great story concept on your hand — or only a passable one?
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