Story Ideas: Titles
As it turned out, our collective conversation about “Go Into The Story: The Quest” over the last couple of weeks has, I think, sharpened everyone’s awareness about the importance of working with the strongest story ideas possible.
Let me repeat something I can not verify factually, but I know it in my gut to be true: At least 50% of the value of your screenplay to a Hollywood buyer is the story concept.
And that’s why as you all were busily working up your loglines for “The Quest” — all 4000 of them! — I hammered you with a daily series of posts:
Story Ideas: The two most important words are ‘what if’
Story Ideas: Halliwell’s Film Guide
Story Ideas: Think international
Story Ideas: Test your concept
Story Ideas: Challenge yourself
Story Ideas: Get my [bleeping] attention!
So this week, I propose to round out this subject of generating story ideas with five more posts, thus giving you a myriad number of ways to approach this incredibly important aspect of the screenwriting process.
Today: Titles.
A great title can lead to a great story idea and a great script. It can suggest a plot, key characters, the central conceit and story genre.
I went through the list of spec scripts that have sold this year and plucked out some of the projects whose titles caught my eye:
The Incredible True Story of Jessica & Drew Who Accidentally Boned on the Way to the Wedding
Lauren Pemberton Is No Longer In A Relationship
Some of these conjure up more in the imagination than others, but each is effective in its own way. In fact, I can say that as I have been reviewing all the “Quest” loglines, there are some ideas I have selected for consideration where the title itself grabbed my attention.
More to the point, why not spend one story idea session per week brainstorming titles? That could be a great way of generating a concept… and setting up your project with an eye-catching title.
Tomorrow: Franchise.
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