STORY IDEAS

By Rob Tobin

You want to write a screenplay. More, you want to BE a screenwriter, which means you want to write a lot of scripts, and to have a long career watching movies being made from your brilliant screenplays, and earning a great living from it. And you’ve been reading this book, getting good little hints and suggestions and shortcuts that will help you market your work, but you want now to get to the meat of things: how do you become a screenwriter or perhaps you’re already a screenwriter and want to learn how to become a better screenwriter? 

Well this chapter will discuss, finally, the first steps you can take to become a screenwriter or a better screenwriter. But first, I want to discuss one last matter, this one less practical than how to use IMDB Pro or LinkedIn to market your work. This one last matter is about priorities.

Life versus “Other Things”

I made a discovery today, one that I should have made many years ago I suppose, but still, a discovery is a discovery. I’ve often used a particular John Lennon quote, “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans,” and I’ve always assumed that my day gig was life, and that my own writing, screenplays, novels and non-fiction books, were the far less important “other plans.”

I was wrong. My day gig is my “other plan.” My WRITING is my life. It may not sound like a big deal; semantics perhaps. But in reality, it’s a huge mistake to make, because it led me to assign far too much importance and energy and intention and JUDGMENT to what I thought were my “other plans.”

Here I was, my whole life, feeling guilty for taking time to write, feeling guilty every time I spent four bucks to mail off a screenplay (back when you used snail-mail to send scripts), every time I bought a new laptop or new version of screenwriting software or paid a huge amount of money to attend a course or a festival or a conference, and it colored everything in my life; the wrong color.

Now, and this is the God’s honest truth, I just interrupted this article to get a cup of coffee, and on the way I met a friend of mine, Erwin, one of the wisest and smartest people I know. I told him of my amazing discovery and he smiled and told me a story that has blown my mind and has me sitting here actually reeling. He told me he’d seen an episode of a sitcom in which there were two married couples living as neighbors; one a younger couple the other a long-married couple. The older husband had spent years collecting pieces of wood, to the point at which the older wife could hardly get out of her car, the garage was so full of this wood.

So the older wife gives the older husband an ultimatum: either do something constructive with the wood or she was going to throw it out. The older husband has no idea what to do with the wood, so the wife ends up throwing it out. Shortly afterward, she goes next door to visit the younger wife. The older wife opens a closet door and sees a full-sized kayak in the closet. The younger wife explains that her husband had bought it years before and that the closest thing he had ever come to using it was one day when the younger wife came home and found him sitting in the kayak in the middle of the living room pretending to be paddling on a river. 

The older wife assumes that that younger wife will eventually throw the kayak out, but the younger wife is shocked and asks why she would ever do that. “That’s the man he wants to be,” the younger wife says, and the older woman gets it, goes back home, recovers the discarded wood and buys her husband some woodworking tools.

I should have known that Erwin would have a story like that at hand, because he understands much more profoundly than I do the reality of things. He knew long ago that the “life” part of the equation was what he does AFTER his day gig, not DURING it. Now I have to adjust my vision, my “reality lenses” to see things as they really are, this new reality, after years of thinking up was down and white was black. 

Wish me well, it’s a heck of an adjustment but it carries with it the promise of great adventure. I invite you to see life in this way, that whatever day jobs, responsibilities, duties and requirements you have in your life are just the other plans, the other stuff, the means to an end, the end being to make time to practice your art and your craft, no matter where that art and craft take you, regardless of commercial success, regardless of prizes or acknowledgments. 

The Original Idea

So, that said, let’s begin at the beginning. An idea for a new screenplay. I have no way of knowing what that idea is, of course. But I do know that that idea is a prerequisite to writing a screenplay. So the first question is: where do you get such an idea, the original idea?

Well, sometimes ideas are just handed to you by the writing Gods. Sometimes this idea is a gift, sometimes it’s a curse. It’s a gift when it triggers a storm of creativity and ideas in you that make the writing of the script a joy. It’s a curse when you sit there with this idea not having a clue as to what to do with it and wanting desperately to give the damned idea back to whoever gave it to you in the first place.

But, gift or curse, the idea is the beginning. But sometimes, you don’t have an idea. All you really have is the desire or need to write a new story, but you literally have no idea, pun intended. 

There are a number of things you can do at this point. You can do what someone (and I wish I could remember what genius came up with this process) called “penstorming” and which I call “keystorming” (as in keys on a keyboard, because who the heck uses pens anymore?). 

Keystorming involves sitting down, clearing your mind and typing until an idea comes to you. That simple. Now there are one or two “rules” to keystorming. One is that you do not take your hands off that keyboard and you do not stop typing until you have keystormed for a set amount of time. So set yourself a length of time for your keystorming, and be prepared to have that period of time feel like ten times as long as it really is. I suggest five minutes to start with.

Second, have a central question that you want answered. In this case of course it would be something like “what shall I write about?”

Third, you will constantly be pulled away from your central question, your mind wandering. When you become aware of this, gently bring yourself back on point.

That’s it. Don’t stop once you’ve started, have a central question, and bring yourself back to point as soon as you realize you’ve wandered.

One keystorming session may not give you the idea you want. If not, try another and another, change the length of the sessions, until you find the idea.

Another technique is to read newspapers. Go to your local coffee shop, buy a paper and just start reading. Write down any ideas of questions or reactions you have to the various stories you read. You may not want to write a script based on an actual event because that involves all sorts of legalities and ownership and rights issues, but certainly be open to inspiration.

Get in the habit of asking “what if?” “What if” is the central question of a lot of screenplays. What if an alien pops up in your closet? What if the world champion reaches down and offers you a chance at the title? What if aliens finally reveal themselves to us? What if vampires not only exist, but live among us without our knowledge? What if two people fall in love on the maiden voyage of the Titanic?

I’m sure there are endless ways to stimulate creativity and to create or discover ideas worthy of being the core of a screenplay. Try the ones mentioned here, and make it a habit – keystorming, reading newspapers, keeping a pen and paper handy to write down ideas as they come to you, or even just the reactions and thoughts you have while going through your day, or the dreams you have at night. And always ask “what if?” Examine and question how you feel about things: Issues, people, places, things, emotions, conditions, events, problems, questions, defeats, victories, fears, religions…

You see, the process of screenwriting is the process of asking questions. You begin with a central question that becomes the core of your script. What if the American President is forced to always tell the truth… and he’s contagious? What if a fanatic exercise bike rider gets the chance to compete in the Tour de France? What if someone wakes up with the power to make things disappear? What if you flee your broken dreams, only to have them hunt you down and demand that you try again? What if a terrorist plants a nuclear bomb at Disneyland? What if a rock and roll star is stranded in a classical music conservatory?

These are all ideas I had that I turned into screenplays. Asking questions is a skill that grows as you practice it rigorously in the beginning. Eventually you are asking questions constantly: what if I woke up on someone else’ bed and didn’t know who I was? What if I died and woke up in Hell? What if I discovered at the age of 50 that reincarnation was real and that I’d lived a hundred lives before? What if I’d left myself some clues from that previous lifetime, clues that I had to find in order to avoid being killed and/or to find a treasure?

What if, what if, what if? And don’t censor yourself. That’s an important one: let those ideas fly. There are no bad ideas. Not every idea will be worth writing a script about, but every idea has a purpose, even if it’s just to eventually get you to the idea that is worth writing down and using as the basis of your next script.

Now let’s go beyond that nebulous piece of encouragement and advice. Let’s look at ideas in a more practical way, relating them to some of the components of an actual screenplay. I have written two other screenwriting books: “The Screenwriting Formula” and “How to Write High Structure, High Concept Movies.” Some of what I’m going to discuss in this book will have been covered in one or both of those books, but I am not just copying what I wrote in those books, I’m writing down what has stuck with me all these years, what works for me and has withstood the test of time.

The Seven Elements

In those other books I wrote that there are seven major elements of a screenplay. Those seven elements were summed up in the acronym HALF JOE, which one of my readers created as a mnemonic. 

Hero: the person through whose eyes you see the story unfold.

Ally: the person who helps your hero overcome his flaw in time to be able to battle the opponent.

Lifechanging Event: the event at the end of Act One that sends the story in a new direction, is instigated by the Opponent, and offers the hero an opportunity or a threat, forcing him to overcome his flaw in order to either seize the opportunity or negate the threat.

Flaw: the main flaw in the hero that prevents him from reacting to the lifechanging event. It is most often not perceived as a flaw by the hero, but rather as a defense against some real or perceived threat, which leads the hero to embrace the flaw as a necessary evil. It is like a suit of armor that both protects and hinders the hero.

Jeopardy: the main threat to the opponent and, later, to others around him.

Opponent: the person who opposes the hero in seizing the opportunity or negating the threat. Also the person who instigates the lifechanging event, and the person the hero battles in the third act.

Enabling Circumstances: the circumstances at the beginning of the story that enable the hero to maintain his flaw.

Some of those terms will be familiar to you, some may not. I’ll get into them in much more depth in the coming pages and chapters, but for now I want to use them as a way to talk about what we might call the Original Idea (which in some ways resembles Original Sin, a term you may be familiar with if you were unlucky enough to be brought up a Catholic as I was).

Using the Seven Elements to Create an Original Idea

Hero

The hero is the person the screenplay is about. You can create an Original Idea by thinking about the hero and asking questions about him. Who might he be? What age would he be? Is it, in fact, a “he” or it is a “she” or maybe even an “it” (an alien, perhaps)? Height, weight, eye color, level of attractiveness, religious beliefs, political beliefs, type of voice, emotional makeup, slow temper or quick, angry or happy, kind or mean, educated or ignorant, smart or dumb or maybe just average intelligence, what work does he do?

There are countless questions you can ask if this is the element you use to start creating your story. The hero may also be the element that is “given” to you by the writing gods. You might be sitting in a restaurant and the most interesting person you’ve ever seen comes walking in. Maybe a hideously ugly man or woman comes in and you realize that they are completely comfortable and confident in a way that runs entirely counter to their appearance. Maybe he or she is making jokes, flirting with the servers, completely at ease even as everyone stares at him or her, or maybe tries not to stare.

Or maybe it’s someone you already know and though you don’t want to tell their story, you do want to use them as the hero of your story. Now, let me stop here and explain that “hero” is synonymous with the term “protagonist,” the main character in your story. The hero is not necessarily heroic at all, it’s just a term. You can write a screenplay with Hitler or Hannibal Lector as your hero, and neither are heroic in any way.

Ally and Opponent

There are at least three people likely to be in your story: the hero, the hero’s ally, and the hero’s opponent, and any one of them might trigger ideas in you, ideas that could form the basis of a screenplay.

Here’s a very simple question that is related to the hero’s ally: what kind of person could help your hero become a better person and accomplish a worthwhile goal?” The ally’s job is to help the hero either directly or indirectly to achieve his goal and to make any changes in himself that he needs to make in order to have a chance to achieve that goal.

What’s an example of an ally being the character who stimulates your creativity? What if you see or imagine a character with whom you would gladly fall madly in love? Now you can make her the central character in your story, the hero. Or, since it’s about the hero falling in love with this woman, you can make her the ally. So if Lady Gaga or Madonna didn’t exist, you could have made them up and then written a story in which the hero falls in love with such a woman. Such a character would naturally stimulate a lot of questions, the first one probably being: what kind of hero would fall in love with such a character? What characteristics would the hero have to have in order to attract such a character? And suddenly you’re on your way to defining your hero and you now have to major elements: your ally and your hero.

Or, perhaps, the woman of your dreams is your opponent. What if you fall in love with the woman of your dreams only to discover she’s a professional bank robber, or assassin, or a world class physicist or artist who has lost her memory, or is running from their fame and lying about their past? All of these are great possibilities, and great story starters. Again the “what if” question comes into play. It could take the form of “what if I fell in love with this person?” Or “what if such a person started stalking me?” Or “what if this person has something I need?” The choices are endless.

Opponents are often the most fun to create, perhaps because we’re not as limited as we might be in creating the hero. When creating the hero we may want them to be sympathetic, for instance, whereas we can go hog-wild with an opponent. We can be sitting in a coffee shop and see a Hell’s Angels type of guy or woman walk in, abusive, foul mouthed, dangerous, and wonder “how would I deal with this person if they came after me or tried to stop me from getting what I wanted?” There’s a whole story right there. “What if I fell in love with that person’s daughter and good old Dad didn’t like it?” That’s Romeo and Juliette meets Hell’s Angels and could make a heck of a script. Or it could be a series like “Sons of Anarchy.”

Enabling Circumstances

Now, what triggers an idea in you may have more to do with a place than a person. You may find a place so fascinating that you want to write a story set against that place. If so, you then need to start thinking of the other elements and how they would fit into that background naturally and believably. A classical music conservatory. A scientific laboratory. The White House. A boxing club. A doomed cruise liner. The bottom of a gold mine. Prison. A whore house. A crack house. A convent.

It may not be a place so much as a setting. An abusive household. A political family. A working class family. A blue-collar town about to be bulldozed in order to make room for a huge resort for the wealthy.

These are all “places” of a sort, settings, backdrops against which the story plays out. And this may be the inspiration for your story. You know that someone at some point saw the Empire State Building or Mount Rushmore for the first time and immediately wondered “what if?” What if you're trapped at the top of the Empire State Building, or what if you’re being chased across the face of Mount Rushmore?

Lifechanging Event

On the other hand, the idea could be based on an event. The Tour de France. A war. An alien landing. An environmental disaster. The closing of a business, the opening of a business, meeting someone new, or perhaps either witnessing, perpetrating, or becoming the victim of a crime. The possibilities are endless.

Here’s an example of an idea for a screenplay that occurred to me based on an event. I had been watching the Tour de France several years ago, when Lance Armstrong was still the dominant long-distance cyclist in the world. I was also at that time exercising on a stationary bike. I tend to be obsessive and aggressive when exercising, always challenging myself to go faster, longer, burn more calories, increase the resistance, etc. And suddenly the crazy idea occurred to me: I wonder if I could work out so hard on my stationary bike that I could get good enough to ride the Tour de France. You don’t get much sillier an idea than that. “Spokes,” a script that is currently in the finals of a major screenwriting competition, and is about a billionaire widower who handles his grief by obsessively and neurotically riding the best-built stationary training bikes in the world, and is then asked to sponsor a new Tour de France team in return for the chance to ride in the Tour himself.

Here’s an event: the President of the United States is touring a secret chemical weapons plant and accidentally gets infected by a manmade virus that forces him to always tell the truth… and he’s contagious. It’s a script I wrote called “Truthies.”

Flaw

The hero’s flaw is a significant element in most stories, and can also be the spark for the Original Idea: you have always wondered about greed, cruelty, impatience, anger, fear and other strong emotions that drive us or hinder us – or that both drive and hinder us. You want to write a story about a fearful man who is forced to face great danger in order to accomplish some worthwhile task. Or a fluffy rom com about a greedy man who falls in love with a generous, free-spending woman.

Jeopardy

Jeopardy. I was a writer on a film called “Dam 999,” that was centered on the danger of an aging dam bursting, which presents obvious jeopardy. Horror scripts are based on special kinds of jeopardy. Everything from war to personal threats and danger are types of jeopardy and could trigger an idea. Nuclear disaster.  Biochemical accident. Crazed lunatic comes home. Abusive husband or wife tracks you down.

So ideas can come from a number of places. If you don’t have one of those wonderful ideas just drop into your lap, look at the different types of elements as described above and start asking that all-powerful question: “what if?” applying that question to each of those elements.

What If?

It doesn’t have to be brain surgery or nuclear physics. If you drive the same way to work every day, what if you took a different route and got lost or ambushed, or saw the woman of your dreams, or hit another car or ended up in the middle of a shoot-out? If you wake up in the same house every day (as most of us do), what if you woke up in someone else’s house and didn’t know how you got there or who the person is? What if you woke up with a person you didn’t know who claimed to be your wife? What if you woke up with your wife who claimed they didn’t know you? If you buy a lottery ticket every week, what if you actually won the lottery? What if you won the lottery and someone stole your ticket? What if you thought you won the lottery and quit your job only to discover you’d made a mistake? What if you won the lottery, and the realized you could not realize a long-held dream, which could be anything from wreaking revenge on an old enemy or wooing an old flame. 

The possibilities are literally endless (pun intended).

Small town setting. What if a big-city guy or gal is forced to move to a small town? What if the small town becomes the site for a toxic waste dump? What if someone buys the entire town in order to bulldoze it to make way for an exclusive vacation resort? What if a psychotic killer starts to terrorize the small town? 

A high-powered attorney. What if he’s cursed with the inability to tell the truth (“Liar, Liar,”) or hired by the devil or maybe the mob or a religious order or is himself accused of a crime and ends up being defended by an attorney he’d beaten and humiliated earlier in his career?

A woman with magic powers. What if an ultra-logical hero falls in love with a witch? What if a government agent falls in love with a witch who the government is trying to capture for her powers? What if a regular guy falls in love with a female superhero and then decides to break up with her (“My Super Ex-Girlfriend”)?

An alien invasion. What if a regular Joe discovers that alien invaders are after him specifically for knowledge he did not even know he had? What if an imprisoned mobster is the only one who can save the Earth from an alien invasion? What if the alien invaders are good guys trying to protect humans from their own stupidity? What if humans are the alien invaders, on an alien planet? What if an alien is the hero facing human invaders from Earth? What if aliens invade and the hero falls in love with one of the invaders?

Fear. What if a soldier freezes during a battle and gets all his fellow soldiers killed, and then has to return to a society that thinks he’s a war hero instead of a coward? What if a coward has to choose between his fear and the safety of his family? 

A mafia hit man. What if an Everyman becomes the target of a mafia hit man through a case of mistaken identity or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time? A version of this is “High Noon.” Of course, there were no mafia hit men back then, but a mafia hit man is just a trained killer with evil intentions, and that describes the outlaws coming to terrorize the town. The story is about Gary Cooper’s character’s decision whether to stay and fight or to flee with his pacifist wife.

Child abuse. What if your hero was abused as a child? What if your hero discovers someone else abusing a child? This is a circumstance that is fertile ground for stories, of course, including the recent “Precious.” 

Suicide: What if your hero is in such despair that he decides to commit suicide? “Leaving Las Vegas.” 

Insanity: What if your hero is unjustly (or perhaps even justly) confined to an insane asylum?

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Girl Interrupted.”

Genius: What if your hero is a genius but also has serious emotional or mental problems?

“Good Will Hunting” and “Beautiful Mind.”

On and on and on. Ideas can drop into your lap, but sometimes you have to look around you, at people, places, things, events, news, politics, sports, emotions, and start asking questions, especially the “what if” question. Believe me, eventually something will catch your attention; life is nothing but a soup of ideas, concepts and stories waiting to be told or adapted or used.

One you have that idea, you’re ready to start talking about story structure, which we’ll look at in the next article.

Rob Tobin is a produced screenwriter, published novelist ("Jo-Bri and the Two Worlds" and "God Wars: Living with Angels", available on Amazon.com and iBookshelf), author of two screenwriting books ("The Screenwriting Formula" and

"How to Write High Structure, High Concept Movies" available on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Google, bookstores, etc.), a former motion picture development executive and book editor, graduate of USC's prestigious Master of Professional Writing program, husband, father, Canadian, and he lives an extraordinarily happy life in Southern California. He is available for writing assignments at scripts@earthlink.net.

Visit his website at robtobinwriting.com or surfcityfilms.net.