Monday, October 04, 2010

The Script

Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.-Stephen King

There are a great number of stories that I have laid by the wayside in my day. I probably have about four different scripts that stop after about ten pages sitting in my external hardrive. I think that the most frustrating part about writing stories is that like it or not, they have to be organic. As a writer I have to feel something when I am writing and if I don't I stop after about ten pages. I think that Mr. King is suggesting that good story ideas are elusive and you don't really understand why out of all your ideas you put one specific one down on paper.

The idea for this still untitled short film came to me in a daydream. More specifically, it started with a single line of dialogue. I would tell you what it is but the scene is sort of the climax of the film and I'm not going to spoil my own film. The point is this one line of dialogue became the genesis of the entire story. I quickly started to create the characters and why this sentence would be said by one of them. From there I started to put them into a larger story and before I knew it, I had a finished screenplay.

I have no idea why it happened, but I was left with a compulsion to tell this story. I knew that this is the one that I wanted to actually produce and set out in the world.

So, here we go.

1 comment:

Kate D said...

very cool. i bet i can guess the line. :)