Fresh out of Ideas

It’s a terrible feeling when you’ve finally gotten that draft done and it occurs to you that you must quickly generate another script – but you have no ideas. None. Zero. Your brain feels like Death Valley; tumbleweed blows by at regular intervals and all you really want is a diet coke. Then your stomach growls.

Worse, it seems that other writers have tons of ideas. Great, inspired, vivid ideas. Other writers are literally Idea Machines. And each time they call and tell you gleefully of their great new idea you briefly consider strangling them and stealing it.

I have found over time that writers seem to be divided into two camps: the Idea Machines and the Ponderers. I’m a Ponderer. It is a special kind of hell for us Ponderers because most of the time, we got nothin’, just absolutely nothin’. But. There are sources of inspiration to turn to. It’s called the news.

Naysayers are quick to point out that scanning the newspaper for ideas is a dead-end road which ends at the Heart Break Hotel; if a story comes out in the Christian Science Monitor about a three-legged child from Atlanta who sued the Little League for the right to play, six weeks from now, eighteen specs will hit the market about just that. There is some truth to this possibility. Three or four months ago the Atlantic Monthly published a piece about the IRA and indeed, several established writers immediately set to putting together ideas and pitches. Sure enough a friend of a friend of mine found himself having dinner with David Benioff pitching an idea based on a particular paragraph of that article. He has since sold the pitch.

Of course this is a chance we take; when we all drink out of the same water hole, the source becomes muddy and overcrowded. The point I want to make is that reading various media outlets for ideas is the gift that keeps on giving. Writers who stay current not only on hard news but commentary, editorial and opinion pieces find themselves immersed in the sometimes brilliant, often controversial exchange of ideas that goes on between the great minds writing today. It prevents myopia from limiting your vision as a screenwriter.

Keep a file folder of clippings. Every time you see an article that tickles your fancy, cut it out and put it in the Idea File. Sometimes two clippings of seemingly disparate ideas may merge into one incredible premise. Sometimes the clippings will inspire simply a moment in a script you are already writing. Here are some clips I have saved because there was just something about the story that struck me as interesting:

*An elderly woman in the Midwest donated the recycling money she’d spent over thirty years saving – literally from Ensure and Dr. Pepper cans – and purchased a swimming pool for the population of the small town where she lived. In the clipping there is a photo of the elderly woman in a crazy 1920’s bathing suit cutting the ribbon in the modest city pool she’d purchased and stepping in as the first official swimmer. Thirty years she saved her recycling money. And what did she do with the money? She bought a pool because it was too damn hot.

*An entrepreneur purchased land in Virginia, near a Civil War battleground and is in the process of using the land for the first Civil War themed cemetery. That’s right. There will be a Union side and a Confederate side. Those who purchase a plot will, upon their deaths receive a funeral with full “military honors” with period costumes and the pomp and ritual fitting for either the Wah-uh of North’n Aggression or the War Between the States – depending which side of the cemetery you choose to be buried in.

*A small town in Texas went bankrupt when the local factory had to shut its doors. Desperate to keep the tiny town afloat economically, the townsfolk took a vote and decided to turn their little town into a permanent Oktoberfest-style Austrian village. They bought lederhosen, they revamped the main street complete with pointy-roofed facades and cuckoo clocks and they opened a restaurant which serves dark beer, sausage, blood pudding and pfeffernusse. Business is booming.

*A small town in the south is overrun by squirrels. Like, BEN overrun. The town council takes a vote and decides that every Monday, Wednesday and Friday citizens may shoot squirrels between twelve noon and two p.m. So three days a week for two hours each afternoon, the town erupts in gunfire. As of the date of the article, progress had been made.

Are any of these little clips particularly good ideas? Obviously not. Maybe they are just funny little moments doomed to languish in the Idea File forever. Or maybe one day a couple of them will coalesce to become the story of a town called Oberheffenhaffen where a character played by Jim Carrey blows into town one day, buys a sausage on a stick, shoots a squirrel and starts selling plots in the Confederate side of the cemetery. It's THE MUSIC MAN meets HAPPY TEXAS.

My point is this: if you feel like a dry well when it comes to ideas, if searching for them makes you feel desiccated artistically rather than inspired, turn to the world around you. Here are some of my favorite sources:

The Sunday New York Times
Vanity Fair*
The Atlantic Monthly
Defamer
Slate
Salon
The New Yorker
The Utne Reader
NPR (all of it, but This American Life in particular)

*did anybody read the article in VF 2 months ago about the wealthy scion whose yacht ran aground in a national preserve off the Florida Keys? That is a story waiting to be written.

Reading these types of publications will do more than gift you with ideas. It will widen your horizons and save you from the becoming a single-minded, slightly dull-eyed screenwriter with no interest in what’s happening in the world outside of Hollywood. All Hollywood and no world makes Jack a dull boy.

You will also be exposed to some terrific writers, controversial and otherwise; in Vanity Fair alone, regular contributors include Sebastian Junger, Christopher Hitchens and James Wolcott. The New Yorker of course features the brilliantly acerbic movie critic Anthony Lane (if you don’t own his collected reviews and essays “Nobody’s Perfect” run, do not walk to the bookstore), Jeffrey Toobin, Tad Friend, Hilton Als and occasional visits by Steve Martin. The Utne reader is a bi-monthly publication which features the best of the alternative press; it is rich with progressive and alternative points of view and a publication very dear to my heart.

I’m sure readers can contribute many other excellent sources for idea shopping. Do it for fun, do it for edification and do it to suss out the stories, large and small that are happening all around us. Because nothing is as strange as real life and nothing is more frustrating than staring at it right in the face and coming up bone dry.

If you enjoyed this post, follow me on Twitter or subscribe via RSS.