4 Tips To Help Writers Brainstorm Ideas – Scott Myers

Film Courage: Do you have any suggestions to help writers brainstorm? Scott Myers, DePaul University Professor/Screenwriter/Creator Gointothestory.blcklst(dot)com: Yes, well first of all let’s imagine that we’ve got 10 tracks in our brain (that our brain can do 10 things at one time). One of those tracks if you’re a writer should be always sensitive to and aware of is ideas that are out there all over the place. They are in newspaper articles, they are in conversations you hear with people at a coffee shop, they are on the radio, they are on the click, click, click thing.

I know (for example) David Rabinowitz and Charlie Wachtel who wrote BlacKkKlansman I interviewed them and said well how did you guys come up with it and I think David said Well I was trying to avoid writing so I was doing the click, click, click thing and I stumbled on this Facebook article about this guy Ron Stallworth, the first black police officer in Colorado Springs, so when they did this thing with the Ku Klux Clan so that’s how they discovered it. One thing is to be just conscious of it.

The other thing is to be intentional. Like every day you should be thinking about story ideas. Now people are not going to necessarily, it’s going to vary from person-to-person but there have been times in my life where I’ve literally said I’m going to come up with an idea a day (every day) I’m going to come up with something.

And a third point to that related is this Dr.Linus Pauling who was the only person to win two Nobel prizes and he has that saying, “The best way to come up with a good idea is to come up with a lot of ideas.” So that’s a third point that you can do is generate a lot of ideas, keep a file like I’ve got a Word file stretching back to 20-some-odd years ago with literally hundreds and hundreds of ideas (most of them awful). But you keep working that muscle and then eventually I think chances are that you are going to surface something. Now then you have to assess the ideas and so there are certain questions you have to ask like “Well is this big enough to be a movie?

Who is the audience for this? What is the hook? That central conceit.” When I sold K-9 I remember going into an executive’s office and they said “What you guys did was so brilliant.

You took the buddy action-comedy formula (the police cop) and you put in a Rin Tin.” Who was like the biggest star in Hollywood from back in the late 1920’s and 1930’s. I learned a very valuable lesson there which is you always when somebody gives you a compliment even if you didn’t mean it you go “Yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking!” And it wasn’t that at all but that idea I could walk in at any point in time in 1987, I could walk into any producer’s office or any bar where people are hanging out and “What are you working on?” “Yes, I’ve got this idea for K-9.” Loner cop, new partner and a police dog.

They would see that. So, the hook there is the police dog. Nobody had done that you know. So, you look for like INCEPTION, the idea to be able to go inside someone’s mind. GROUNDHOG DAY, we are living that same thing.

What is that thing that is going to set it off from something else. Those are some keys. You have one part of your brain going be intentional about it, be generating a lot of ideas and hoping that you will come up with some really good ones, some strong ones off of that and then assess them to make sure that you feel like it’s big enough to be a movie.

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