Screenwriting : Ideas vs Writing by Alex R Price

Yes. Write the ideas in a spiral or send them as emails to yourself. Emails work as you can always open the email and add to the story.

They come in Eureka moments, write them all down, store in an email folder so you can quickly send to yourself, they add up mightily quickly.

Organize. Make a list. Write down all of your ideas.

loglines and a paragraph on each one. I keep a word document of them.

Occasionally I’ll read it and think of something knew and I’ll add it to the story. Then one day “tada”, we have a winner and it is the next script.

My current one about a good man in a town gripped by terror and lawlessness. The bad guys seem to be winning. But he stays true. Finally forced to break the law, I punish the crap out of him for betraying his morals. I am not a happy ending kind of guy.

google drive folder called “da movies” with dozens of sub folders, one for every project... then, inside, I open a document (or more than one) with my list of ideas, tone, jokes or whatever i think will help me get back in the groove of the project once I have time to develop it :)

I'm not dealing well with it at all. I feel like I'm going to go insane if I don't get to write them all. I'm thinking of quitting my day job. Give it about a year before I'm forced to move to a coardboard box (but at least I'll still be writing, right?). These people, their stories in my head, they demand to be written, they gnaw at my shadow.

Sarah Gabrielle Baron put them together. Does that person need their own story or can they appear in another

Everyone has way more ideas, thoughts and concepts in their head than they can ever flesh out . The challenge comes when deciding which to pursue - and that depends on your goal. If you want to earn a buck at it; your story must be big enough to appeal to a mass market. Once you've chosen one - stick with it. Don't worry about it - you're never going to run out of ideas.

I have a million ideas. I use criteria to select the best and write it. http://sex-in-a-sub.blogspot.com/2019/07/film-courage-plus-100-idea-theo...

Y'all are way too organized...especially you, CJ Walley! You're a bad, bad man... I've got ideas on napkins, spiral notebooks, in file folders with scrap of paper - in places all over my house and office.

Now where did I put my Million-Dollar Idea...Tennyson Stead :)

I get so many ideas... and the funny thing is, they all always sound so good when I initially get the idea, and then half the time when I read them again I'm like... okay? Why was I so excited about it. Which I've realized is ultimately my best sorting system, get excited then read it again later and most of the time, I learn that my excitement was for nothing. Unlike CJ, I'm still old school... I have this lavender flip file in my desk... it's thick with hand written notes of my ideas, each with a sticker of the title on the plastic sleeve. I am still a sucker for paper and pen. In fact you just reminded me to have a look into my file... it's been a while.

I literally give my ideas away for free, on Twitter, under the hashtag #FreeMovieIdea. To me, the work of making a great film is so much more valuable than the concept of it that I really don’t worry about the fate of my ideas. If I come up with something that I think especially fits the needs of me or someone I know, I hold onto it.

In my opinion, ideas are overvalued and craft is WAY undervalued, in Hollywood and in business in general. Because ANYONE can have an idea, and because having craft takes years or decades of practice, Hollywood agents and managers maintain the myth that ideas are powerful in order to keep the “Cinderella Story” of getting discovered alive. If ideas make you rich and famous, a rep’s job is just to collect as many weirdoes as possible, throw everything they’ve got up on a wall in their pitch, and “see what sticks.” From a sales perspective, it’s easy work - like pulling a slot machine. Salespeople call it “the shotgun approach.”

If success comes from craft, then a rep needs to learn to recognize and sell the craft that drives the filmmaking disciplines they want to represent and sell. Then, they need to go find those people who are masters of their craft, and who could be generating plenty of money if they had help with sales. Then, they have to actually do the sales work. These agents and managers literally can not afford to have more than a few clients... if they still exist at all.

Keeping Hollywood’s focus on ideas means that nobody is an expert because no expertise is ever required to succeed. That focus “levels the playing field” for people who have nothing to offer the entertainment industry to get rich, have fun, and be in the movie business regardless. Obviously, that level playing field isn’t making our industry any more sustainable. Even now, the WGA negotiations and the shuttering agencies and management houses are showing some course-correction from the market. It’s not the 2000’s anymore where everyone wants to be a manager, that’s for sure.

Don’t worry about what happens to the ideas you don’t write about. Write as much as you can. Your craft, and the hours you put in, will wind up being the thing that defines your contribution to cinema.

I would not worry about it, since it is more than you can write anyway. I leave the ideas in my head and the good ones stick for years... others go away, guess it is a natural selection filter kinda thing. Then that doesn't mean being an extremist and never write down anything, sometimes I feel the need /urge to write it down.

Basically: The good stuff sticks and I guess it helps uncluttered the creative mind. (Maybe) (And not waste time in ideas that will not be to your standarts in the end)

I am constantly coming up with ideas but not all of them are worthy of being written down. What I do is pay attention to the ideas that stick with me for about 24 hours. If I'm having a hard time getting the idea out of my head then I know it's something worth investigating further.

Hi Alex,

I think creative people can see ideas in just about anything - physical or metaphysical, real or imaginary. Of course, fleshing out that seed of an idea into a well-executed story that can become the basis of an interesting and marketable film is the harder part.

And yes...I have more ideas than you have jackrabbits in Wyoming. I think most writers probably do as well.

Favorite films set in Wyoming: Wind River; Red Rock West; An Unfinished Life; Brokeback Mountain; The Hateful Eight; Monte Walsh; Close Encounters of the Third Kind; and, of course, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Best fortunes in your creative endeavors, Alex!

Here's Amber's advice to writing as a profession. Key points: less is more and finding your own tribe.

https://twitter.com/KetchupSnowman/status/1196127655302770688?s=20

Ideas are everywhere. There are millions of ideas. But how you assemble them and how you choose among the ideas - choice - that is the art. And to find the right combination is like doing an oil painting and layering in the ideas like paint. That is how it works for me.

I am a highly intuitive thinker though and tend to bounce from idea to idea without explaining my process to arrive at the idea. It is natural to me and a more mathematical mind wants an explanation of an idea and how I arrived at it. It just is. It pops up. For me, the challenge is the choice and explaining the idea to others that think differently than I.