Author: Scott William Carter

Here’s another technique to take advantage of a fairly well-known fact, which is that some of the best new ideas come from combining two unrelated ideas together.

One of the ways I like to do this is by doing what I call Crazy Hollywood Pitches.  It’s fairly straightforward:  Make four or five columns of movie titles, separated by genre (horror, science fiction, romantic comedy, etc.), and then combine them at random in a MOVIE TITLE #1 meets MOVIE TITLE #2 fashion.

So let’s say I have Driving Miss Daisy in one column, and the first three movie titles in my science fiction column are Star Wars, Blade Runner, and Dune.  That would give me . . .

• Driving Miss Daisy meets Star Wars
• Driving Miss Daisy meets Blade Runner
• Driving Miss Daisy meets Dune

If you’re laughing out loud at these, that’s great.  This should be fun.  Laughter is a tonic for a tired imagination.  But then ask yourself how you might really make one of these crazy pitches into a story, and don’t be afraid to change the idea to see where it leads you.  What if the story’s about an android driver shuttling a prejudiced old man to his retirement home on another planet?  What if their ship crashes?  What happens next?

It’s just one idea.  If it doesn’t lead anywhere, scrap it and try another.  If you’re looking for an easy way to make lists of movie titles, try IMDB.com.

-+-

One of the ways I can justify writing these “Games Writers Play” posts for free is by putting a donate button at the bottom of these posts.  If you find them useful, even a small donation of a couple dollars helps justify my time.  If you can’t donate, please help spread the word by linking to these posts.  Thanks!

-+-

All posts in this series can be found at
www.gameswritersplay.com

“Writers are, pretty much thieves, stealing ideas from other people who didn’t have the foresight to write them down, and then from the people who did have the foresight to write them down.”  — Lemony Snicket

Probably the number one question I get asked — especially by people who aren’t writers — is where I get my ideas.  The truth is, ideas are a dime a dozen.  They can come from anywhere.  It’s what you do with those ideas that matters.  One of the common mistakes that a lot of beginning writers make is thinking that ideas are a finite resource, that if you think of a good one then you’d better protect it fiercely because you don’t want anyone “stealing it” from you.

In actual practice I’ve often found that the ideas that I find most precious, the ones that I hold onto the longest, turning them over in my mind, shaping and molding them, don’t often turn out as well as the ones I think up on the spot.  I think this has something to do with letting an idea go where it takes you rather than trying to force an idea into a preconceived box.

Here’s a technique that I like to call “ripped from the headlines,” to borrow Law and Order’s tagline, that can help you think up ideas on the spot: Use a newspaper headline to generate a story question.  Don’t read the article.  Just use the headline to ask questions.

Instead of an actual newspaper, head over to a news search site like http://news.google.com and type in something like “burglary.”  You’ll come up with a bunch of articles.  Choose one that raises questions in your mind.  Trying it now, here’s one that jumps out at me:  “Teenagers Arrested In Marina For Burglary.”

Who are these teenagers?  What were they doing in the marina?  What were they stealing?  Don’t settle for the first answer that comes to mind.  Push a little further.  Maybe one of the teenagers was stealing a rare comic book from an artist everyone thought was dead, a guy living on a small yacht, and the other teenager was trying to stop him.  Maybe this crime leads to an unusual friendship.

Who knows.  You can go anywhere once you have the headline.  It’s just a place to start, and sometimes that’s all you need.

-+-

One of the ways I can justify writing these “Games Writers Play” posts for free is by putting a donate button at the bottom of these posts.  If you find them useful, even a small donation of a couple dollars helps justify my time.  If you can’t donate, please help spread the word by linking to these posts.  Thanks!

-+-

All posts in this series can be found at
www.gameswritersplay.com

Unless you’re living in a vortex where time doesn’t pass — hey, I do write science fiction now and again — all of us have the same twenty-four hours in a day.  Part of being more productive as a writer certainly has to do with different tricks and techniques to increase the quality and quantity of our output when we actually sit down to write — improving our discipline, expanding our creativity, the things I’ve largely been focusing on for the past nineteen games.  But what about just finding more time?

If you’re serious about becoming a professional writer, there’s no way around it:  It’s going to take a huge time commitment.  If you want to dabble and play at it, treating it like a hobby, you can do that on an ad hoc basis, but that’s just not going to cut it if you have lofty ambitions.  You’re going to have to put in many hours of practice.

If you want more time, take a hard look at where your time is going now.  What can you give up?  One of the things I’ve mostly given up is television, which is a pretty big time sink for most of us.

Try giving it up for a week or a month.  You might be amazed at how much more writing you get done.

Now, I’m not one of those people that claim that television is bad for you, or that there’s nothing on, or that it’s a mind control device used by the government to keep us from rebelling.  I actually think there’s far more good shows than there were ten years ago.  There’s also more terrible shows.  There’s just more, which is why we have a bit of both.  If you’re a discerning viewer, you can find some great stuff out there.

But here’s the thing.  Time is a finite resource.  We’re all going to run out of it eventually.  My problem is not so much finding enough time to write, though I can always do better.  My problem is that with a day job and two young children, it’s tough finding the time to read. And television, as good as it can be on its best days, is not reading.  If you want to write teleplays, watch scripted television.  If you want to write screenplays, watch movies.  If you want to write short stories and novels, you must read short stories and novels.  No way around it.

So my point is to set priorities.   Giving up something bad for you, as hard as that is, is much easier than giving up something that’s good for you.  Because, you know, consuming more story, in whatever form, can’t hurt.

However, if you’re not finding enough time to write or read, you might have to give up something else to find it.  Television is a great place to start.

.

-+-

One of the ways I can justify writing these “Games Writers Play” posts for free is by putting a donate button at the bottom of these posts.  If you find them useful, even a small donation of a couple dollars helps justify my time.  If you can’t donate, please help spread the word by linking to these posts.  Thanks!

-+-

All posts in this series can be found at
www.gameswritersplay.com