Where Do Stories Come From?
Do you ever wonder where the stories you love came from? I’m not talking about the ones told from you from something that happened in real life or that you learned from history. I’m talking about the made up stories. The books, movies, plays, comics, and TV shows you love.
Over the last twenty years I’ve come up with stories that I thought would make a great movie or book in a split second of inspiration. From the moment, the outlines and eventually the details of a story begin to form.
Some years back a friend told me that the most over-pitched idea that Hollywood producers here is a story about cloning Jesus. That made me think, Okay if cloning the King of Kings is out, then what about cloning the King of Rock N’ Roll? Who wouldn’t want to see a movie called Cloning Elvis? Elvis fans like me would flock to it.
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling said the entire idea for Harry and his seven book series popped into her head while sitting on a train delayed at King’s Cross Station.
In 1990, I was in Manchester looking for a flat, but I decided to take the train back to London and the idea for Harry Potter fell into my head during the journey. I had been writing since I was six, but I had never been as excited about an idea as I was for this book. Coincidentally, I didn’t have a pen and was too shy to ask anyone for one on the train, this gave me the full four hours on the train to think up all the ideas for the book. I began to write ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ that very evening.
At the first screenwriting conference I ever attended, Scott Rosenberg said that that idea for the movie Beautiful Girls came to him while at his parents home back east. He was standing at the window watching the snow plow and thought, No one ever makes movies about guys who plow snow. Less than two weeks later, he’d written the script that included three characters who indeed plowed snow.
It happened to me the other day too. I was complaining about the summer smog here in Southern California. I told a friend they need to invent something that eats smog. Then it hit me. The government develops a nanotechnology that eats the smog out of the air. But after all the smog is devoured, the nanites need something else to eat, so they turn on the humans living below.
It’s moments like that which are amazing, but not all ideas are necessarily good. Some are just ideas that sound cool, but when fleshed out won’t grow into great stories. Maybe the movie about the smog/human eating microscopic robots would make millions and spawn 14 sequels. Or maybe it would be the next Ishtar or Gigli. I really don’t know.
Fortunately, ideas are also a dime a dozen. That may sound discouraging, but it’s not. Whenever an idea doesn’t work out, the first inclination we storytellers have is to get depressed and think we have no talent. But there’s always another idea. It could be a far better idea that impacts far more people when they encounter that story.
Take George Lucas for example. His first feature film was THX-1138. It left most people wondering, what the hell was that? That didn’t stop him. In fact his next three ideas – American Graffiti, Star Wars, and Raiders of the Lost Ark – impacted audiences on monumental scales and have had a lasting impact on movies.
But yes, a bad idea or the poor execution of a good idea, can take the legs right out from underneath we storytellers. It could make us not ever want to tell a story again. However, we have to. We have to tell stories. We were born to tell stories and coming up with ideas is easy. It’s growing and properly developing that idea so that it can powerfully impact its audience that’s the hard part.
After all that’s why we do it. And as long as the ideas keep coming, we storytellers have a responsibility to craft that idea and turn it into a powerful story for those who are unknowingly, yet eagerly awaiting our story.