DEVELOPING YOUR CONCEPT

I read a lot of scripts. I see a lot of stories that fail. There are common traits that are done poorly in unsuccessful screenplays and done exceptionally well in successful screenplays. 

It doesn't matter what your story is about. It doesn't matter what your genre. Who your target audience is. All successful films do certain aspects of their story well. 

The first thing to get right is CONCEPT.

A lot of screenplays fail even before they've begun. They fail the concept test. 

A lot of people write screenplays without even identifying what the core concept of their story is. 

A great test is to write down what your screenplay is about in around 10 words. Can you summarise your story in one simple sentence? 

Well done if you can. You've passed the first part of the concept test. Next, is the real test. Is that sentence engaging? Does it make your audience want to engage with that film? Does it inspire people to read your script? 

If you can't distill your concept to one simple sentence it's likely your story isn't as developed as it needs to be. 

Let's look at... 

THE SIXTH SENSE. 

A young boy sees dead people. That's a powerful concept. The core idea could be executed an infinite amount of ways.

Execution of the concept is just as important as the concept itself. But we'll get to how best to execute your idea in later posts. 

JAWS

Shark attacks summer vacation town. Or... Man v Shark. 

While this concept is not very new these days, consider how powerful that concept was in 1975. 

A great exercise is to take your top ten films and distill their concepts. Look at these concepts. You will notice that all these films are interesting at their core. 

A great exercise is to do this same process with films that tanked. Films that were unsuccessful. Distill their stories to a simple sentence and look at what you have.

Another exercise is to create a concept using the hook method. Write down as many ideas as you can about anything at all. But make sure that your concepts are really engaging. Think of click-bait. What will get someone to click that link, what will get someone to read your story? 

Start writing down ideas that are ridiculous. Start with anything that pops to mind. Treat this process like a stream-of-consciousness exercise.

There's no right and wrong to it. Just let the ideas flow, no matter how stupid they may seem. 

IDEAS CREATE IDEAS

What do I mean by that?

You don't land on a GREAT idea every time you stop to think of an idea for your next script. If it were that simple EVERYONE would be churning out killer scripts. 

It takes time and work to develop great ideas. 

You start with a stupid idea about an alien that loves hot air ballooning. Then you ditch the idea of the alien and you focus on hot air ballooning, but that doesn't work and you think about flying in general, perhaps that takes you to a story about aviation, but that you can't come up with anything great there, so you take aviation and branch off from that. 

What you're doing here is expanding your thinking scope. You're allowing your mind to jump from one idea to the next in a connected way. 

This process won't immediately yield a fantastic idea, but what it's doing is getting you to think outside of your comfort zone. 

When you start to think outside of the range of thoughts you normally have you'll find that you land of a new subject or a new way of looking at a subject that you wouldn't normally have considered.

Keep doing this exercise for ten minutes everyday. You'll create a lot of terrible ideas, but out of those terrible ideas will likely be the seed for a great idea.