Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?
I remember doing a Screen Training Ireland masterclass in Dublin about five years ago where one of the writers (Jurgen Wolfe) gave his tips for generating ideas when writing for television. Using the characters of The Golden Girls he suggested you write a list of all the main players, Dorothy, Rose, Blanche and Sophia. You create four columns beside each name — if I am remembering this correctly — and then brainstorm nouns. He turned it over to the floor, beginning with Dorothy and those present mentioned glass, car, hat, dog, house. I suggested AIDS test but he didn’t hear me, even though I repeated myself a dozen times. Anyway, he continued on with each character until they all had a few words beside their name. Then we just joined the dots. Dorothy breaks Sophia’s glasses. Rose has to redo her driver’s licence. Blanche has a wedding. Sophia, with no glasses, gets a seeing eye dog. Rose has to take an AIDS test. On and on we went generating hundreds of possible story ideas. It was very productive and a brilliant tip.
How do I do it? I get insanely drunk.
However, if there’s no booze at hand I go to the gym to workout and inspiration always comes, along with the heart palpitations and temporary blindness. I have too many ideas, is the problem, and those goddamn monkey’s I bought are useless at writing them up into coherent scripts.
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