Where Screenplay Ideas Come from and How to Generate Your Own

Where do ideas for screenplays come from?

If you’ve ever heard a working screenwriter asked this question, you might get the sense that most movie ideas hit scribes as bolts of genius hurled down from Mt. Olympus by the ghosts of Plato, Shakespeare and Paddy Chayefsky — rewards for typing such prose that merit the story gods’ favor.

As the writer scrunches his face in thought (probably imagining a lightning bolt-clutching Chayefsky in a toga), the usual response is to say that they “don’t know” where their ideas come from. Which is often followed by the equally worthless disclosure of the location of the creative rendezvous — “My ideas come to me in the shower.”

I believe that many writers’ own thoughts are too flooded with plot points and character arcs to wonder where it all originates. But the question is worth looking into. Where do film stories come from? If a writer lacks existential curiosity of his own creativity and merely brushes it off as “divine inspiration,” then who is to say that blessed spigot won’t turn off just as wondrously as it switched on?

The good news is, if your spigot is on, it’s doubtful that it will ever turn off — barring some kind of mental collapse. Creativity is to screenwriters as algebraic prowess is to engineers. The real question is whether or not a dormant creative faucet can be switched on in the first place.

In high school, I joined a garage band. There were three of us, two six-string players and a bass. No drummer — which was not by choice, but more due to living in a limited talent pool. I don’t know what got into me at age 15 that I was somehow musical enough to be in a garage band. I couldn’t read music and I was all of six months into teaching myself to play guitar. Nevertheless, I was pretty sure that our drummer-less trio was destined for rock greatness. All it would take is a dozen original songs.

While my band mates got more adept at performing covers, I preferred to plink out my own compositions — some of which were decent, but most of them not at all decent. And my lyrics were even worse than my guitar riffs. I never completed a single song. Forget twelve of them.

By the end of high school, my band failed to emerge anywhere outside of our own garages and basements. We could do some passable Metallica covers (minus drums), but we never played anything of our own compositions. Meanwhile, a half dozen other garage bands from our high school played a regular rotation of gigs all over town featuring mostly original material.

I asked a friend who was chief writer for one of those bands how he came up with his songs. His response — much like the scrunchy-faced screenwriter thinking of Chayefsky in a toga — was that he really didn’t know where his music came from. Melodies arrived out of his subconscious and the lyrics followed to fit the tune.

My friend had an “inner-singer.” He could no more keep his dulcet muse from entering his head than will his own lungs to stop breathing. I clearly never had an inner-singer. But what I do have — and I knew it at a young age — is an “inner-storyteller.” While my friend could compose a complete song in a few nights, I could knock out the first act of a movie script with the same ease.

If the notion of having an “inner storyteller” doesn’t seem familiar to you, then you might be in the same boat as I was when it came to song writing. Maybe you’ve started a few scripts here and there, but never finished. Or perhaps you have a collection of interesting scenes and engaging characters that you are unable to organize into a cohesive unit.

I don’t mean to offend you, but this entirely sounds like a writer’s version of my musical foibles.

Now, let’s say I had decided to stick with music after high school. What would it have taken for me — a creative guy but, alas, with no inner-songwriter — to have created something musical worth my time and effort?

The first step would have been to learn the craft. As a grungy teen with an axe-body Gibson, I bristled at the idea of playing covers, but my bandmates had the more practical approach. Learn by mimicking the great artists who came before — then create something new.

But how does a budding screenwriter “play a cover” as it were? There are two ways you can go about it.

The direct way is to grab your favorite screenplays and retype them verbatim. What will you learn by doing this? It’s impossible to guess. But I guarantee you will learn SOMETHING. This exercise is the same as practicing scales in music or shooting free throws in basketball practice. It’s repetitious and mentally untaxing work. But, by waxing on and off (as Miyagi would have you do), you internalize the styles and habits of already successful screenwriters. What ultimately comes out of retyping a script verbatim will depend on which scripts you choose (I recommend a blend of both classic and contemporary) and whatever individual revelations bubble up in your particular head.

The indirect way of “playing a cover” as a screenwriter is to run DVDs of your favorite movies and transcribe them into your own versions of the scripts. This exercise is akin to playing a song by ear instead of from sheet music. Reading music directly doesn’t flex the same mental muscles as hearing a tune and doing your own version of it. The same applies to scripting a movie by watching it instead of reading it. In college, I tried this exercise with Reservoir Dogs and I distinctly remember an ah-ha moment as I saw the nuances of Tarantino’s character development and plot movement via dialogue.

Nearly twenty years later, it’s hard to decipher everything I may have learned by doing script covers. The lessons I picked up are now too ingrained into my writing habits to pull them apart from what I’ve learned by pounding out script after script.

Once you’ve gleaned everything you possibly can from these exercises, then what? Retyping other people’s scripts doesn’t offer the same vicarious thrill of musical covers where you can stand on a club stage and thrash out Linkin Park’s greatest hits. So, after a few “script covers,” you’re pretty much ready to abandon the practice.

Time to go original. Create something brand new, but make it derivative. Before the Beatles were THE BEATLES , the quartet aped the sounds of Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry. Likewise, before Quentin Tarantino put his unique stamp on the film world, he wrote homages to John Woo. It wasn’t until Tarantino siphoned in another influence — Jean-Luc Godard — and married the French New Wave into his appreciation for Woo, that Tarantino’s personal style truly emerged.

I started writing screenplays at the age of eight. These first forays were hand-written in single paragraphs (albeit 30-page-long paragraphs — I’m not kidding) on the back of math work sheets without three-hole punches or brass brads. I kept the pages loose and stored in the flip-up bench of my mother’s piano. I must have written a half-dozen of these 30-page movies by the time I finished grade school. And every single one of them was a Star Wars knock-off.

Then, in 7th grade, my cinematic horizons opened like the vast expanse of the Sonoran Desert when my family took in a Saturday matinee viewing of Raising Arizona.

Few people knew of the Coen Brothers in 1987 — and I certainly didn’t. But this fly-over-country-theater-of-the-absurd spurred a paradigm shift in my writing. This was no calculated turn. The film happened to come at a moment ripe for influence in my development as a writer. I had no clue that I would go home and never write a single epic space battle ever again. Not after seeing Nick Cage’s keystone criminal hold up a quickie mart for a container of pampers while Holly Hunter’s maternal hormones kick into overdrive and Tex Cobb lobs grenades at jack rabbits.

You probably know which movies have influenced you the most. I’m sure if you grabbed a handful of random script pages from your own spec library, you’d find a scene or two that could have come right out of your beloved inspirations. Patterning your own screenplays after the movies you love is perfectly natural and a few scripts derived from your main influence is a great way to progress as a screenwriter.

But here’s the thing about my own screenwriting progression. Even though Raising Arizona threw the emergency brake on my budding career as a writer of overdramatic space operas, I never wrote a single script that was at all like a Coen Brothers movie until more than twenty years later.

The same holds true for my other favorite filmmakers — Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock. No doubt I’d love to pen a satire as smart and hilarious as Dr. Strangelove or a thriller as wondrously suspenseful as North by Northwest. It’s just that my inner storyteller has never buttonholed me in either of these veins. Instead, my primary influences tend toward individual films by such dissonant filmmakers as Coppola, Rafelson and Truffaut. More specifically, it’s the somber loneliness of the protagonists of The Conversation, Five Easy Pieces and The 400 Blows that most often crops up in my own work.

Why is this? I don’t know, I’m not particularly lonely nor somber myself. Nevertheless the most common strain running through my spec work filters off the vicarious isolation found in those films. This was never a conscious turn on my part.

A number of successful artists site unexpected influences on their work. I’ve mentioned how Tarantino’s unique style is the love-child of John Woo and Jean-Luc Godard. Doubtful any other filmmaker could have made that exact pairing work so fluidly. Doubtful any other filmmaker would have even thought of that combination in the first place. But something about those two directors spoke to Tarantino’s inner storyteller so resolutely that he obviously couldn’t ignore it.

Woody Allen’s chief influences were the Marx Brothers and Ingmar Bergman. A blend that actually describes the Allen ethos to a T. And yet, what entertainers are more polar opposite than Groucho and Ingmar?

Jackie Chan names Gene Kelly as his primary inspiration while Bruce Lee not so much. Forget the surface level connection of martial arts, when you run a Jackie Chan action sequence next to a fight scene from Enter the Dragon and compare it to a dance number from Singin’ in the Rain, you will indeed see Chan’s sensibilities gravitate much closer to Kelly than they do to Lee.

Unusual influences are a common trait among artists, but most make perfect sense once expressed. And I think this is the key to pinning down where movie ideas come from. The fountainhead of creativity is simply a natural curiosity about the world around. What comes back through the artist’s filter has to be unique, but should also make sense. In fact, it must be both. A bizarre, unexplainable idea is no more useful to an audience than is something that’s merely old hash.

Can a person with no natural inner-storyteller create something that is both unique and logical? Since abandoning my ill-fated musical career twenty years ago I’ve rediscovered my itch to play within the art form thanks to the Garage Band software that comes free on MacIntosh. Creating digital music this way is a lot like using Final Cut editing software and so I’ve actually been able to complete a few songs that I’m pretty proud of. But most of my compositions are happy accidents born out of placing random beats together. I will never be another Beethoven nor John Williams nor even another John Tesh. And that’s fine. My artistic fires burn elsewhere.

But my tinkering with music suggests to me that, yeah, given enough persistence, a writer with no natural inner-storyteller could create a screenplay that is unique and coherent and entertaining. Run this unique idea through a half-dozen 100-page drafts and you might very well grab attention in the spec market. Just don’t expect any miracles, because there is no ghost of Chayefsky hurling lightning bolts from Mt. Olympus. Unfortunately.

More screenwriting advice by Mark Albracht:

How to write and indie film script.

Four screenwriting tips that annoy me.

Tips on writing a horror movie script.


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