Guest Column ‘HTWFA’ | #38 An Infinity of Ideas

When I started out as a story editor at Hanna-Barbera, a woman came into my office one day and in the middle of our conversation said, “There’s no such thing as a shortage of ideas.” That idea struck me like a dart in the forehead. Poing! I agreed with it instantly. It’s proven to be true ever since.

Ideas are infinite. But how do you find those few sparkling gems in that mountain of dull ore between your ears? The first thing you have to do is start digging. More specifically, you have to get your ideas flowing.

Here’s a practical drill that will not only demonstrate that there is an infinity of ideas but will help open up your creative flows anytime they’re stuck. Wherever you happen to be, look around and find an object. Make up an idea about it. It doesn’t matter whether the idea is good or bad-we’re just looking for ideas. Now look at another part of that same object and get another idea. Do this over and over until you realise you can keep doing it indefinitely.

I’ll give you an example. I’m looking at the telephone on my desk:

Idea #1: I discover my phone is magically connected to heaven.

Idea #2: The man who made the buttons on the phone has secretly made one of them out of C-4 explosive.

Idea #3: The government has figured out a way to listen to me via satellite, even when I’m not talking on the phone.

Idea #4: There’s a gremlin inside the phone who secretly adds expletives to my conversations without my hearing or knowing!

Idea #5: My phone number is a winning lottery ticket number.

Are you getting the idea? I could do this forever. And we’re just talking about a mundane telephone. Imagine if we chose something interesting to develop ideas about! The purpose of this drill is to teach you that getting ideas is really the easiest thing in the world. The trick is getting funny ones, or brilliant ones, or ones you can sell. However, in order to find these you’ve got to get the brakes off your idea machine.

The fact that I was open to getting ideas from anywhere gave me the opportunity to get a great story idea. Many years ago I vaguely recalled a past life experience about being in some kind of slave mine. The most oppressive thing about it was that the mine was only four feet high, so that everyone had to work while crouching over. This made it hard to dig and even harder to escape. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but a few years later a producer asked me if I had any ideas for an animated feature. I started looking closer at my slave mine “experience,” and it blossomed into a fascinating story about a slave society that knew only of their mine world. There was no outside world to them, nothing to do in life but eating, sleeping, and digging. In fact, they had a myth that told them to never dig up, up was hell. Then, while digging in the mine, the young hero of the story uncovered an object which spoke to him, telling him that his freedom would be found in the world above.

He defied the rules and dug upward until he broke through to the surface of the planet, where he discovered that his people were being unwittingly forced to mine fuel for the starships of an evil empire. Our young hero wound up helping to free his people from bondage. I wound up selling the screenplay, which was released in 1984 as Starchaser: The Legend of Orin, the first 3-D animated feature ever made.

Moral of the story: Your mind is a virtual gold mine of ideas.

(Jeffrey Scott has written over 700 animated and live-action TV and film scripts for Sony, Warner Bros., Disney, Marvel, Universal, Paramount, Columbia, Big Animation, Hanna-Barbera and others. His writing has been honoured with three Emmys and the Humanitas Prize. He is author of the acclaimed book, How to Write for Animation. To work with Jeffrey visit his website at www.JeffreyScott.tv.)

Read other articles from this series:

#1 The difference between live-action and animation writing

#2 Tools of the Trade

#3 It all begins with a premise

#4 The secret to developing your story

#5 Finding the scenes that Must be there

#6 How to write an outline

#7 How to easily transform your outline into script

#8 A brief introduction to script writing

#9 How long should your scenes be?

#10 How to (and NOT to) edit your writing

#11 How to write description