How to Get and Develop Killer Story Ideas (Summary)

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How to Get and Develop Killer Story Ideas (Summary)
John Brown and Larry Correia

Life, the Universe, and Everything at BYU on February 18, 2011

From http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfWUtHMlZf8
Transcript at http://community.livejournal.com/wetranscripts/41783.html

Ideas are everywhere! But how do you do it? How do you get and develop great ideas?

Two principles of creativity:
1. Turn your zing sensors on. This means that you are alert, looking around for things that tingle your interest. Things that give you a little zzt.
2. Ask questions. Use creative Q&A to guide yourself in asking questions and coming up with some answers. Your question should focus on building a story: characters, setting, problem, and plot. So you will ask what could cause a problem? What does it cost? Similar, simple questions. Then start listing options.

Remember a farmer's faith. Manure produces gold. Cherish your crappy ideas, throw them on the garden of your mind, and you will get wonderful ideas.

We all have relatively small brain capacities. 3 to 5 items. But, if you make a paper list, you can remember more things because you can see them. So make a list on paper.

The exercise that they did was to take the setting of modern-day Wyoming and ghosts, then list the things we think of for each of those two, and finally twist the results.

List and twist: list normal associations, then twist things.

Larry talked about Monster Hunter International being an homage to B movies. He said he started by listing B movie tropes. The characters are basically B movie stereotypes, twisted to be believable persons.

Michael Crichton basically took a technology and asked what can go wrong.

Mary Higgins Clark says, "Take a dramatic incident that happened to you, or someone you know, or something you read about. Something that sticks in your mind. Then ask what if, suppose, why?"

Websites: http://johndbrown.com/ and http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/