[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com posting in [community profile] wetranscripts
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/
This account has disabled anonymous posting.
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting

Profile

Writing Excuses Transcripts

July 2025

S M T W T F S
  12 345
6789 101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 14th, 2025 08:21 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios