A QUOTE FROM MY BOOK, THE HERO'S DILEMMA
Don't play it safe at this point. It’s crucial to bear in mind how skeletal this part of the writing process is. Don’t try to get everything neatly nailed down at this point. This is the time to get yourself in trouble. A classic question is: Can God make a rock so big he can’t lift it up? This is the point in the development of the story where you can experiment wildly. You can see that we’re sketching out possibilities even as we build the story’s foundation. It’s all fluid, with an experimenter’s sense of feeling out possibilities and trying new things.
If you’re in an innovative company that’s doing a wide-open brainstorming session to explore crazy new possibilities, then you participate in that way. You’re not trying to come up with neat solutions, but to bash up against intractable problems. Your company is hoping you stumble onto some weird backwards-thinking kooky glimmer of an idea that just might work. They don’t want answers, but truly challenging questions that might alter the foundation of business-as-usual. It’s not neat—it’s exploded ideas and failed attempts and ridiculous What Ifs. It’s an angry thought expressed in pure exasperation that makes everyone sit up and say, “Wait, could we actually do that?”
Don’t play it safe. The key word in the entertainment industry is Outrageousness. And because this is a skeletal outline of a potential story, we can go off the deep end. It’s ultra-easy to change an outline because it’s only a few moving parts. This is the time to be adventurous. The more concrete it becomes, the harder it is to shift things around. Don’t feel like we need to have it all figured out at this point since the story’s continually evolving. All we’re doing here is tentatively laying out potential foundation points and working to make this story dramatic. It’s all adjustable as the story grows. I don’t expect to have this story carved in stone until the script is actually written—with everything up until that point being a fluid set of evolving possibilities. Even then, the script itself is just a blueprint for a story that will be performed by actors.
Here’s William Thompson Price discussing this in his 1912 book, The Philosophy of Dramatic Principle and Method:
“Sound your Theme and Material to the bottom before determining upon your play. If you gain the idea for it, hold it in reserve, awaiting the possible chance for something better. The idea will inevitably be modified or improved in some manner. There may be hundreds of plays in that Material so why take the first thing that occurs to you? You may get a great drama instead of a superficial one by questioning and cross-questioning everything. At least you will get substance rather than shadow… nothing in details, or absolutely in outline can be fixed until you have taken all your bearings and sounded all the possibilities… The deeper you go, the more suggestive the facts.” https://bit.ly/3wFMB9b
Visual Artist at Self-Employed
3moyes i did know this