Issue #9 - Brainstorming a New Idea (18 min read)
Welcome to Issue #9!
Fair warning, this is more process-oriented than usual, a step-by-step look at the early brainstorming of a new idea. I bolded the tools and key turning points along the way. If you decide to check it out I hope it sparks a new idea for you or gives you an added tool for your own process.
By the way, if you're experiencing higher than normal levels of FOMO, impostor syndrome, insecurity, or feelings of uncertainty about this business and your place in it this week, I'm right there with you. A lot of it came bubbling to the surface for me for various reasons. I'm dealing with it the best way I know how, focusing on the things I can control, like doing the best work I can.
If you're not experiencing all those things, more power to you.
Either way, keep going.
Like Dot said to Georges, "Give us more to see..."
Brainstorming a New Idea
In Issue #5 I posted a pitch for a series called INSIGHT. I thought it might be interesting to start at the very beginning of a new idea and walk you through how I think it all started to take shape in my mind and some nuts and bolts process stuff that I did while fleshing it out.
A lot of writers think it’s crazy to post your ideas because of theft but as I was working on this a movie dropped on Netflix built around a similar device (literally) so I honestly don’t know how viable this is now and I already broke it down for parts. I’ll post a link to the trailer at the end.
For starters, I don’t know if I’ve ever sat at a desk with a pen and paper and thought, “Okay, let’s come up with an idea today.” I take in a lot of information and inspiration, everything from the conversations I have to the things I experience, to the articles I’m reading, things I see on Twitter or Digg, books or short stories, songs I’m listening to, random images, you name it. Some of it ends up in what I imagine is like a raw data matrix of “stuff that interests me” in my head.
I also keep an INSPIRATION FOLDER on my notes app where I copy and paste images and links. Every now and then I scroll through it to refresh my memory of what’s there, to see if it clicks with whatever’s going on in my life, or if it connects to some other new interest.
At some point one of these bits will grab my attention and I’ll find myself asking a series of questions about it. It’s not even all that conscious at first, I’m just following the lead of one answer to the next about a molecule of something I’m interested in, playing “what if.”
This often happens during an INDEPENDENT ACTIVITY, like walking the dog, making pizza, playing pinball, or just driving around. My conscious mind is engaged in some other activity, meanwhile my subconscious is sorting through stuff in the background and piping in from time to time to say, “Hey, is this anything?”
Asking those questions may reveal connections to other things in the matrix. Once a connection is made (or discovered) those two ideas form a nucleus that has a bit more mass. It picks up gravitational force and starts pulling other new ideas in and connecting to other points of data.
It’s like the creative version of “frequency illusion.” Like how you buy a certain make, model, and color of a car and then suddenly it seems like that car is everywhere. Once I’m down the rabbit hole of thinking about an idea I see connections to it all over the place.
Here’s one specific recent example:
I read a lot about neuroscience. I understand very little of it but I’m fascinated by ideas about the nature of consciousness, memory, and identity. My play REPLICA is about a woman and her experimental clone undergoing a series of tests to determine how close they got the replica to the real woman. If they have the same memories, core beliefs, likes and dislikes, etc, does that mean they’re the same person? At what point is the replica really her? This is one of the fundamental questions that science-fiction tackles which is, “What does it mean to be human?”
Recently I came across an article by a writer and neuroscientist named David Eagleman on a new theory scientists have about why we dream, called “defense activation theory.” The basic idea is that dreams engage our visual cortex, holding that territory in our brain while we’re asleep so that neighboring senses don’t overtake it and claim it for their own. The article explains all this in great detail and with many specific examples I won’t even attempt to relate to you here.
(Side note, the article opens with a section about how many blind people have developed the skill of "echolocation" as an example of the adaptability of our brains. The whole thing is fascinating, linked below.)
What grabbed my imagination was a section about the possibility that, “Dreams are hallucinations triggered by the lack of visual input,” and “We might expect to find similar hallucinations among people who are deprived of that visual input while awake.” He gives the example of prisoners in solitary confinement.
My brain went right to interstellar travel and the cryo-sleep trope we’ve seen in so many of our favorite sci-fi movies. We take it for granted that these people have been asleep for a very long time and when they wake up they’re going to thaw out, throw up, and be fine.
My FIRST "WHAT IF" was, “What if an astronaut woke up from cryo-sleep and because of the lack of visual input they struggled with their perception of reality? That would make them a danger to the rest of the crew, or at the very least a danger to the mission.” But that immediately felt like a lot of things I’d seen before. Michael Biehn in THE ABYSS.
So I started thinking about how to SUBVERT THE TROPE. After a bit it occurred to me that in real life this is one of the problems we’ll have to solve before ever we get to that point. They’ll have to do tests, a lot of them, here on Earth, long before we get to that point.
Presumably someone will have to be the very first human to try out cryo-sleep for space travel. WHO would do that and why? Asking that question put me on the trail of a character. My mind went to “An astronaut who volunteers for the experiment.”
During EXTANT I wrote a bio that was my head-canon backstory for Sparks, the head of our fictional space administration. The story was that he was an astronaut who was meant to be on the first manned mission to Mars, which would have likely been a one-way trip. But there was an accident, he was injured, and the mission ended in failure, which meant he never got to go. Because he wasn’t one of the first six people on Mars his name wasn’t going in any history books. What if you trained your whole life for one moment and it was taken away? I wrote a whole bio for him that never made it into the show. I pulled it up - SAVE EVERYTHING - and read it. This is a guy still in search of a story. I found a connection to something that had been in the matrix for nearly seven years.
I don't always picture actors right away but immediately I'm picturing Denzel or Clooney, both of whom are on my dream list to work with.
This is a guy who would be absolutely devastated but he puts his ego aside because he still wants to contribute. He can still be part of the future in space by helping to make interstellar travel possible. So he volunteers to help a neuroscientist who is designing a “stasis pod prototype.” Another character has entered the chat.
Because I’m thinking about a guy for the astronaut this neuroscientist appears as a woman. I start asking questions. WHO IS SHE? WHAT DOES SHE WANT? What are her intentions? Does she have a similar motivation? Is it to make a name for herself? Is she in a race against other companies to win this contract? Is she principled? Desperate? What is their RELATIONSHIP DYNAMIC?
(At some point I SWAP GENDERS and consider how that changes the story. Does it make it more interesting? Reveal an angle I hadn’t thought of yet? A male doctor studying a sleeping female astronaut verges on creepy so I keep the original makeup.)
Back to the astronaut, I kind of know his backstory but all I have is a jumping off point. He doesn’t have a tangible goal. Here’s where I start being a little more conscious about the questions I’m asking. Again, What does he want? What happens if he doesn’t get it? Why does it have to be now? Basics of drama.
To answer these questions I need more info about him. This is where I usually move to my NOTEBOOK, to do some new STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS CHARACTER WORK.
Who else is in his life? What if he had a girlfriend who was also scheduled to go to Mars? He was grounded but it’s not like he could ask her to stay. This was her dream too so of course he told her she had to go. There’s a chance he’ll get there someday but the odds of that are low at this point. So now she’s on Mars and he’s here. He’s stuck on Earth and kind of stuck in his life.
His life is already in stasis.
I think I found my title.
But it also gives me some idea about his end point. He’s stuck in his personal life because of the breakup and he’s stuck in his professional life because of the failure of this mission. On the other side of this story he needs to be ready to move on. He needs to be coming out of stasis.
But that’s still just a vague notion of narrative movement in need of more specifics.
What if a good friend was killed and he’s carrying a heavy burden of guilt? That mission was his responsibility and someone lost their life. Volunteering to be in this stasis pod for days, weeks, maybe a month at a time, he makes some kind of breakthrough. Still not concrete.
What if the problem is that because this is an experimental technology it could have an adverse effect on his brain? What if part of this experiment is having stimuli pumped into your brain to bolster the active defense process which leads to incredibly lucid dreams?
This pushes it squarely into paranoid thriller territory — but what if after the first few sessions he starts seeing things in real life that lead him to believe his mission was sabotaged? Maybe he sees something in this deep lucid state that he never thought about or questioned before, but now he’s looking into it and verifies it IRL.
He tells the neuroscientist and she has reason to think that maybe what he’s seeing isn’t real, that they’re hallucinations caused by his brain being stimulated artificially for the experiment. That becomes the source of the CONFLICT between them but it’s also their internal conflict.
He thinks that something he found in his dream is the key to unlocking the mystery behind his failed mission. Solving that mystery could absolve him of the guilt he’s been carrying. Once he learns that he may be hallucinating he tries to let it go but he can’t. He wants to believe it because then everything makes sense. Then it wasn’t his fault.
From the scientist’s POV it looks like he may be losing his grip on reality because of her stasis pod experiment. If this is her life’s work and she’s so close to securing a contract with the space administration would she cover that up? What if he’s right?
That becomes the central mystery: did someone really sabotage his mission or is he losing his grasp on reality?
I’ve strayed pretty from my initial spark of “defense activation theory.” It’s the on ramp for the story now, the thing that kicks it into gear.
Also, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m still living in Tropelandia with the paranoid thriller aspect of it all. That may be a TONE issue, which means keeping a hand on the throttle and not letting plot twists overrun the character drama. I can’t go adding faceless bad guys or shadowy cabal. It needs to stay firmly rooted in the simple emotional journey. This experiment may be driving him over the edge but both of them are too emotionally invested to stop.
I’m remembering that, “Ruthless ambition leads to its own destruction” is the PREMISE that Lajos Egri lays out for MACBETH. This feels like similar territory for the neuroscientist.
This setup is enough for me to devote a separate notebook to this idea and put a STASIS WHITEBOARD folder on the Notes App, a dedicated inspiration and research folder for this project. I start throwing ideas in there as I go, copying and pasting articles into it, and dragging in photos that provide inspiration. Before I start adding scenes I’ll write the LOGLINE that synthesizes the PLOT AND EMOTIONAL STORY into a few sentences. That will be the axis these scenes will hang on.
From there I would start thinking of TENTPOLE SCENES, the beats that logically arise. There’s the scene where he learns about this program, the scene where he volunteers, his first time in stasis, the scene where he tells the neuroscientist that he was sabotaged, her reaction, etc.
Eventually I do a BEAT SHEET or put all my scenes on INDEX CARDS. Recently I've been using a large SKETCHBOOK, whatever helps me see how the story is flowing and overall structure. This is all before I ever pull up Final Draft and type "INT." or "EXT." If I'm on my own I rarely detailed OUTLINE, but at the very least I do a beat sheet with LOGLINES FOR EACH SCENE. Once I have that I'm ready to write the script.
In terms of STORY DARWINISM (Issue #5) this has a lot going for it. I don’t see a TV engine that can drive a few seasons worth of story. I think this is a feature that can easily wrap itself up in two hours. There’s a protagonist I think the audience will care about early on. There are roles (I think) that two great actors would want to play. There are big thematic ideas to explore. And there’s opportunity for genuine surprise.
I was pretty excited about this one.
Then I saw the trailer for OXYGEN on Netflix.
The logline: After waking up in a cryogenic unit, Liz fights to survive and remember who she is before her oxygen runs out.
Jesus, that’s a hell of a logline and a terrific trailer. Intense, claustrophobic, emotional, contained. It looks so well done. I haven’t watched the movie yet. Not out of spite, I just haven’t had a chance. But there’s an experimental cryo chamber, questions of memory and identity, a scientist as lead character. It kind of zapped my enthusiasm for this incarnation so I went back to the whiteboard and came up with a different angle.
I didn’t delete my previous work though. Like I said, I SAVE EVERYTHING.
I never know when some new spark of inspiration from the matrix will bring one of these ideas up again. Until next time...
Oxygen | Official Trailer | Netflix — www.youtube.com No escape, no memory, 90 minutes to live.Liz is running out of oxygen and time, in order to survive she must find a way to remember who she is.Oxygen, an Ale...
Why Do We Dream? A New Theory on How It Protects Our Brains | Time — time.com How did the visual cortex of our ancestors’ brains defend its territory while sleeping? Neuroscientists explain why we dream.
Dropbox - Sparks.pdf - Simplify your life — www.dropbox.com Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Never email yourself a file again!
(The dropbox link is to the original character bio I wrote for the character of Sparks on EXTANT.)