A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 25
This is the 15th year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Why a story idea each day for the month? Because the best way to come up with…
This is the 15th year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Why a story idea each day for the month? Because the best way to come up with a great story idea is to come up with a lot of ideas. And the best way to come up with a lot of ideas is to be proactive in sourcing story ideas.
Today’s story: “Before Dylan, There Was Connie Converse. Then She Vanished.”
Connie Converse was a pioneer of what’s become known as the singer-songwriter era, making music in the predawn of a movement that had its roots in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s.
But her songs, created a decade earlier, arrived just a moment too soon. They didn’t catch on. And by the time the sun had come up in the form of a young Bob Dylan, she was already gone. Not simply retired. She had vanished from New York City, as she eventually would from the world, along with her music and legacy.
It wasn’t until 2004, when an N.Y.U. student heard a 1954 bootleg recording of Ms. Converse on WNYC, that her music started to get any of the attention and respect that had evaded her some 50 years before.
The student, Dan Dzula, and his friend, David Herman, were spellbound by what they heard. They dug up more archival recordings, and assembled the 2009 album, “How Sad, How Lovely,” a compilation of songs that sound as though they could have been written today. It has been streamed over 16 million times on Spotify.
Young musicians like Angel Olsen and Greta Kline now cite Ms. Converse as an influence, and musical acts from Big Thief to Laurie Anderson to the opera singer Julia Bullock have covered her songs.
“She was the female Bob Dylan,” Ellen Stekert, a singer, folk music scholar and song collector told me during my research for a book about Ms. Converse. “She was even better than him, as a lyricist and composer, but she didn’t have his showbiz savvy, and she wasn’t interested in writing protest songs.”
I feel like if I walked into a producer’s office and simply said these words — A female Bob Dylan … before Bob Dylan … then she just disappeared — that probably would catch their attention. It feels like a biopic about a musician and those have proven to do well in theaters and streaming (see: Straight Outta Compton, Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, Elvis).
Three different approaches come to mind. The first is a conventional biopic. If you read the article cited above, you’ll see how they break down Converse’s life in NYC by where she lived a few years at a time. That could lend itself to a series of narrative sequences. But the thing is, she never established herself as a musical performer. No big record deals or performances (the only time she appeared on television was a morning show and that was not recorded and is lost to history). So unlike the musical biopics noted here, the narrative doesn’t build to a Big Gig or even minor ones.
That leads me to a straight ahead drama focusing on a young woman with an expansive creative instinct (she was not only a songwriter, but also a poet and even wrote an opera) living in the Bohemian era in NYC. All leading up to her disappearance.
And that makes me think: Why not embrace the mystery of who Converse was and why she intentionally vanished never to be heard from again? Something akin to the approach in Citizen Kane, someone setting out to find Converse, tracking down her life through a series of people who knew her back when.
Whatever the approach, this could make for a fascinating character study.
Here is a documentary on Connie Converse:
There you go. My 25th story this month. Free for you to take and write.
Previous articles in this year’s series:
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17
Day 18
Day 19
Day 20
Day 21
Day 22
Day 23
Day 24
Each day in April, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are valuable skills for a writer to develop.
See you in RESPONSES to hear YOUR take on this story idea.
Let’s say you’ve found a story concept from an article in this series. Or you have an idea of your own, but you’re at the very beginning of the story-crafting process.
How to develop, then write it as a screenplay?
May I humbly recommend my book The Protagonist’s Journey: An Introduction to Character-Driven Screenwriting and Storytelling.
Hundreds of people have sent photos of my book. Here’s one.
The book is structured to provide writers an approach to the story-crafting process grounded in immersing oneself in the lives of the characters (Parts I and II). Then Part III presents a stage by stage approach to break story: from concept to outline.
Go here to read endorsements from dozens of professional screenwriters, authors, and academics.
You may purchase The Protagonist’s Journey here:
Come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.