Keys to Screenwriting: Brainstorming

“If you keep asking questions, they help you go deeper and deeper into your brainstorming process.”

Once I find a story concept I think might make a good movie, I create a Word file in my computer and start brainstorming ideas into that file. I can not emphasize enough how important brainstorming is. To begin with, this is where I discover if my concept is, indeed, good enough — if ideas for the plot and characters leap into my imagination, there’s a pretty good chance I’ve got a decent concept.

Also when I brainstorm, I start to ‘see’ the movie. Key scenes emerge, characters morph into being, I hear bits of dialogue. Of course, that all represents potential story stuff, but more than that, ‘seeing’ these elements fuels my passion… which drives me deeper into brainstorming… which gives me more story stuff… which gets me more excited. And so on.

Finally, and most importantly, if I do enough brainstorming and the creative stars align, this is where I uncover gold, those fantastic bits of story business that appear as if from nowhere, totally unexpected, surprising ideas and beats.

The key to doing it right: no prejudgment. All ideas go into the master brainstorming file. Upon further reflection, I may choose to toss them aside — fine. But any image, scene, line of dialogue, action, or theme I have as I brainstorm goes into the file. I find this process frees up that special part of my consciousness so that those wondrous gold story nuggets can reveal themselves.

I spend days, even weeks brainstorming (in connection with research, our next subject). The process is a lot like wallowing in a sea of ideas, but again, this is where a majority of the story ‘stuff’ emerges and, more often than not, the Plotline and sub-plots start to show themselves, too.

Many aspiring screenwriters do not spend enough time brainstorming, their impatience getting the better of them. That will almost always come back to bite you in the ass. You’ll either get stuck in the writing because you didn’t ‘find’ your story or your story will have little, if anything special about it because you didn’t brainstorm enough to surface the gold.

I have a whole set of prompts I’ve developed over the years to fuel my brainstorming, but there is a common dynamic to all of them: Get curious.

Get curious about the plot. Get curious about the characters. Get curious about the story universe. If you keep asking questions, they help you go deeper and deeper into your brainstorming process.

And from that, the plot and story structure emerges.