Story Hunting [Screenwriting Fundamentals]

Coming up with good stories is a very hard task. However, with practise you can develop better techniques for telling stories and methods for taking a simple idea, a character or even just an object and use it to create a story. Each writer has their own way of developing story ideas, and the best way of finding yours is through practice.

One of the most unique sources is the stories your friends and family tell. My uncle once told me a great little story about his dad who was captured by a tribe during the Second World War. The tribe captured and killed a group of soldiers, except my uncle's dad who was left alive because the tribe were intrigued by his ginger hair! This would be ideal material for a short film; however as I currently live in suburban England, getting access to a group of actors to play the tribe is somewhat limited. My first film project was a spoof rock documentary which I made as a 50th birthday present to a friend. Using a number of his stories that we found funny, a group of friends and I improvised a 35 minute documentary around all of these stories. Although the final film is extremely rough around the edges, it worked because of the stories were so good.

Newspaper articles are a good source of story ideas. Michael Mann takes a lot of his influences from newspaper and magazine articles. His masterpiece Heat was largely based on real events that were reported in various newspaper articles.

Sticking to the actual events may make your story historically accurate, but it may also make it extremely boring. If you can see a way of making a story more dramatic by changing a set of events, by all means do so.

Although they may require substantial funding to recreate the appropriate sets, historical stories are a rich source of ideas. I would dearly love to make a film set around the great fire of London.

Needless to say, novels have always been a good source of stories for film makers. However they are strongly guarded by publishers and accountants, but this doesn't stop you from working out what it is you like about a particular story and applying that to either a different scenario or a different cast of characters. Stephen King has a policy of allowing student film makers to make short films based on his short stories for the fee of $1.

In the early stages of getting into writing, the best thing is to just write absolutely anything. There is an old idea that you have to write a hundred thousand words of rubbish before you can get to the good stuff. Start by writing a very small story in just a few paragraphs and then expand it to a few pages. If you still are in love with the story, keep expanding it until you have a full script.

Test Your Knowledge

To test your knowledge of this subject, why not attempt one of the assignments? When making a film, it is essential to make something that you would want to enjoy, so we have designed these assignments to help you think about what you like about films and how you can apply this to the films you want to make. Chances are, if you like your film, someone else will too!

Next lesson: Approaches to Writing Screenplays | Back to Screenwriting Fundamentals