Fresh Writing Ideas

When I've read scripts for other writers or publishers, early on I can see how high the originality-meter registers. Plays about topics such as AIDS, abortion, substance abuse, and physical abuse abound, and with good reason: they are important topics that need to be addressed.

However, a major goal for an emerging writer is to tackle such an everyday issue using a fresh approach. This is where the

clichés seem to enter, when these issues are presented in scripts with predictable plots and one-dimensional characters.

Many of these storylines involve betrayal, lust, distrust, and greed, age-old human traits, but show only what I call the "first-thought" elements: those initial thoughts someone has and then starts to write on.

More original thinking writers (and likely more successful ones) are those who take those first thoughts, and then expand to the next level, and the next after that, and so on, continuing to turn it up a notch until they reach the fresh story they want to tell.

It has frequently been said (and is now a cliché itself) that there are no new stories, but there are countless fresh approaches. The love triangle, the hero's adventure, the buddy story, and the search for oneself are among the standard story templates that can be starting points for a script, but then what the writer does beyond that determines success or failure.

Someone once described Star Wars as little more than "boy meets girl and good triumphs over evil." But when George Lucas was finished with the series, adding laser weapons and space travel, it had taken on much, much more.

So, something I generally keep in mind with story ideas, characters, and the other script components is, "Where can I take it from here that no one else has?"