Jump in - Make your idea specific - Focus

Writing FAST - Jeff Bollow 2012

Jump in
Make your idea specific
Focus

The first thing to do, is just go for it.

Forget the fear of being “wrong.” There’s no right or wrong, and you’ll make plenty of changes to this stuff as you go. Remember, ideas spark ideas. You’ll have better ideas later. For now, don’t worry about “getting it right.” Just jump in.

Let’s imagine Shawshank didn’t exist, and we were creating it. It probably didn’t happen this way, but I want to show you the process for making your idea specific.

You start with the idea (“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies...”), and you want to make it tangible. You want to turn it into a movie.

So, let’s see. You start out by thinking about hope itself. What is it? It’s that feeling of anticipation. It’s when you want something, and believe it’s likely to happen. Maybe we could use contrast. We could show a hopeless situation.

So what’s a hopeless situation? How about prison? How about showing a man (Andy) facing life in prison for a crime he claims he didn’t commit. He maintains hope that he’ll be released, and his name will be cleared.

Not a bad start. We’ll jot that down.

So where do we go from here?

Now, let’s build upon it. “Hope is a good thing...” In order to make that argument, we need to show the opposing viewpoint. We could have a character who doesn’t agree. How about a second character (Red) — an inmate who has no hope at all? He’s been rejected for parole three times, and figures he’ll die in this prison. In fact, he believes hope is dangerous in a place like this.

Okay. Jot that down. That gives us a way to show different sides to this idea. But it’s not going to make the audience feel it yet. The idea still isn’t really tangible enough.

What if we give Andy disappointment after disappointment after disappointment? Span the story across twenty years. Push him to despair. And because of the friendship they’ve formed, Red’s concern for his friend gives him hope. Let Red discover hope through his friendship with Andy.

And when he does, the idea becomes clear to the audience. It’ll hit them in gut. And they’ll feel it.

Make sense?

This is how you make your idea specific. You simply give it a specific shape. A shape that demonstrates the idea.