Filmgroupie

In today’s time we rarely get movies with innovative ideas especially in Telugu film industry. It is the one which is producing largest number of movies in a year but all the hundreds of movies that releases every year are tested and tried formula based repetitive stories. On screen they all seem to be more mechanical than creative.

Something like in every movie there is a fight + a song + a love scene + a comedy + a bit of sentiment + a confrontation scene. Add those six scenes repetitively in the same sequence or in different comes till the time reaches 2&1/2 hrs there becomes a complete movie to test the audience patience. Again if you want to make a comedy movie compile ten scenes to perform buffoonery act or to make spoof of characters in recent blockbusters and tie them with non-existing story line there you have a super hit comedy. Every genre has its own formula and writer follow it rigorously with out using much of their brains. For this creative less film making makers blame audience and saying that they are not that intellectual to accept intelligent cinema.

Every time I watch these kinds of movies I wonder is it that difficult to prepare a good story with innovative ideas? Being an aspiring writer I tried to understand how can I get some new ideas to develop a story? These are at once hard questions to answers and at the same time are easy ones. The truth is ideas are everywhere. In daily experiences, the lives of people you meet, the newspapers, the old tales, your past memories, like that everywhere you can find hell lot of good story ideas. Only thing that you need to do is see them. Saying that here comes a question how can I see them?

Being a novice I am still trying to figure out how to generate good story ideas. When I searched on this topic I found many ways through which you can extract story ideas. Here I mention some of them that fancy me.

One way is set a target and write as many story lines as you can. For example let’s say you want to write a love story. Every story will have an ending it can be either a happy or tragic but how about a story with out ending? So our love story can have three possible endings one with happy, one with tragic and one without ending. Let’s put that on a paper. Now set a goal for you to write different ideas perhaps 10 different story ideas for each ending. At the end our love story should have 30 different story ideas. Remember while writing your ideas scribble whatever comes to mind, however ludicrous it may be. Think hard take your time but you have to reach target of writing 10 story ideas for each ending.

Now after you complete writing those entire 30 story lines, first, browse through your list, figuring out which items actually have potential. Next, choose three or four ideas and develop them a little further, maybe with one or two pages of free writing, or some basic musing about setting, plot, or the characters that might inhabit them. After that's done, there is sure to be a tantalizing idea that rise above the rest, idea that rouse the passion and make you eager to get to work.

The other way is free writing. It is one of the best and easiest exercises you can do. To start with select one word, it can be a genre, a character, a location or anything that you are very much interested to write on. Set a time limit of 5 to 10 minutes and that you will not lift you pen from paper before that time is up. Now think about that word and start writing whatever comes to your mind, it can be anything an event, an experience, a situation or write nonsense but don’t stop writing till time is up. If your thinking stopped after writing some line with in that time then re-write whatever you had written again and again till time stops. At the end look back over what you've written and see if anything sparks your interest. Now take that as lead for your next free writing session and continue the same until you get a proper story structure.

We all know a saying that pictures speak many words. Images can be one of the best sources for story ideas. Select a theme on which you want to write story and gather as many pictures as you can that represents the theme. These days you can search thousands of images at one click on internet. So search for the same and collect all the images that raised interest in you. Now write one or two line scene description that you can write to those pictures. At the end with all those pictures and descriptions see if any interesting idea sparks in your mind. Now all that is left is to figure out how to develop that idea further. The advantage of this method is these pictures can also give you an interesting scene or shot which you can accommodate in your screenplay at later stage.

So this is some of my knowledge on extracting story ideas which I want to share with you all. I want you guys to share your opinion, inputs and knowledge on the topic by posting you comments.