How to Tame Your Idea!

You're almost home, and the idea hits you like a literary bus. In an instant you can see the whole novel. The cover art. The trailer to the film adaptation. The studio buying you a Mercedes with a vanity license plate.

You get home. You trip over the cat on your way in, such is your fervor to get to a keyboard and pound out this masterpiece. The first draft will be the only draft. It will be perfect.

If you're like me, this is the part where you realize the idea is actually more of a feeling. There are no characters for the idea yet. There is no plot. There is no beginning. There is no end. You begin to dwell on the attractive cover art you imagined earlier. Would it all look better in fuchsia?

When I have an idea that, for one reason or another, I don't understand well enough to write, I have developed a necessarily vigorous plan of attack. I set out to write the stream-of-consciousness stage play version. These plays are awful. I start out knowing nothing. A character enters from stage-left and delivers everything I know about my idea as a monologue to the audience, or an unsympathetic second character. As the dialogue rattles on, I begin to understand where the conflict is.

Before I go on, one interesting way to think about plays: in some ways, they are the dramatic opposite of the novel. A novel, even traditionally speaking, offers you 100 to 1,000 pages to explore conflict. The tradition of noveling encourages fluid changes in setting, time, and perspective.

Writing for the stage, a traditional page count will land you between 80 and 150 pages, and the word count will be the equivalent of less than 25 pages of prose. The form is also encouraging you to use as few scenes as possible, since breaks in a performance are impractical, and suspension of disbelief can become difficult when all your action is necessarily unfolding on one stage.

If you don't understand your idea, writing the oft-recommended prose outline or step chart can be problematic. After all, there's no real form here to keep you on track. I often wind up writing all the things that don't matter in these outlines, which quickly unravel into long descriptions of events and characters I don't yet understand, which, from a dramatic perspective, is quite useless.

A stream-of-consciousness screenplay draft might be helpful for some, but for me this proves too open a form as well. In a screenplay I can avoid making real choices and discoveries by wondering about where the scene should take place, how long it should be, etc. In a film, a scene can last one minute or 15.

There's something about the stage play that is just perfect. You can't get away with a page of playwriting without conflict. The very act of putting two characters on a stage together seems to necessitate conflict. If I simply have these two anonymous characters speak to one another, the conflict that my idea sits atop will usually emerge, wild and curious, covered in horns and hair, from the back of my brain. Sometimes it's really, really ugly, and I go back to thinking about typefaces on the cover art. Other times, I get 50 pages into the stage play, and know all my characters, what they want and what they get. What else do you need to know?

If the idea is destined for a novel or screenplay, the stage play prewrite has a curious way of happening in the past-tense. That is, you may discover that the events your characters have to recount to one another in order to illustrate why they did what they did, or are doing what they are doing, is the real story you want to tell. Then you get to joyously move into a more fluid form that will allow you to bounce around and tell that story.

Poets know all too well the power of formal constraints to draw out creativity and ideas. If you don't know what you're trying to say, rhyme scheme and meter will force you to develop some kind of dramatic inertia, or give up. For me, the stage play is the perfect set of formal constraints.

– Max

Photo by Flickr user Our Hero