The Writing Week (Vol. 3) part 151 - Developing New Ideas as Producers Read

It's been a pretty eventful two weeks, though not a lot of that time has been spent on writing. As you know, I've been out of the country exploring the Middle East and Cyprus. It was a pretty epic, pretty incredible trip. And to be honest, it was good to get away from everything for a bit, especially the post-Apocalyptic spec, since there's nothing I can really do to further any progress at this point.

While I was abroad, my team went out to some directors and big-time producers. We're still waiting to hear back from most people. Of course, not everyone will like or want the material, but part of the process right now also involves just getting my name out there and familiarizing people with my style. Ideally, even if that doesn't lead to a direct sale right now on this project, it will beget other work in the near future.

Now that I'm back in the country, I need to continue developing other script ideas. I'm working on scaling them back a bit for the time being, and as I tried to kill 13 hours in the Larnaka, Cyprus airport last week, I came up with a half dozen, fairly mainstream and "simple" ideas. I don't mean simple in terms of the idea being basic or dumb or easy. Rather, simple just means that it's easy to comprehend, conducive to an elevator pitch that doesn't require visuals and an entire world or preexisting knowledge. People can hear these ideas in 30 seconds and think, "I know that. It's like (insert well-known movie here), but with a twist." Frankly, that's the ticket right now, at least for me. 

As I mentioned in the past few weeks, the industry is still fickle at this point, and as writers trying to sell big ideas, we have to make things that are unique and new takes on something that has been tried and true. That's what I'm working on now. If nothing else, it's an interesting experiment, just seeing how many ideas I can come up with in an hour, which I'd actually want to write. If I detested them, they didn't even go down on paper. After all, I'm the one who is going to have to spend (possibly) a year on it.