MAMWM #2: How I brainstorm when writing a movie

with photos of the process!

Hello dear readers. Last week I announced, quite publicly, the next movie I’m going to write (and then produce/direct/sell). I have a few things in the pipeline I cannot talk about (including what would hopefully be my directorial debut, and some other writing jobs) but this is what’s coming next. It’s about a shitty teenage stoner ghost going on a road trip with the guy who accidentally killed him.

This means I have officially begun to think.

So how do you think about a movie?

Thinking is easy, actually, when you think about it. You do it all the time. It only starts to feel challenging when you need to do it, and when you need to do it about just one thing in particular.

In the spectrum of “No Idea” to fully fleshed out pitch for a film, I’m definitely closer to “No Idea” still, and so this week I have been hard at work, utilizing my patented process for figuring out a movie idea — writing down every single thing I think.

I’ve actually written about my process before, “How to go from no idea to movie idea.”

Basically, for this movie, and all movies, I will simply… open up a notes document (I use Evernote usually at first, this is not sponsored content) and start thinking…

literally the first thing I see when I start writing a new movie

Even “paid” “professionals” with a lot of “experience” start out like this. A blank page. Nothing.

But it’s not nothing, and the goal is to as quickly as possible ensure that it stops being nothing, and so I will start to write IMMEDIATELY, without thinking about it, everything I can remember that I thought might be cool about my new idea. The goal is not to do this in order, and not even to do this in a way that makes cogent sense as a reader. The goal is to do this FAST.

I will write literally everything I am thinking, including “okay here we go, let’s see let’s see uh…” as if I am taking dictation.

Keeping up with my entire inner monologue is hard work, and turns me essentially into the stenographer for myself, which also means that there isn’t very much time or mental capacity to criticize anything I’m writing, because I am too busy simply trying to keep up. Pretty soon I will tire out the nonsense filler words and buffering, and start to think of things that one could actually consider to be “ideas.”

These are ideas in the loosest sense of the word. Like this:

And like this…

As you can see, this process is partly ideas, but then a lot of commentary from me the author, to myself, also the author (and typist, and reader). Questions, comments, concerns, things I like about what I’m thinking, things I don’t like about what I’m thinking.

This is essentially the process Julia Cameron proposes in The Artist’s Way (I’m a writer living in LA, of course I’ve read The Artist’s Way), for writing “Morning Pages.” Free writing, simply putting pen to paper and writing whatever comes to mind. I do that every morning, but then I also essentially do it again any time I am working (especially in this early brainstorming phase).

What this process does for me is it changes writing from “work” to “meditation.” I am no longer sitting and trying to come up with thoughts, I am simply trying to capture all the thoughts that are already, automatically, without effort, crossing my mind.

Is this a sort of mental jiu-jitsu to make it feel easier than if I were to say… really try to think hard, all the while worrying about having “good” thoughts? Yes. Does it work? Also yes. That’s why I do it.

Look whatever works, man. Even if it just is tricking yourself into working.

How long does brainstorming / outlining something usually take? It really depends! I think that I am a slow outliner. I tend to spit out a lot of ideas, maybe too many ideas, and since I am doing it in a piecemeal, random, nonlinear, whatever the hell comes to mind, fashion, I’m not sitting at my desk actively thinking about “the story” or even “the characters” for a while.

What am I thinking about? Moments. Ingredients. Ideas.

I tend to think about things it would be fun to see. This is kind of the “what would be in the trailer” game of screenwriting, which can be a really good way to come up with a movie idea. If you can quickly jam out 7-10 incredible moments for a movie trailer, then you probably have a good idea for a movie.

It’s almost as though I am trying to create a big collection of source material that I can then sort through. These are all puzzle pieces that I can then slowly begin to try to coerce together into a narrative. What’s nice about this kind of grab-bag process is, it can tend to create a story that’s more suprising — I am not thinking about plotting so much as I’m thinking about cool things that can happen and then how to reverse engineer making them happen within the movie. It’s great for non-linear, or non-traditional structure. But… it does add time to the process of needing to then jam all of those pieces into something that does inherently feel satisfying and like it has a narrative flow.

When I tend to think about story first, as in, “well if this happened, then what would happen next?” I find myself feeling pretty uninspired, and will often end up with movies and sequences within those movies that simply plod along from A to B to C and don’t have very much surprise to them.

So, I instead go with the… “how the heck can I get from D to W when I don’t have any clue what comes between them?” method. “Would a 3 fit in there?”

I haven’t gotten that far this week, I’ve been busy with all of the other various projects, but I did get a start, and wanted to report back on what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.

If anything, I hope that updating you all in live time about my filmmaking process, from idea to production to distribution, will be very eye opening about just how long these things tend to take (years).

Paid Subscribers, stick around because I am going to below invite you to our upcoming Hollyweird Hang in September, as well as our upcoming Quarterly Shareholders Meeting, also in September.

Also! I am going to be giving you the details about how you can win one of these hats, absolutely free of charge!

But before we close things out… how do you think about the early phase of an idea? What’s your brainstorming process like? Please let me know in the comments! I truly love to get into the weeds about how and why people work the way they do! So gimme your processin the comments…

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Previously on… Hollyweird!

What Will Colby Write Next?

Make a Movie with Me!

Introducing Hollyweird 2.0

If you’re new here (hello TikTok followers) and wondering what the heck this newsletter is, I’d recommend getting started with the above introduction to Hollyweird 2.0, where I describe the experiment we’re currently running!