Saturday, 20 April 2013

Project: Getting the Idea


Exercise 1: Brainstorming Ideas

I spent quite a lot of time thinking about this exercise.  I carried a notepad with me for a number of weeks, frantically scribbling down ideas and inspirations as I came across them.    Of course, this method left me with a lot of ‘unusable’ scrawls, but below are a number of ideas, which I would be keen to develop further. 

1. In the aftermath of WWIII a man becomes obsessed with inventing a time travel machine to undo the damage. 

2. A solitary piece written about a man walking at night who is plagued by supernatural forces.  My intention would be to write this piece as a monologue involving only from the central character.

3. A businesswoman travels to North America to meet a client in the remote northern reaches of Canada. 

4. The life story of a lonely old lady as she tries to piece together her life despite suffering from dementia. 

5.  To explore the idea of a man’s journey ‘post-life’, thrown into a world of ‘ghost agents’ who intervene with the world’s affairs.  His only gateway to the world is the exact location of his death.

6. A story focused around a magical family as the monarchy eradicates magic from the land. 

7.  Life of a family in Medieval England. 

8. Aliens invading a small remote and poverty-stricken town in Africa.

9. A story of the genetic experimentation on a boy, with the aim of trying to accelerate growth and splicing skills to create a super race. 

10.  A catastrophic event cracks the world to the core. A man tries to cross the world to find his family.

11.  The story of a secret Order, borne to protect the secrets locked in the compositions of great musicians. 

12. A modern retelling of the Greek myth of Persephone and her descent into the underworld, seen through the eyes of a drug addict. 

13. A group of students travel to Peru in search of tribes, but stumble across a community of travellers who got lost in the jungles. 

14. A young autistic girl struggles to continue her life after the death of her sole carer. 

15. The story of a group of school children who accidentally stumble across a cure for cancer. 

16. A man grows up in a world where human development is a cycle of just 18 days from birth to death. 

17.  A bright young student is given the opportunity to become one of a new generation of world leaders and is given a place on a board of individuals holding ultimate power over the world’s future.


Despite this list only having seventeen fully formed ideas, I could have continued indefinitely in an attempt to ‘empty out my brain of ideas’.    However, these seventeen ideas are ones that have been constantly cycling and developing in my mind.

I realise that at this stage, the complexity involved in further developing some of these ideas would be a huge undertaking.  For example the research involved in a piece containing elements of dementia and mental health would require a large amount of research on my part so that I could accurately capture and portray the feelings and experiences relating to this condition.   However, as this task was simply to come up with ideas for development, I wanted to include some of these more contextually complex ideas. 


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