Experiment with bold choices, volatile emotions, and counterintuitive character motivations in order to throw a monkey wrench into something that previously seemed untouchable. Maybe you throw out your third act and explore a wildly fresh way to make your story work. Use that foul mood to attack your story and make decisions that seemed hard before, but now you can plow right through them because of your fury. Maybe you get a parking ticket and come home to write in an irrational rage. Sometimes you have to go off the deep end to make things work. They’re not delicate things that can’t be shaken up. The main point is to not be afraid to bang some eggs together to make an omelet. You can go write that and then come back to this wacky comedy idea. What are the extremes? How stupid can you make this story? How funny? Is there maybe a serious science fiction thriller lurking in there? Maybe playing around with it triggers a cascade of ideas that leads in turn to a fresh new idea that grabs you by the throat and won’t let go. You’re playing Mad Scientist with explosive chemicals, trying to concoct something worth writing about. But what if you collide them together like an atom smasher? What if your dumb robbers break into an inventor’s workshop and steal a quantum time teleporter, then use it to pull off the greatest robbery ever? Maybe it’s Dumb and Dumber robbers meets Bill and Ted for the crime of the century. Then later you hatch a time travel plot that’s promising but doesn’t have enough horsepower on its own either. Suppose you’ve played with a comedy about stupid bank robbers, but it never really caught fire, so it sits on the shelf. Sometimes you can collide one with another partial idea to make something great. You play with them and explore their possibilities, and take them as far as you can. As you collect ideas, a healthy percentage of them will be weak or partial ideas. You see that in Bester’s appraisal of his original malfunctioning android idea - he knew it was not good enough. Obviously, it’s hard to be completely objective, but there has to be some serious critical facility. So it’s crucial to be able to judge the quality of your work. Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who wrote Pirates of the Caribbean, said the single biggest problem they see with scripts that don’t work is that people spend all this time building scripts around weak original ideas. So how do you do something like that for your screenplay ideas? It’s partly about collecting ideas and partly about being able to evaluate them with a professional eye. Or is it the other way around? Or both? In any case, the first person keeps jumping back and forth between the two, or encompassing the two.” Here’s a comment by blogger Eric McMillan, “B ut the story is narrated by… well, it’s hard to tell at any particular point who is narrating, for the killer android’s playboy owner, James Vandaleur, has been absorbed into the machine’s personality. Written in 1954, Fondly Fahrenheit is widely considered one of the best-ever science fiction short stories. It added a dynamic complexity to the story’s chemistry and made it a classic. Not only is the android going crazy and killing on a regular basis, but it’s exhibiting a delusional mental illness in which the android thinks it’s its master. Bester was fascinated with the possibilities and went back to the crazy android story and, in his words, collided the two of them together to see what would happen. Several years later he stumbled onto information about a psychological delusion in which one person believes themself to be another person. Bester said he wasn’t satisfied with the idea, saying it just didn’t have enough juice to be great, so he put it on the shelf. But then it kills again, and he has to run even farther and hide its abilities even more as a manhunt heats up. He discussed an idea about a sophisticated android that goes crazy and kills someone, so its owner has to go on the run and disguise the android’s capabilities so it can keep working to make him a living.
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