Ideas, ideas, ideas! Where do they come from? In an answer: EVERYWHERE. The news and current events. Our personal experiences and those that happen to our friends and family, and how we process them. I've never had a hard time coming up with ideas for stories. In fact, I probably have too many of them. Which means I need to manage them and, before I spend weeks or months working on one of them, validate that a random idea is really worthy of a story.

In this three-part blog series, I'll share with you some of the things I do to generate, manage, and validate ideas. Up first: Idea Generation.

Idea Generation

I think most great ideas are drawn from personal experiences and/or experiences of family and friends close to us. This is basically a reflection of the old adage, "Write what you know." But most of us, frankly, live pretty mundane lives. So you typically need to take one of your personal experiences and then "up the stakes".

Would if, in your personal life, you found out that one partner in a married union you know was having an affair. In and of itself, that's not very interesting -- happens thousands of times a day all across the world. But would if the infidel was having the affair with their significant other's sibling ... or father? And then what if a death or murder ensued? That gets more interesting.

This is exactly what happens in a number of movies, including the haunting 1992 movie Damage, Woody Allen's 2005 film Match Point, and the movie I swear Woody Allen drew inspiration from when making Match Point, the 1951 film, A Place in the Sun (which itself was adapted from Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel, An American Tragedy). Watch both Match Point and A Place in the Sun and tell me if you don't agree!

The point here is that each of us can draw from our personal experiences for lots of ideas. But typically these won't be interesting enough, so we'll have to raise the stakes to make the story compelling to an audience.

A good exercise to do is to write out loglines for an hour. A logline is a one or two sentence capsule of a story, similar to what you might see in the TV listings for a movie. Per IMDB.com, the Logline for Match Point is, "At a turning point in his life, a former tennis pro falls for a femme-fatal type who happens to be dating his friend and soon-to-be brother-in-law."

When doing this exercise, you can follow a "Mad-Libs" style template where you just fill in the blanks. For example --

WHAT IF (fill in the blank)

AND THEN (something unexpected happens)

AND THEN (raise the stakes even higher)

What's interesting about the above template is that it loosely breaks thing into Aristotle's classic three-act story structure.