Running out of ideas
Will that happen? (96/365)
What if you or I run out of ideas or stories?
Most likely, we won't. The key is to have the willingness to escape your comfort zone every now and then to do things for the first time.
Like Scott Frank.
Scott Frank is highly relevant in Hollywood, and it's likely that this is the first time you've heard about him.
Scott is one of the most successful screenwriters, but his work is mostly hidden from plain sight: His expertise lies in fixing scripts. Like a script whisperer—if that’s a thing.
He has worked on—fixed? whispered?—scripts such as Saving Private Ryan, Logan, Gravity, Marley & Me, The Hunger Games, Minority Report & The Ring, charging up to three hundred thousand dollars a week.
In his profile published last year in The New Yorker, (Jan. 1 & 8, 2024), the author talks about a time in his life when he was scared of drying up:
At night, he would walk the family dog around Pasadena, and upon reaching home he'd look at his family through the brightly lit windows and wonder, 'What if I run out of ideas?' There was no reason to believe that creativity was a renewable resource. Writers burn out, fall out of fashion, become blocked.
Whether consciously or unconsciously driven by this fear, Frank eventually made a detour in his life. He wondered: instead of fixing scripts, could he write one from scratch? Or even direct and produce?
That's how we got The Queen's Gambit, a massive Netflix success, watched by sixty-two million subscribers in the first month of streaming.
He hasn't stopped evolving, and at least until last year, he was working on an opera set to the music of the Killers about the foundation of Las Vegas.
So I guess that's the insight: if you're feeling that you don't know what you're doing, you could be on the right track, finding new ideas or stories.
For me, at least this year, coming up with ideas—and doing it fast—is not optional. As I wrote a couple of days ago,
I can’t wait for inspiration.
I sit down, mind-wander for a bit, and pay attention to where my attention is going.
Then, I follow each of those intuitions and try to imagine how would a post look like around that idea.
If I don’t find potential in seconds, I move to another one, and so on.
Today, that’s exactly what I did. And because I had a 18-hour day yesterday and tomorrow is Monday, I have to press Continue and Send to Everyone Now—the two clicks that take me to you—in this exact moment.
*Continue*
*Send to Everyone Now*
Thanks for reading!
#day96