How to Turn a Rough Idea Into a Full-Fledged Story

When you have an idea for a story, you never know the complete story. Instead, you often have a single scene or individual action that has captured your attention. Now the trick is expanding your single idea into a full-length screenplay.

The wrong way to do this is to start with an idea and immediately try writing a screenplay. Since you don’t know your whole story, writing your screenplay prematurely means you’ll likely run out of ideas and wind up with a partially completed screenplay with no idea how to finish it.

A far better solution is to start with an initial idea and ask yourself the following questions:

• What emotions does your idea generate in your mind?
• What makes your idea important to others?

The emotion your initial idea evokes in your mind points to the genre of your story such as horror (fear), romance (love), action (excitement), laughter (comedy), or drama (seriousness). Knowing the genre is important because it helps shape the type of story you want to tell. Since every genre has certain conventions (horror stories often isolate characters to increase terror while action stories often put characters in exotic locations for greater interest), knowing your story’s genre can help you shape the basic outline of your story.

Besides identifying the emotion that your initial idea evokes, ask yourself why your idea might be important to others. Specifically, what do you want people to think?

In an action-thriller, this might seem as simple as “the good guys need to kill the bad guys”, but dig deeper and you can find a more meaningful idea. “Kelly’s Heroes” is a war movie about a group of American soldiers who learn about gold the Nazis are hiding in a bank. So although there’s plenty of war action, the main idea is that fighting a war is pointless unless there’s something in it for you.

“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” is a coming of age movie where a high school senior has been trying to avoid committing to any relationship with anyone for fear of getting hurt. Then he’s forced to befriend a girl dying of leukemia so the main message might be that even though relationships can be painful, they can be immensely rewarding to make it all worth it.

“The 40-Year Old Virgin” is a comedy about a 40-year old man trying to lose his virginity. However, it’s not just about the physical pursuit of casual sex but about how men and women should treat each other without focusing solely on sex.

Identifying why your idea will be important to others will help identify your story’s theme. Once you know your story’s theme, you know exactly what your story is about so all action revolves around forcing the hero to choose between the two extremes of the theme.

Watch any mediocre movie (like “Mortal Engines”, “The 355”, or “Madame Web”) and you’ll see lots of action that has no point or focus. Then watch a great movie and notice that even though the action may not be earth-shaking, the conflict forces the hero to constantly make difficult choices. In this scene from “Little Miss Sunshine”, there’s no gunfire, explosions, or car crashes. Instead, the scene revolves completely around Olive, the hero, not wanting to be a loser and her grandfather telling her that a real loser is someone so afraid of not winning they don’t even try. So by trying, you’re already a winner.

That forces Olive to rethink what it means to be a loser and a winner, and by being happy at what her grandfather told her, we can see she’s made up her mind. By trying, she’s already a winner in her own mind and that’s all that matters.

“Little Miss Sunshine” has a strong theme (winners are those who try whether they succeed or not) so every scene forces the hero to make tough decisions on how they’re going to respond to problems, as a winner or a loser.

The foundation of every great movie lies with a strong theme so by taking a rough idea and defining why it’s important to others, you can define the strongest possible theme for your idea. Knowing your theme, you can then build a story around that theme. This gives you a much stronger foundation than simply flailing around, coming up with ideas, and hoping they’ll work together somehow.

Every great story starts with an idea. Make sure you idea moves you emotionally (so you can identify the genre) and is important to you (so you can identify a theme). Finding your theme as early as possible will only help you define the rest of your story so look for a theme and the rest of your story will follow.

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