ABSTRACT
Choosing and developing ideas can be haphazardly by luck and impulse, or you can tackle it in the more sustained, deliberate process known as ideation. This helps make any work’s foundations solid, but even in fiction filmmaking this stage receives scant attention. In all the many books on screenwriting, there is virtually nothing about developing and sifting initial story ideas. This led me to write Developing Story Ideas: The Power and Purpose of Storytelling 3rd Edition (Focal Press, 2017) which offers a cornucopia of sources and methods for developing both fiction and documentary narratives.
