Research and writing down ideas
Pretty much all screenwriting books and teachers will tell you to do your homework and research, and also to write down your ideas when they occur to you, especially if they’re not applicable to your current project. Personally, I find it a bit hard to write my ideas down in a form I’m satisfied with before I’ve done some research and let them churn around in my head for a bit. Today, I did a round of research and wrote some 5 pages of notes for an idea I had a few weeks ago. It led me to research, through the wonderful Wikipedia, topics as disparate as debutante balls, language isolates, caves, the ancient pueblo peoples, the Manchu language, acrolects, and a few other things. All for the same story idea, which is actually surprisingly simple and coherent. All of a sudden, a bunch of things you’ve known about for a while just come together in a new, strange way. It’s fun, especially since I’m the kind of person who actually reads random encyclopedia entries for entertainment. And I have the feeling that it might actually work as the kind of creepy, intellectual cosmic horror that I enjoy. Think of it as Lovecraft meets Focault’s Pendulum, protagonized by a linguist doing field work in the jungles of Mexico.
So that’s one idea written down, and I can feel that it’s not invading my thoughts so much now. I have another one which is also separate from the project I’m supposed to be working on, so I guess I’ll do that one next. Writing ideas out makes them crystallize too, although I’m often worried that they seem banal. It’s sort of like what happens when you tell people your dreams. They seem significant and highly weird when you wake up and the experience is fresh, but then they become trivial, flat, and uninteresting when you try to tell them to someone else. Although Hans Petter recently characterized my dreams as “Lovecraftian”, and that’s got to count for something.