How Do I Stop Skipping From One Idea To Another?

Q. I just wanted to ask your advice regarding narrowing your ideas down. I have the opposite of writer's block: my major problem is that I'm interested in pretty much everything. I'm attracted to any idea, and will happily flit from a project I'm bored with (perhaps just begun) to a new shiny thought that has grabbed my attention. I have notebooks full of half-begun narratives, scribbles, sketches and ideas, all of which I've lost interest in as quickly as my initial enthusiasm. It makes it difficult me for to even get through your first screenwriting steps of generating ideas - an idea which I really like because it's so similar to developing an art sketchbook. All the images I come up with seem very disparate, and I feel like I'm trying to impose a narrative upon them, rather than letting something emerge. I'm then increasingly dissatisfied with the basis of my narrative and throw the whole idea out, only to start the futile process again. Am I destined to write short stories? If not, how do I gag my internal fickle teenager?

A. In some ways I wish I had your problem, in others, well, I recognise it to be a curse. I would suggest the following steps when you are doing that first step of getting some seeds:

1. Always make sure that you are thinking in terms of concrete scenes, with dramatic action - not themes, or moods, or concepts, or anything vague like that. Be absolutely rigorous with yourself - if your idea isn't a picture of people doing stuff then it shouldn't be in the list.

2. Make sure that every scene you include like this really does make you catch your breath in some way when you think about it.

3. Make sure that you still think that when you come back two days later, or a week later. Any scene that has lost that power you throw out and get a new scene.

4. STOP when you have 10 of those scenes. And now put your mind into the next problem, the next step in the book.

5. Any other bright ideas that come up, note down, but your job now is to go out and work with your tent poles, do the research, and see what happens.

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