No Is Not An Answer...

So you want to get creative, and you’re searching for an idea. Try as you might, you pop your head off, give it a furious shake, but nothing comes out. You put your head back on and try a new locale. You move from room to room, and when that doesn’t work, you go on a vacation. “Yes!” you think. “That will do it!” And then it doesn’t.
I’m not going to spend a lot of time telling you how to find an idea, because if I knew that, I’d be richer than Bill Gates. No, you either have an idea, or you don’t, though you just may have an idea without even realizing it. You see the key to developing creative ideas is passion. If you don’t have it, you won’t be able to do the things required to not only complete your work, but to see it published/televised/projected.
So what am I getting at? Well, the next time you find yourself in a creative funk, don’t go for the traditional modes of changing the location. Keep this nugget in the back of your mind, next time you’re at a party. Pay close attention to what you talk about to others. Is there a topic you steer the direction to? Is there any one subject you can stay on for an hour or more? If you’re passionate about something enough to talk about it for nearly an hour, most likely this is the subject you should be writing about.
The next step is to research this field as much as possible, though if you’re interested in it, you probably already have. Mine this area for as many ideas as you can. And now this brings me to my point, and the reason for the title of this posting. Once you’ve set on something, you may be temped to doubt your baby, and dismiss it as a stupid idea. Or you may have others tell you it’s a bad idea. They may be right, or it might not be to their taste. The point is, you will have a lot of opposition to face. A lot of people will be saying no to your idea, and you need to get used to that. Keep that passion you have alive, and never doubt it, even if it is a bad idea. Michael Bay and Uwe Boll have made very successful careers off of bad ideas.
You see there is no correlation between the quality of a story or script and with what gets published or produced. It all comes down to the Executive Producer, or Editor who looks at it and says, ‘Yeah, I like it!” So what you need to do is find that one person who likes it. It may take years, and will surely try your patience, but remember, “No is not an answer.”

Doing the Development Limbo...

Over the years I have seen many people create their own projects in many types of media, and the one immutable fact I’ve learned is that creating the idea is the easy part. The hard part is getting someone to pay you for it, so that your project ends up on screen, in print, or on television.

I am by no means a master at this, I like many, am still learning. I do however know some things, and continue to learn other techniques to success. What I hope to do is share some of these secrets as I travel on this journey through the murky, unpredictable world of development limbo.

Over time I hope to have a useful resource that anyone can use to develop a project and get it produced or published.