John Vorhaus, Author/Speaker/Artist/Screenwriter: The path to a good idea is through a bad idea, you might not be agreeable to that, you might say well that seems like a lot of hard work and frustration, heartbreak, heartache, why should I do that?
Film Courage: Where does a great idea begin?
John: Usually with a bad idea, usually I have to pass through a lot of bad ideas to get to a great idea. We talked earlier about the rule of nine says ten for every 10 jokes you try nine won’t work, same is true for ideas. You might have 10 ideas for a sitcom or a screenplay and if you look at all 10 of them you can just say well some of these are better than others, which one’s the best one at that? If you have 10 ideas and you pick the one you like best, you might not have a great idea but you have the best of 10 ideas. That’s why it’s so important to generate a lot of ideas. Most of them will fall by the wayside. In my vocabulary there’s something called a Monday Idea. A Monday Idea is something that sounds great on Monday but by the end of the week you don’t even know why you’re so excited about it. It’s like a hit song that sounds great at first but then pretty soon you can’t stand it. You realize there’s nothing really there. We fall in love with things because they’re new and the great ideas are the ones that stand the test of time and the weight of development. I’ll give you an example of something that I consider to be a great idea that it’s new to me in my experience. Then I’ll talk about where this one came from because they don’t always come from that strategy that I just gave you. I’m walking with a friend (we’re walking our dogs) and my friend has a kind of a wild and woolly look about him. He’s an actor and he looks a little…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BIO:
John Vorhaus is best known for his comedy-writing classic, The Comic Toolbox: How to be Funny Even if You’re Not. He has taught and trained writers in 37 countries on five continents at last count, and created TV shows of his own in Nicaragua, Romania and elsewhere. His writing credits include dozens of teleplays and screenplays, plus seven novels and some two dozen works of non-fiction. His latest book is the little book of STANDUP. Vorhaus is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and a member of the Writers Guild of America. He lives in Southern California and secretly controls the world from JohnVorhaus.com.
Advertisement – contains affiliate links
(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases)
More affiliates:
Camera we use for interviews – https://buff.ly/3rWqrra
Editing system – https://goo.gl/56LnpM
Sound we use for interviews – https://amzn.to/2tbFlM9
Other books on Amazon that Film Courage recommends – https://buff.ly/3o0oE5o
