What’s the Big Idea?
Dream Projects and the Fools that Chase them
Every so often I get possessed by nostalgia. So deep in the night, I play DCOM music while laying on my bedroom floor. During the more ungodly hours, I found myself completely surrounded by stacks of paper. It’s notebooks, cards, and sticky notes all filled with halfbaked ideas from my youth. At the bottom of the stack I rediscovered the dustiest of composition books. Almost like a grimoire, it contained page after page of early concepts for a splendid idea for a graphic novel. While a mischievous smile grew across my face, “Not yet.” I muttered before I closed the cover.
Like most creatives, I have big ideas. Intangible concepts that have stayed with me since high school, hell middle school. These are the coveted “dream projects” that every creator chases after. As we grow, the worlds of these stories grow with us. Their lore becomes complicated, the characters become lived in, and the worlds become bigger than the pages they’re written on. When fully realized, they can be wonderful things. But more often than not, these projects never reach their full potential. Besides the usual factors of time and money, there’s a secret third thing that trips up even the most stable of creators. It lies in a combination of inexperience and impatience.
Trying to produce a dream project without experience is a dangerous game. If a creators’ concept is bigger than their capabilities, they will have to compromise their vision in devastating ways. As a professor, audience member, and script reader I’ve seen many failed dream projects in various media. While many are on their second or third drafts, they’re often bloated and filled with tired tropes and amateurish decisions. It comes as no surprise that many of these forgettable attempts are most creators’ first attempts at making a script, novel, or show. We’ve seen it time and time again with disastrous works like Spiderman Lotus, Age of Scorpius, or Mortal Engines who all featured first time creators at the helm. Each jumped the gun, whether from hubris or ignorance, and was swiftly humbled by audience expectations.
“In this age of instant gratification, many artists start out expecting their work to be the exception.”
Inexperienced artists tend to set themselves up for failure. While it’s a wonderful thing that these creators were able to get through the bitter work of creating a draft, many issues I find come from ignorance of the craft. In this age of instant gratification, many artists start out expecting their work to be the exception. Someone with a gift that supersedes the need to build skill. However, it’s foolish to think you can play a sonnet when you’ve just learned the piano keys. It’s foolish to think you can bench 250lbs when it’s your second day at the gym. The same applies to creation, it’s foolish to think you can do justice to a complicated mess of concepts when you can’t do justice to a simple plot.
So when is the right time to shoot for the stars? Well, everyone’s different. I remember being told the first ten scripts you write will be shit no matter what. While I don’t believe in something as exact as that, I do believe in building a track record of smaller scale projects. This trial and error is meant to build discernment (something you’ll need a lot of when translating ideas into outlines). The greatest writers, poets, and filmmakers learn universal truths and hard lessons by working on different endeavors. This culminates into a showcase of the skills you’ve accumulated.
My wave of nostalgia finally subsided when the sun came up. And so, I took that dusty composition notebook and returned it to the stack, opting to work on something more peaceable for my current skill level. Someday that graphic novel is gonna materialize and sell kajillion copies. But for now I amass these ideas and wait for enough prowess to do them justice. I have so much to learn.***
