Okay, so if you did each of the three concept generating exercises—Netflix, CSI, and What If?—and did each one daily for a week each, you should have anywhere from 21 – 210 concepts. If you did the bonus AI round, and were able to get decent results, you might have 28 – 280 concepts. That, in itself, is awesome. But we’re not done yet.
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For this next exercise, scroll through your existing concepts and apply the Netflix strategy. Pick three random concepts and combine their elements to see if they inspire a new concept. For example, below are three concepts from my Netflix post:

1. When Armageddon strikes during their after-school detention, a gang of mismatched teens rely on one another’s strengths to defend the school so that they can survive.
2. When a famous actress returns to her alma mater to give a speech during Homecoming, the current Homecoming Queen plots to have her kidnapped for stealing her thunder.
3. Everyone in the world wakes to discover Armageddon happened while they were sleeping…twenty years ago. Can the survivors pick up the pieces and reclaim a world that’s been overrun by mother nature?

 
And here are some new concepts that I see:

• When the entire boarding school mysteriously passes out and wakes during the Homecoming dance, they are convinced that they are subjects of the Homecoming Court. When the queen kills her king to claim the throne for her own, the lower classmen rally for a coup.
• When a famous actress is hired for a feature film on a princess, largely chosen for similar looks, the two women meet, and the princess goes missing. Or is the princess merely pretending to be her doppelganger so that she can get a break from the royal life?

I’m calling this one a bonus round because, for right now, it’s more nerdy fun than it is useful. But just as this isn’t the stage to be censoring your ideas, the crazy ideas that you might get out of this process can probably be mined into gold.

If you haven’t yet given Chat GPT a try, you definitely should. Imagine Tony Stark, interacting with his AI computer to build the latest Iron Man suit. Using Chat GPT is kinda like that, if you squint just right. When you do a Google search, the algorithm scans the database and gives you links to articles and pages that might be what you’re looking for, and might not. You then click through the ads and hyperlinks to hopefully find what you need.

Chat GPT is a different kind of beast. You can ask it the same question as you did Google, and it reads the articles and summarizes the search findings for you. And if the information isn’t quite what you’re looking for, you can ask it to try again with tweaks—it learns what information is relevant to you. Its data is not current, however, so you shouldn’t attempt to use it for picking stocks.

So, how can you use this to generate movie ideas? Visit chat.openai.com, login, and just ask. The trick to getting good results is to tweak the wording of your question to get useful results. I went back to my “CSI Strategy” post and fed the listed headlines as prompts and asked for a high concept movie idea.

The AI spat out something like “Big Bird mourns the loss of an original ‘Sesame Street’ character.”

​After a couple more tries, I landed on the following prompt:

What if?

Really, what it all comes down to when writing is the writer asking themselves this question. What if a tornado carried a runaway teen over the rainbow to a magical land of Munchkins, wizards and witches? What if an orphaned boy who was forced to sleep under the stairs suddenly discovered he is a powerful wizard and gets invited to study magic in a castle school? What if a wolf’s bite cursed you into turning into a wolf every full moon?

What if? coupled with And then what? Over and over again…that’s where a story develops. And most writers probably do this subconsciously as they go about their day. The trick for generating concepts doesn’t need the And then what? Just the What if? And the trick is to make it a conscious exercise.
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• What if the barista poisoned my Mocha Latte? Why would she do that? Was she targeting me, specifically? How could I survive?
• What if my house was burning down and I called 911, and when the firemen arrived they refused to get out of the truck? Why would they do that? Is my house really on fire? Am I hallucinating a fire? Maybe it’s a premonition.
• What if the morning radio host began speaking directly to me? And he could hear me talk back? Could everyone hear our conversation? What would we talk about? What would be so important to trigger this phenomenon?
• What if my dog swallowed my cat whole? What would the cat do?
• What if my daughter was an elf at the North Pole who hated making toys? How would the other elves treat her? What would she rather do than make toys?
• What if I was secretly running from a demon who expected my daughter as payment for a debt incurred when I, myself was just a child?
• What if that Nigerian prince really did give me a fortune?

​This could be more appropriately called the “torn from the headlines” strategy, but calling “CSI” is a great reminder that, sometimes, facts make great fiction.

With this approach, scroll through the headlines of a news website and see what the headlines trigger in your imagination. There are a few ways to do this:

• Apply the Netflix strategy to multiple headlines
  • Combine the elements of two or more headlines
• Write the story
  • Write a "big" story that fits the headline
• Intentionally misunderstand the headline
  • As I’m writing, one headline reads “Original ‘Sesame Street’ Character Dies.” I know they’re talking about one of the humans (Bob McGrath), but my writer brain immediately goes “Oh, no! What happened to Kermit?” And that joke can lead to all sorts of story ideas.
• Visit the other side of the argument
  • It used to be that news was merely facts with an editorial sprinkled here and there. Nowadays, most news outlets seem to be all editorial disguised as fact. Even when there is true news being reported, an outlet may have a bias—they only report news in such a way that promotes a certain view. They can’t even be registered as a news outlet, but as entertainment. This is a shame in the bigger scheme of things, but for this exercise, it can be quite helpful.
  • If you lean left/liberal, scan the headlines on some outlet that leans right/conservative, and vice versa.
  • Why is this helpful? Because reading an alternative bias against what you typically resonate with is likely to spark something unsettling within you, and that angst can drive creativity.

Remember, the vast majority of the concepts you generate will suck. And that is okay. You need to give yourself permission to be crazy, stupid, out there, and messy when you’re trying to figure out what to write. Don’t edit yourself. The goal is to just have fun with this and generate as many ideas as you can. You’ll then review the concepts and see which ones get your attention, which ones can be tweaked into a better concept, and hone in on the marketable ones.

Always remember, “Sharknado” is a thing. It’s not only ridiculously dumb, but was ridiculously successful. Just have fun with this.

​This first “Netflix” strategy was once my favorite, but the Netflix interface is no longer compatible—especially the way it auto-plays previews. It used to show a grid of movies, where each row more or less contained a different genre…and scrolling through that grid was what helped me generate ideas.
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Luckily, Google offers a great alternative. Search “movies on Netflix,” and results show up in a grid as shown here.

​And here comes the fun. Pick two movies in the same genre, and a third from a different genre or category and try to get yourself to see something by combining the three.