My best idea for a story came to me when I was on a train and six years later it’s still rattling tracks through my head. Colourful, featherlight and pure, I fell in love with it the same way an artist might fall in love with a model or butterfly collector might a Grizzled Skipper.
The wilfully impractical unproduced shorts, feature length pilots and 130 page ‘bible’ I’ve put together since then have been fences to guard this spotless idea. Each too big or too small to be practical, they’re passive-aggressive attempts to resist the transformation into completed, imperfect output that would take life away from the purity of the original idea. ‘Story Execution’, indeed.
The thing is, filling your head full of fluttering ideas is just as inadvisable…
