Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Ideas: Don't Stop with One Good Idea

Technique Tuesday

Animator Patrick Smith, writing at Scribble Junkies, shared some of John Lasseter's advice in a post on the 7 Creative Principles of Pixar.

The first principle is, "Never come up with just one idea."

Here's how John explains it:


The first key here, and it bears repeating, is, "this requirement suddenly forces you to think about things your hadn't even considered before." There are a lot of people out there having good ideas. If you stop with your first good idea, chances are very good that someone has already thought of it. But with each additional good idea you bring to the table, the chance of someone else thinking of the exact same ideas drops dramatically.

The second key is the perspective you gain through detachment. That is, if you have more than one good idea then you've got a fall-back if one of the ideas proves less good than you thought. More importantly, you can compare and contrast the ideas and get a better sense of their relative merits than if you have only one, precious idea ... gollum.

Image: luigi diamanti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net


  1. Yes Yes Yes. Illuminating post. Thanks.

  2. I like this philosophy. It would work with each new scene, too.

  3. In the context of the Pixar comments, I understood the advice about at least three good ideas to serve as insurance that they really were investing all that time and energy into the best idea.

    But you make a very good point, Deb, and for the opposite structural reason: scenes are cheep, compared to then scope of the entire project and so you can afford to try several approaches.

    I suspect a substantial part of revisions amounts to the same thing: trying different approaches to key scenes. Doing so on the first draft won't guarantee that it will be perfect, but it will probably reduce the number of scenes that have to be reworked in revisions.