Developing Story Ideas, 3rd Edition

2 About the Creative Process

The Journey of the Self

Discovering the stories you are best qualified to tell means looking into unfamiliar aspects of your own life, and grasping the nature of things you may have felt deeply but whose primacy you may not have unrecognized. Such a source came as a true “moment of vision” in my own life. Working on a capsule autobiography for a degree program, I wrote that, “The twenty or so documentary films I have directed are all different, and have nothing in common.” No sooner had I put the words on paper than I realized with a premonitory shock that exactly the opposite was true. All my documentaries explored one theme—that of imprisonment and the will to break out of it. True, they had a wide range of subject ...