How To Write Out Of The Box Story

Many people ask me why writers don’t write out of the box stories? Out of the stories are the most interesting ones and yet there are very few.

Well out of the box stories are very hard to write but those are the stories which critics and audience love. Most of the stories are predictable, like there is a protagonist and he has a conflict and he is going to solve the conflict in the end of the movie. It can be a romantic movie or an action movie or a drama movie or… but this will be the basic structure of every story. Out of the box stories have curiosity as an integral part of them. Out of the box story means its is based on the basic structure of the storytelling yet it is unpredictable. I personally love out of the box stories and I love to write them.

Lets analyse couple of examples how of write out of the box. We will analyse The Terminal (2004) and The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (2008). The terminal is a story of a man from eastern Europe who is travelling to USA. While he is travelling there is a war in his country and USA withdraws his country’s recognition and when he arrives at JFK, he is a man with no country and he cannot enter USA and forced to stay in the airport for 9 months. Imagine a man without a country staying at airport. Second example is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Imagine a man starts aging backwards, which means he is born as a old man and dies as an infant. Both films are critically acclaimed and The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button got Academy nominations in almost all the categories.

Now the big question is how to write out of the box story? Well personally I use two methods. First method to write out of the box is improvisation. Improvisation means you give a situation to the actors/friends without dialog or specifying their characters and they have to come up with the ideas and dialogs of their own to take the story forward. For example lets say we just give situation that people are standing on bus stop, now the actors have to decide who they are and what their dialogs will be. One actor starts as a cop and others will follow him, then second becomes a beggar or whatever they want, but you will notice that the story starts moving forward. Just video tape the act and you get a rough out of the box story.

Second method is my favourite to write out of the box. Imagine what will happen if everything starts moving opposite direction like The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button. What will happen if people start aging backwards or sun will start cooling down or oceans will dry out or …. Imagine the story and you will get what no one has ever imagined.  I have written a screenplay about the victims of a bomb blast who become happy after getting injured in the bomb blast and I am currently negotiating with a couple of top shot Hollywood studios.

I hope you like my methods of how to wite out of the box stories? Please share it with your friends and don’t wait,start implementing what you learned about how to write out of the box.