Considering Chip has been thinking about playing around with flicks like Tron: Legacy and Sucker Punch, and given that I've always enjoyed doing that kind of thing, and that it's not an often-discussed way of writing, I thought it would behoove us to have a thread dedicated to that.
There are a couple things to bear in mind about this approach:
* This isn't a direct path to anything. Remember the line from Halt And Catch Fire: "it's not the thing, it's the thing that leads us TO the thing." I personally approach this as writing for the trashcan, a way to analyze what I like, see what works and what doesn't, and what I can learn.
* The idea of "fixing something" is pretty arrogant. Instead, the mentality should be experimentation. "What would happen if I did this?" "What if I put this character from this movie into another movie?" That sort of thing. The objective isn't to fix, it's to play.
So with that in mind, I figure this thread would be a nice place to shoot the breeze about this sort of thing, not just what we're working on, but our approaches, what we might want to play with and why, why we do it, that sort of thing.
I'll tell you what started this for me: When I was a kid living in Italy, one of the only shows on was Power Rangers. Well, I remember figuring out the whole dual-nature of that show, how half of it was a whole different show from Japan, and that inspired my imagination, wondering what I wasn't seeing. Then, when I started getting online, I discovered that the Japanese show always aired a whole year before the American show, so I would see these scans of Japanese magazines featuring new outfits, creatures, robots, etc... early 90s JPG quality, and if I was very lucky, a clip or two on RealPlayer. Low-resolution text in a language I couldn't understand if I could even see it... well, it gave me a year to try and figure out what I thought it would be.
And when I got exposed to more things, like books I wanted to read or trailers for movies I wanted to see (remember how long it took for a movie to come out when you were young?), my mind started playing with those too.
Of course, back then I wasn't a particularly skillful writer, and I was barely an artist, so the extent of what I could do with all that was limited. I guess that's why that instinct went away.
Ironically, I think what brought me back was Power Rangers. A couple of years ago Disney cancelled the series and it looked like that might have been the end for the show. And I saw the amazing designs that would have gone to waste and started thinking "okay, if I had to bring the show back, what would I do? What would I want to see? How could I please old and new audiences? What are the flaws in the show and how could I fix them? What current shows have the mood and style that I'd like to see, and how could I recreate that without ripping them off?" etc. I played around with it, had some interesting ideas (as well as a couple brand-new original all-my-own "parts" that I can insert into other projects... and doing this taught me how to effectively use Scrivener without sacrificing a "worthy" project to that cause (I always want a "sacrifice" project when you're trying something new, because developing a workflow always comes with snags and hang-ups.
There's an approach to writing I heard about and love called "writing for the trashcan," songwriters do it a lot, the idea is just to write something, maybe it's useful, maybe it's not, but you just have to keep doing it. Doing de-writes and mash-ups has allowed me to design a modular workflow meaning for whatever I create, I can see all the parts that went into something, and if a project fails, I can just take out the parts I want and insert them somewhere else.