As a writer, I find one should always be taking in new information. It can be through articles, books, tv shows, podcasts – the important thing is to have a steady flow of new concepts and corners of the world that you can process and turn into story. I recently read an article that to me seemed ripe with different concepts and potential a writer could take away.
Mind you, these are just the elements I’ve identified. Each person will take away different things – that’s why I can’t write the same script you would. What follows isn’t meant to be the way to do this, but a way. And I hope it inspires some new ways of harvesting material for you!
To start, read this article which summarizes an episode of a podcast that interviews gamblers. Then come back here and we’ll break down the different ways into it I see.
Language
The most immediate thing that popped for me: how these people talk. The insider lingo flies quick and steady – hole card, big player, chop, bank. Gina, the interviewee, talks authoritatively in the language of this subculture. These terms come naturally for her, and she uses them without a second thought. It’s the writer who has to stop and give us context so we, the reader, can understand.
Obviously this gets flagged as something I’d want to return to if I ever wrote about gamblers. But it also teaches an important lesson about researching whatever world you’re writing about and knowing the language. Deploying insider terms establishes your authority and the authenticity of your writing. Even if you’re making a world up, this opportunity still exists. Blade Runners, for instance, are the term of art for the detectives who track down escaped androids.
Character
Obviously, Gina makes for an interesting character. A single mom who has to put on a persona so she can run the tables and take advantage of the casinos. That right there makes for great story fodder. But you can keep pushing deeper into the article to find other possibilities.
There’s the attorney she references, who works with gamblers. That also feels like a fresh way into a gambling movie. Or the Big Player that gets recruited to front her gambling efforts and who works because of the racism of the casino. All sorts of supporting characters in this article each suggest their own possible story.
Premises
Again, Gina’s personal biography acts as premise on its own, Erin Brockovich meets Rounders. But what about the moment in her story when she and a few other gamblers come together to run a town together for a weekend? You can take her out and swap in all new characters into this premise with high stakes and a limited time frame. It could be a 21-style thriller or a low-key Mississippi Grind dramedy or an existential nightmare a la Uncut Gems.
Same for a team flying out to Puerto Rico to take advantage of looser gambling laws – now you’ve got an interesting new setting for gambling movie. Or what about the lawyer for gamblers – you could create a legal procedural around someone like that. And so on.
The Take-Away
These are just some of the elements you could extract from the article, and we didn’t even get to the actual story at the heart of it involving search and seizure by the TSA and the ensuing legal battle. And you should notice that all of what I described above are general concepts removed from the specifics of the article. You could take anything I suggested above and run with it without needing the rights to the article, Gina, or the podcast. Too often a writer encounters something, likes the story potential, and gets hung up on the rights and the specifics when the thing that’s exciting them is general enough that you don’t need any of that.
The other thing to remember with the above is that a lot of it translates outside of the specifics of a gambling movie. You can take the lawyer who specializes for a niche clientele and reapply it to a lawyer for Amish people, or for free climbers, or any other subculture. Same for the woman who has to put on a persona to match the expectations by a sexist or racist institution in order to actually do the thing she’s good at. Or the quasi-legal search and seizure tactics of the U.S. Law Enforcement. You can take all of these threads and run with them, leaving gambling far behind.
And this all just takes practice. Make a point of exposing yourself constantly to new information and ideas, and then think about what could be useful for you. Then write down those ideas for future reference. Do it enough and it will become second nature, and you’ll start seeing everything as potential story fodder. Which is maybe its own problem but that’s for your therapist to figure out.