A writer friend of mine recently sent me this excellent piece of advice:

‘Why this story?’

It’s what you should ask yourself before you start writing, while you’re writing and after you think you’re done. It’s a polite way of someone asking you, ‘Why the fuck should I care?’ And you have to be able to answer or your story is fucked.

It boils down to theme. Every story is about something (plot) but it’s also really about something else (theme) and most people have shitty stories because they didn’t know what they were trying to say from the beginning. If you don’t have a theme (and you manage to finish a story) the whole thing feels hollow. People leave theaters thinking, ‘that was fun … but what was the point?’

The Matrix’s plot is about reality being a computer program and the rebels fighting against the robot overlords. But what it’s really about is our perception of reality, dealing with paradigm shifts, believing in yourself, being willing to rise to the occasion, accepting your ‘being the one’-ness and what not.

The Lion King is about a lion cub who is sent into exile and how he deals with it, but it’s really about facing the past, accepting responsibility, rising to the occasion, embracing your ‘being the one’-ness and what not.

Clever writers try to figure out what they want to talk about before they start writing because it makes it easier. Going back and trying to insert a theme is hard because there are too many details you have to keep lined up, you have to do a lot more work and odds are you’ll find the story you want to tell is far different from the one you just wrote.

Although my friend was writing in reference to stories, I think his advice can be applied just as equally to projects. The same integral question arises. First you need to ask yourself, what is this really about? Because if you want to create a company, project or movement that has meaning, something truly great, there needs to be BIG IDEA behind it. Otherwise it’s just shadows and glitter.

Emily and I have been brainstorming about where to take Lane Change, and the truth is, we’d love to be able to make a living from this project so we can spend more than just a few spare hours a week on it. But once we agreed on that suddenly the “how to make money” question began to grow and grow until it had taken over the brainstorm (or at least was completely dominating my headspace.)

At some point I turned around to Emily and said, “If money was no option, what would you like to do?”

In the bio-pic Milk about gay-rights activist Harvey Milk, it’s clear that Harvey was not driven by a thirst for power or the prestige of a political career. “Politics is theater,” he said, and he used it only to further a greater cause: the acceptance of gay people in a then incredibly hostile environment. For Harvey it was the gay movement first, and politics second. And without the former, the latter had no meaning.

For Emily and I, making money out of Lane Change is simply a means to an end. The more pressing question is, what do we want Lane Change to achieve? What is Lane Change really about?

Image (cc) leg0fenris