Another Quest success story!
As we approach the end of the 24-week Quest period, I’m receiving more and more tweets and emails from writers who have successfully prepped and written a first draft of an original screenplay. Recently Cherri Stoute emailed me with this note:
Hello Scott, Thank you so very much for the quest. When I started this journey I was very doubtful. I would tell anyone I spoke to about it “I don’t see how this is going to work but at this point I have no choice but to do it. It will either work or it won’t.”
So, everyday I would show up online and read the question of the day. Sometimes I had an answer, which would actually surprised me, and sometimes I didn’t but I would find an answer. That was Core.
Next came Prep, at the end of which I knew I would have to have an outline. This scared me because I had tried to write an outline before. But I plugged away. I read about outlines from your blog and other places. Then I put your questions together with what I thought my outline would be and I’m sure you know what happened next…
I GOT AN OUTLINE! 25 pages with acts and a midpoint and purpose and lines of dialogue!
That’s when I knew. You sir, are a trickster.
Somehow you made it seem as though nothing was happening even after you told us what would happen!
Well 92 pages later, I’m writing to say, “You told me so and it happened so.”
I thank you from the bottom of my once Grinch sized doubting heart for “teaching me to fish”.
Life will never be the same.
Cherri
Hey, if I have to be a Trickster to get people to write their stories, I’m happy to don that mask! And you know what? It’s an accurate observation. The Prep process is really fundamentally about asking a series of questions tied to weekly writing assignments. You use the questions to dig into your story, first this question and that, then suddenly after you’ve gone through the whole process — voila! You have an outline! I can see why Cherri thought it felt like the work of a trickster.
What I’m trying to is demystify the process: how to break a story? You don’t have to run off into the wilds and drink Wild Turkey for months on end, there is a more direct and efficient way as laid out in Prep.
Cherri added this in a follow-up email:
I can’t tell you enough how the quest made my life. Some people may think structure means formula but it was the “structure” you provided that really freed my mind to find and then tell the story. The moment I finished that outline and saw I had in fact just written my screenplay, words escaped me.
Love it! I’m tempted to do a week-long series in January on rewriting. Would anyone be interested in that?
Congratulations, Cherri!
If anyone else has a Quest success story, I’d love to hear from you, either in comments or email. Who knows? Maybe I’ll ask to publish your note!
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