Dispatch From The Quest: Troy Klith
Over the course of the 24 weeks I am working with the writers in The Quest, each will write a weekly dispatch to share with the GITS community. There are several reasons for doing this, the main one educational: Hopefully you will learn something of value for your own understanding of the craft from the experiences of the Questers. I should also add they are a great group of people, so I expect you will enjoy getting to know them.
Today: Troy has a revelation about The Quest writing exercises:
The focus of this week’s lectures was dialog, with the great summation that dialog = purpose. One of our writing exercises was to create a scene with subtext, which everyone found to be a challenging task. It’s hard enough to create a scene with a decent beginning/middle/end, but when there’s an added requirement that it be laced with subtext? Eeesh. I wasn’t excited.
So I began with some reluctance. How would I pull a “subtext scene” out of the air? I started to comb my undeveloped story for opportunities. Were there any places, objects, or concepts that connected to a character’s goal, or to the story’s underlying theme? As I pondered this question, my anxiety morphed into that much sought after creative flicker. All sorts of ideas materialized — most not good, some not bad, but a few that were promising. Ultimately, the exercise forced me to not only think about subtext within scenes and dialog, but also allowed me to look at my entire story concept from a new perspective, which I think is always helpful.
I’ve now come to think of these writing exercises as an athlete might going to the gym. I think they’re working my narrative muscles in prep for the big game. It’s tempting for a football player to say “I’d rather not hit the weights, I just want to play ball,” but it’s probably not an approach that will lead to success.
I also realized that those exercises I suspect are a diversion might end up being the most useful. The next time I resist tackling one of them, I hope to identify this reluctance signals opportunity. If I suspect the exercise will be difficult, it’s probably because it’s forcing me to do something new and that will likely lead to fresh insights.
Troy is onto me. The Quest does have writing exercises. And while it may feel to a writer like they are suddenly back in a college creative writing class, there are much more practical reasons why I have the Questers doing them:
* As Troy has discovered, I want them to work those writing muscles, develop those chops week to week.
* That process ought to help them get into a groove of pounding out pages.
* Since each exercise has a due date, that, too, has a benefit in compelling writers to meet deadlines.
* The exercises put theory into practice, each one tied to that week’s lecture contents.
* The exercises work to compel each writer to engage their creativity in new and different ways.
* They also force the writers to dig into their stories and experiment with the raw narrative material.
There are other reasons which I’ll leave unspoken, a mystery box for Troy and his compatriots to discover.
The Quest is not an academic exercise, rather it is a comprehensive approach to give a writer the best preparation possible in the event the script they write enables them to break into the business. Because once you’ve gotten that break, you need to know how to deliver the goods, project after project, in order to continue to work as a writer in Hollywood.
As I say, “It’s not just about writing a screenplay, it’s learning how to think and write like a professional screenwriter.”
Tomorrow: Another Dispatch From The Quest.
About Troy: Born Midwesterner with heart in San Francisco, but nothing beats NYC. Entrepreneur. Writer. Lover of the underdog. Grateful father of 3. @troyklith.