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 reflects on story themes:
One interesting aspect of the Quest is that our group covers so many different genres. There’s action, comedy, horror, family, young adult, adventure, thriller. Even a bit of Bollywood.
But this week, after reading everyone’s “Four Themeline Movements,” it struck me how similar the themes are in these different genres and stories. Miranda/Sandy and Paul are writing vastly different scripts, but the central theme is family. Christian, Waka, and I are writing stories in disparate genres, yet our stories all share a theme of embracing one’s true self.
This got me thinking in general about writing within a genre. Often times, genre writers are considered hacks. Granted, a lot of genre films are written as pure entertainment. In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, I’d argue that human beings need entertainment just as much as we do art. But looking at the themes covered in the Questers’ stories, every script is attempting to communicate something serious.
Reading this week’s themelines also made me appreciate that it’s possible to “write what you know” and also write within any genre. I used to think “write what you know” meant using one’s life experiences to literally inform the story. If the writer is a lawyer, they should consider writing a legal thriller. But actually, I think it’s more useful to think of it as incorporating one’s emotional understanding into a story. It certainly makes things more fun.
Much of the discussion about structure tends to focus on what I call the Plotline, the External World of the screenplay universe, the realm of Action and Dialogue. Here we obsess over things like plot points (or Plotline Points), scenes, sequences, acts. And we are right to work and rework this part of the narrative.
But it is only a part of the whole picture. For when something happens in the External World… something else is happening… in what we may call the Internal World of the screenplay universe, the realm of Intention and Subtext. I call this the Themeline.
Plotline = Physical Journey.
Themeline = Psychological Journey.
The latter is equally important. Writers who delve into the emotional, psychological, even spiritual life of their stories are much more likely to tap into narrative content that resonates with readers on an emotional level.
So in The Quest, we spend a good deal of time talking about characters and their inner lives. And where there are Plotline Points in the External World, we consider Themeline Movements in the Internal World, essentially the arc of the Protagonist’s metamorphosis.
At the end of the day, what we hope to produce is an organic story, one where characters and plot work together seamlessly. But these concepts like Plotline and Themeline are tools we can use to dig into, understand and craft such a story.
Really it all comes back to this: Go into the story and find the animals.
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.