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 describes a risk that exists with every story we develop and how he came back from the precipice:

This week I went off the rails and I had to have my fellow Questers talk me down. (Even my metaphors are mixed up, that’s how confused I was.)

I blasted them all with a lengthy diatribe regarding the “evolution” of my story. What was originally a straight forward concept that Scott described as a “simple, but scary horror thriller” evolved (via a dream vision, I shit you not) into something including air travel, horse stables, Dom Perignon, female escorts, lots of knives, blood and suicidal Russian men with plastic surgery. Cool, right? But let’s just say it wasn’t as “simple” as the original concept and as much as I felt that it was an extension of the original idea, it wasn’t.

Truth be told, I quite liked this new thing and so I solicited a vote with my fellow Questers. Should I be writing this instead? I held my breath until the last vote came in. It was from Paul, who wrote “I agree with Miranda, Sandra, Waka and Christian”… your new idea sucks. Okay, Paul didn’t say suck or anything close to that. No one did. Actually, everyone was very polite. But they were unanimous in their preference for my original concept, and conspicuously silent on the new iteration (as I referred to it).

This presented a problem for me, not only because I kinda liked my new idea, but because I’d run into what I thought were serious problems with my original concept.

I thought I had a decent handle on my stories hero, and last week was feeling pretty good about things. Except for the antagonist. I knew what he was going do, but had no idea why, and not the foggiest sense of who. Well, earlier in the week, Scott had mentioned that, at some point in The Quest, weeks down the road, he’d ask us to “sit down” with our antagonist and hold an interview with him/her. Scott explained that the trick to the exercise would be to really “listen” and let the Bad Guy tell their side of the story. Because, we’re all heroes of our own journey, right?

Well, even though we weren’t at a stage in The Quest to complete this exercise, this idea just sounded too valuable not to try out right away. So, that night, after I put my kids to bed with “Brontorina the Dancing Dinosaur,” I poured myself a glass of wine and went off to talk to my lunatic. I had to get to know this creep. Would he resemble a tongue-flicking, intellectual psycho like Lector? Or maybe more the hands-off, lesson-teacher psycho a la Jigsaw from Saw? (I actually had neither of these baddies in mind and, of course, we don’t want to be derivative of existing characters, just trying to illustrate a point.) Turned out, after about 30 minutes of my “interview,” I realized that my psycho more resembled Mike Wazowski from Monsters U, he just wasn’t that scary. My guy was weird, sure, but the man was really just the victim of terrible circumstances. He’d had some bad shit happen and, well, let’s just say I felt sorry him… Worse, I felt like I was exploiting the poor guy for cheap effect.

Which explains my “dream vision.” (Clarification: This was really just one of those half asleep thought-streams I sometimes have when working on a story, usually about 6am on weekend mornings, while laying in bed, waiting for my young kids to rush in and ask me for juice.) Basically, my doubt about the antagonist folded into other doubts about the entire concept and, well, I’m not sure it was what Scott refers to as the “Shiny Object Syndrome” but it was close… my mind went to other narrative possibilities.

Anyway, I’m back now (to the original concept). With the help of my fellow Questers, and two very valuable pieces of advice from Scott that allowed me to completely re-envision my antagonist, I’m off the ledge, back on track with my original logline and more excited about the idea than ever (of course, now my protagonist has become a bit foggy). But, for now, my train’s a-chuggin’. Whoop-whoop. “Onward!” as Scott says.

We had an extensive discussion about Troy’s creative adventure, both in the forums and in our weekly teleconference, and I thank him for sharing his experience here with the GITS community because this is an ever present possibility: That in our development process, we may lose contact with our original impulses and veer far away from where the story should be.

Now in Troy’s case, he managed to come up with another significantly different concept he can set aside and go at down the road, but what we discussed as a group was the importance of keeping touch with that original creative instinct.

When you had that initial idea, the story concept just leaped to mind, something inside of you sparked to it. Possibly you even saw the movie in your head or at least you had a positive sense of what it could be.

It’s that I’m talking about, that pure, undefiled and strong resonance with the core of your story idea.

When we develop a story, we go through all sorts of possibilities, traveling up and down a plethora of narrative paths and avenues, some of them work, some of them don’t, but it’s easy to find oneself adrift in a miasma of where to turn and what to do.

We can even end up asking ourselves, “What the hell was I thinking about this idea in the first place anyhow?”

That means our original instinct has been lost to the vicissitudes of story development.

So here is what I told Troy: When I read his logline, an image came to my head. A very specific moment in a scene which I described in detail to he and the group in our call last weekend. And that image creeped me out. I had an emotional response to his logline that provoked a moment in the story to come alive in my imagination. Indeed that image conveyed to me everything I needed to know to ‘see’ the movie. I just got it in that instant.

I suggested to each of the Questers to come up with one moment, scene or image, a touchstone that reflects the original inspiration and instinct related to their story concept. No matter where the story development process takes them, they will always have that cinematic talisman to keep them in touch with those original thoughts and feelings, possibly even to help steer them through the roiling waters of crafting a story.

For those of you who are going on your own quest, I recommend the same thing. Find your own touchstone that conjures up the feelings you have for your story at this primitive, raw state.

It is important. It reminds you of your creative instincts for the story. It reminds you of your emotional resonance with the story. It reminds you of why you thought it was a good story in the first place.

And by keeping that touchstone near to you, it can keep you from going off the rails.

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.

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