Filming in the Ghost
Highlights (and challenges) of lifting words off the page
Back when I was doing a LOT of public presentations to help get the word out about my books, my daughter and I spent a lot of time on the road. While book tours might sound exotic (and, yes, there are some fun moments to be sure), they are exhausting.
When I spoke to school groups about where my ideas came from, I mentioned my early obsession with horses…
… and how those obsessions eventually wound up in novels like Rebel of Dark Creek the first of the StableMates series (now out of print). I’d share stories about how I’d been chased by a bear when I was kid, things that had happened during my travels, the idiosyncracies of my family members, and, yes, my daughter and her passion for writing (she wrote her first novel when she was about 12 or 13 and self-published it before self-publishing was a thing anyone with an Amazon KDP account could do) and how that led to my writing of the Tarragon Island novels.
After a school presentation in the middle of a long tour, as she and I were sitting in a fast food restaurant fuelling up to travel to the next town on the itinerary, she said,
“You never tell the truth about anything in those presentations.
And you don’t know how to lie. All your novels are true.”
Ah. Out of the mouths of babes. She was perhaps 13 at the time and had exactly captured the essence of compelling storytelling. Writing fiction allows me to get at certain truths in a way that’s impossible to do in straight narrative non-fiction. And, every good anecdote/piece of memoir (including the one I just shared - I actually have no idea exactly where or when we had this conversation about my compulsive lying and truth-telling…) benefits from some pruning, enhancing, and careful manipulation of the details for the sake of keeping the story moving.
Documentary Films Need to Tell a Story
I was reminded of this weird reality vs creative license tension during our film shoot last weekend in the Ghost Wilderness Area.
We are telling a real story about the filmmaker’s struggles coming back from some pretty debilitating health challenges. And, we wanted to capture his efforts to come back from the brink of beyond by filming him on a great outdoorsy trip into a wild place with a good friend (and his wife, Kat - support team member extraordinaire).
The story involves e-bikes and river crossings, ongoing health challenges, hiking, and climbing… We were out in the middle of nowhere in the mountains, so perilous situations like being caught in a thunderstorm or having our campsite get invaded by hornets, blackflies, or grizzly bears were all possibilities. We didn’t really know what we’d face and had to be ready for anything.
When you drag a camera person, rope guns (the climber/s who go ahead of the cameraman so he can dangle on a route parallel to the one being attempted by our leading men), vehicles, support team, director, etc. out to the back of beyond, you can’t just all hop out of the vehicles in random spots and say - this looks like a good place. Let’s film something, shall we?
We had a script. A plan. A general idea of what we thought the story arc might look like. I am both director and writer on the project, so I had a list of shots that I wanted to get, and that was cross-referenced with the lists of shots provided by Andy (it’s his story we are telling) and our Director of Photography and camera operator, Juan.
Yes, we were shooting a documentary (we didn’t know exactly what was going to happen once we got out there and put Andy and his faithful friend Jason to the test), but we were also telling a story. We hope that the end result is a hybrid that blends fiction and reality smoothly enough that no viewers will be able to tell exactly where one begins and the other ends.
How much is real? All of it.
How much is contrived? Everything.
The mix of detailed planning/scripting and the unpredictable nature of life unfolding in real time led to an interesting (unexpected) final scene and I’m curious how we will deal with all the footage when we tackle the editing process.
Keep reading this newsletter and you’ll be the first to know of developments… We still have some filming to do (we’ve filmed the middle and end - now we have to go back and film the beginning…) and then, of course, there’s LOTS of time to be spent doing that whole cutting and splicing thing. Stay tuned…
“How much is real? All of it.
“How much is contrived? Everything.”
So good. 💫
What you write about lies versus truth in ficition--so key for all writers. I'll follow your filming, directing process of this documentary--and, as you already know, I'm a fan of your learning to draw and the tribute to your father. You might find of interest my take on "truth in fiction" that I talk about here: https://marytabor.substack.com/p/autobiography-and-fiction-get-ready Would love to know what you think.