Latest / The Starfish Storytellers / Episode 1: Developing Your Storyboard as an Author with Phillip Henry

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Episode 1: Developing Your Storyboard as an Author with Phillip Henry · The Starfish Storytellers

• 0:00
  Welcome to the Starfish Storytellers, the podcast that makes a difference one story at a time by bringing storytelling to life.
• 0:12
  He gasped for a large breath of air to regain his composure and stood tall once again.
• 0:18
  You didn't hear me when I told you a moment ago. I said, let them go now.
• 0:26
  Michael's voice did not sound like his own when he spoke, but he didn't know how to qualify who else or what else it sounded like.
• 0:36
  Malcolm laughed. Oh, I heard you correctly. But you really don't understand how things work in the real world, do you?
• 0:46
  You are not in a position to demand anything, least of which is the freedom of your parents.
• 0:54
  I told you when we spoke earlier that I wanted you here. I never mentioned anything about letting mommy and daddy go.
• 1:05
  He licked his lips at this last statement. Yes, good old mom. It would seem that daddy has seen better days.
• 1:16
  Maybe it's time to try mommy on for size. Malcolm took a step towards Sarah Mahoney. She closed her eyes.
• 1:27
  The world slowed down for Michael and proceeded at an apparent pace of one frame per second.
• 1:37
  His chest and stomach was instantaneously a boiling cauldron of fury pain, and he dropped to his knees in the vestibule of the Mahoney home.
• 1:48
  He wrapped his arms around his midsection and groaned loudly as he felt the muscles in his arms expand and contract with a grotesque abandon.
• 1:59
  His head felt like a powder cake less than a second before detonation.
• 2:05
  Another second, and he opened his eyes, newly surveying the scene in front of him.
• 2:13
  He could hear his parents distinctive heartbeats along with the other man's, though this was very, very slow.
• 2:24
  His eyes flashed repeatedly, losing some of his peripheral vision.
• 2:31
  The werewolf inhaled, and he was able to detect the olfactory differences between the three people in the room.
• 2:40
  He stared at Malcolm, who had stopped walking towards Michael's mother, and moved towards him, letting a deep rumbling growl build.
• 2:52
  Malcolm stared back at him and stood fast.
• 2:55
  Excellent, he said, and smiled his terrible smile once again.
• 3:01
  The wolf looked at three people.
• 3:04
  Two were frightened, and one was smiling as he walked toward him.
• 3:10
  He took a step toward the walking man.
• 3:12
  The other two could wait until he was done with this one.
• 3:16
  Suddenly there was the sound of something breaking behind him.
• 3:20
  Snapping his head, he turned and saw another man running into the room.
• 3:25
  He caught the fourth man's gaze and warned him back with a loud, throaty growl.
• 3:33
  Returning his attention to the walking man, he advanced quickly and was about to pounce when he felt something bite him in the soft part of the leg.
• 3:42
  He saw the room go weird with black and white colors.
• 3:47
  The wolf didn't remember anything after that.
• 4:05
  Hello, my name is Liana Henry, and welcome to the Starfish Storytellers.
• 4:10
  I'm the CEO of the Black Dog Group, a MarCom and project management firm headquartered on the east coast of the U.S. in quaint, colonial Bedford, Massachusetts.
• 4:20
  I'm your host and passionate about storytelling, and I'm actually on a mission to raise up the next generation of storytellers.
• 4:27
  We named ourselves the Starfish Storytellers after the Starfish Story.
• 4:31
  The moral of the Starfish Story is based on the power of one.
• 4:35
  No matter how big the challenge, each action we take makes a difference and has an impact.
• 4:40
  One step, one starfish, or one story at a time.
• 4:44
  Every episode, we welcome a new storyteller who will share their story, meant to inspire and connect with you.
• 4:50
  Then we'll break it down and offer tips for any listeners who are ready to tell their own stories.
• 4:55
  So, thanks for tuning in. Now let's get started.
• 4:59
  Today's episode is about developing your storyboard as an author.
• 5:02
  With me today is my partner in business and in life, my husband, Philip Henry.
• 5:07
  Philip is the COO of the Black Dog Group and a storyteller himself.
• 5:11
  How's it going, babe? It's going well. Happy to be here, loving my life. Thanks.
• 5:15
  All right. Enough of that mushy stuff. Let's get to business.
• 5:18
  So what you heard just now was an excerpt of Philip's book or manuscript, soon to be a book, called Hunter, Hunted.
• 5:27
  Can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and maybe tell us a little bit about the background of the book and the story?
• 5:35
  Sure. Without turning this into a forty dollar copay, I was born in Canada, moved here a little over twenty years ago.
• 5:44
  I've always had a fascination with the urban fantasy genre.
• 5:49
  So this story was born out of an idea, a thought that I had way back in college that I wrote a short story about that was really horribly written.
• 5:58
  But the whole story was called Seventeen Minutes.
• 6:01
  And I thought it would be an interesting switch on the regular model of a story or an interesting way to turn the tables if it was the werewolf who was being hunted by a werewolf hunter.
• 6:11
  So and the story at the time was about the main character, the werewolf.
• 6:20
  And I just called him the werewolf at that time because he didn't have any sort of personality beyond that was running.
• 6:26
  And he had 17 minutes to before he would change into the werewolf.
• 6:30
  And he was running from the werewolf hunter.
• 6:32
  So he went through a series of flashbacks telling the story of how he got from small child to running from a werewolf hunter all in 17 minutes.
• 6:43
  So with that, that grew up to or morphed into a shall I say a shift in careers, move into the IT space, moved here to the United States.
• 6:57
  And several years ago, I went back and revisited that story once again.
• 7:02
  And when I revisited it, I really wanted the same point of view of the werewolf running from the werewolf hunter.
• 7:09
  But I realized that I needed some more characters around it and I needed the story to have some depth.
• 7:14
  So I without doing any sort of planning or any sort of forethought, I just started writing stuff down.
• 7:21
  And the pieces that I wrote weren't incredibly bad, but they just had no foundation.
• 7:28
  It was like I was putting pushpins on a corkboard.
• 7:31
  None of them were connected in any way.
• 7:34
  So I think I got 35 or 40 pages into that story at the time.
• 7:38
  And I realized, OK, I need to stop this and plan things accordingly.
• 7:45
  And that's what I did.
• 7:47
  So I'm familiar with the story.
• 7:48
  Obviously, you shared it with me.
• 7:51
  And I think and maybe you can speak to this a little bit.
• 7:54
  You said that initially it was a flashback.
• 7:58
  The 17 minutes was like the flashback sort of layout.
• 8:03
  Do I if I remember correctly, the story itself isn't is not written like that anymore.
• 8:09
  It's it's written now in a very different has a very different storyline.
• 8:14
  Yes. And so you'll talk about that in a second.
• 8:18
  But I think one of the questions I had for you was you had to, you know, because this is a storytelling podcast
• 8:24
  and we want our listeners who may have stories to tell and they just know how to get started.
• 8:29
  Maybe you could talk a little bit about the new format that you chose.
• 8:33
  But also, how did you kind of get to that place of sort of storyboarding this?
• 8:38
  OK, so a couple of different thoughts connecting all of this together.
• 8:42
  So my first thought is about the flashbacks themselves as I creatively wrote throughout the years,
• 8:48
  very sporadically and did a lot of reading, which is something we'll touch on a little bit later in the podcast.
• 8:55
  I realized that flashbacks were a really horrible vehicle used to tell the story.
• 9:02
  And I thought and a lot of writers, other writers have the same opinion that flashbacks,
• 9:07
  they are more of a crutch when you can't figure out when an author can't figure out how to fit in a part of the story that needs back story, use a flashback.
• 9:16
  So it was my intent with this story to make everything as present as possible and not use flashbacks as much as possible.
• 9:26
  Now, in order to do that, I needed to be able to plan it out.
• 9:30
  And I used a couple of different things to do that.
• 9:33
  The first thing was I used the basics, you know, the basic model for the story is it's an urban fantasy thriller in modern day Boston.
• 9:44
  And the whole thing is written in the style of a police procedural.
• 9:49
  So think law and order, how everything is very staccato, segmented.
• 9:54
  But at the end of a 60 minute episode, you get the whole story.
• 9:58
  It's just that the whole story is told to you in fragments.
• 10:02
  So I decided that what I was going to do, I still wanted to keep that whole time component of the werewolf knows when he's going to change.
• 10:11
  Yeah. But and we're counting down to that.
• 10:14
  So then I needed to try to fill in and create the backstory of who is he?
• 10:19
  How does he know he's going to change? Why is he fighting against it? Why is he running?
• 10:24
  And that led me into what the writing software that I used at the time was many, many years ago.
• 10:33
  That led me into the hero's journey, where what I did was in the in the software that I used at the time, it broke down the hero's journey into 12 different components.
• 10:44
  And so I literally spent months going through and putting detail around each one of those components, breaking them down on a fragment by fragment, you know, law and order police procedural way and put details in there so that I knew the beginning, the middle and how the story would end.
• 11:04
  Yeah. From and I did all of that.
• 11:07
  Two things I did all of that before I started writing. But when I started writing, I didn't let myself be restricted to the boundaries inside those details.
• 11:19
  OK, the story after a while, if a story, if you really believe in a story and if this is going to sound strange, but if a story really believes in you as the author, it kind of grows and has a life by itself.
• 11:33
  So some of the characters didn't exist in my details.
• 11:38
  Yeah, some of the story points in the details in the in the breakdown in the framework didn't ever make it on to the final story.
• 11:45
  Yep. The story just started to evolve by itself.
• 11:49
  And I would be writing and I would, for example, finish a section of a segment where Michael is in the hospital, for example.
• 11:57
  And I would get to the end of that segment and I'd look to where I was in the details and I realize I need something else here.
• 12:04
  He's going to do something else in an hour.
• 12:07
  And I would just literally sit and the characters would tell me what should be happening.
• 12:13
  So it was it was a great relationship that I built with the characters with the initial framework and then letting the story kind of go along and evolve like that.
• 12:24
  OK. And, you know, I mean, as a you know, as a storyteller, I'm a fellow storyteller, too.
• 12:30
  It's it's there's a lot of power, I think, in becoming the story, like when you are crafting the story.
• 12:37
  It's interesting that you were talking about the heroes, the hero's journey, you know, for folks that don't know what the hero's journey is.
• 12:45
  You actually do. You are all listeners, listeners.
• 12:48
  You all know what the hero's story is, because think of it as, you know, think Star Wars, The Hobbit, Harry Potter, you know, stories like that.
• 12:57
  And so for those who are like the technical side of storytelling, we look at, you know, let's look at the format.
• 13:03
  So the hero's journey is a is a story format.
• 13:06
  And in the format, the hero or heroine lives in an ordinary world, but they're called out to an adventure.
• 13:12
  Something motivates them to leave their comfort zone.
• 13:15
  So initially, they may not want to go, but then they meet a guide and the guide helps them answer the call.
• 13:21
  So the hero or heroine start their journey, but they might face some challenges and that might bring out some doubt for them.
• 13:28
  Regardless, they'll still go on to face their challenges and their battles, regardless, even if they get big, if the challenges are big, they manage to get to the other side.
• 13:37
  They overcome and then they're rewarded because they went on the journey.
• 13:41
  Then they go back to where they came from.
• 13:43
  They might deal with any problems that might have emerged and then they become triumphant.
• 13:48
  And then they know it's all resolved and they come out of it with new power, new lesson, new energy, and they may go on and share that with others.
• 13:56
  So, I mean, you talked about sort of the hero's journey and how it all sort of played out for Hunter, hunted and for your character or characters.
• 14:04
  The main character's name is Michael Mahoney. Yes. Correct. Yeah. OK. OK.
• 14:08
  So you talked about a little bit just you talked about these these software tools that you use.
• 14:14
  And obviously, we know we're not here to be promoting things.
• 14:18
  But but do you want to maybe talk just maybe name a couple that you think are good for people to use or options?
• 14:25
  What options do people have? Some is a budding author. What might be some different tools they can use?
• 14:30
  I mean, and it can be a technology tool, but like I think you've shared with me before that you had taken part in joining like writing groups.
• 14:39
  So we can talk about that. Yeah. So they I'll start with the technology tools first.
• 14:45
  So currently, one of my favorite tools is a tool called Plotter, where it's very storyboard driven and it's very connectivity based,
• 14:56
  where you can create different parts of the story, different settings of the story, different characters, decide if they're going to be antagonists or protagonists.
• 15:03
  You know, you can create different items that the antagonist protagonist are going to use and you can format it and attach it all in different story formats.
• 15:12
  So that is a wonderful tool. And you can just flesh out.
• 15:15
  It's all online so you can you can access it via the Web. And it's all it's a wonderful tool for being able to store and hold your ideas.
• 15:26
  And it's and that's kind of a segue into the non technology tools.
• 15:31
  A lot of folks, you know, they writing is very much it's it's kind of an organic and very personal experience.
• 15:42
  No two writers write exactly the same way. So that plotter tool is really based on a tool that some writers use, which is just using Post-it notes.
• 15:52
  They write Post-it notes down. They create lanes on big poster boards and they map out parts of their story and they draw lines between all the connective tissue.
• 16:01
  You know, there's excuse me, there's different writing groups and different kinds of writing groups that folks can join where they,
• 16:10
  you know, it's kind of it can be an ongoing thing where they practice their creative craft and they write very spontaneous short stories, you know, while they're there in the group or they bring in excerpts from their current work and they get critiqued on them.
• 16:27
  I think it's important that while writing is a very solitary experience or a very solitary profession or whatever we want to call it, there needs to be some sort of feedback loop from others.
• 16:43
  Other people need to because ultimately you're writing for people to read it.
• 16:47
  So you're not just going to go from hitting, you know, typing your last word to everybody reading it. There needs to be continuous feedback along the way. Yep. Yep. Yeah.
• 16:57
  So like, you know, having other writers who maybe write manuscripts as well, put their eyes to it or people who are authors as well, maybe put their eyes to it as well.
• 17:09
  Very much. People who are editors take a look at it for a syntax and grammar punctuation, things like that.
• 17:17
  So, okay. Yeah, that's that's helpful. The editing is the editing is something that I couldn't recommend enough because it was as a matter of fact, I was with a segment that I read.
• 17:29
  I realized that when I was, you know, practicing it to read to come here, there was a mistake that I made it. So, you know, and I'm not going to go into what the mistake was at this point.
• 17:41
  But I saw a mistake in it and I haven't looked at this manuscript in years. And when I thought it, when I finished it, I thought it was Shakespeare.
• 17:50
  But I'm looking down at it and no, it's far, very far from Shakespeare. There are at least six things in that two minute excerpt that I read to you read to you that I would change now.
• 18:01
  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's I think that's a big part. And I'll talk more about it in all of the podcasts, too, is, you know, I'm you know, by trade, I've been a journalist and an editor.
• 18:10
  I have been I have as a writer been every piece of work I've done has pretty much been edited by somebody else. And you really do have to develop a thick skin when you're edited.
• 18:20
  You can't take it personally because ultimately the person editing you is either going to correct a mistake that you missed or it's just going to make it better.
• 18:27
  It's going to make you sound better, too. So, you know, as we're wrapping up, what is next for Michael Mahoney or what is next for Hunter hunted?
• 18:36
  Well, so, Michael, the the manuscript itself is unpublished. And what I ultimately would like to do as the Black Dog Group grows into our retirement is that I would like to I would like to get into the medium of writing graphic novels.
• 18:54
  So I can you tell us, can you just give like a one second explanation of what a graphic novel is?
• 18:59
  A graphic novel is a long story that is in basically it's in comic book format, but it isn't, you know, when I say comic book format, I'm sure that a lot of the folks on the podcast are going to OK, he wants to write comic books.
• 19:14
  Well, comic books, you know, in terms of the stories that come together there were graphic with the stories that come together that would comprise a graphic novel are the stories that we've been watching at the movies for the last 20 years.
• 19:29
  It's the story that we are going to go see when we see the flash in June.
• 19:34
  That was a graphic novel. So it's just it is a longer story that uses the medium of, you know, the storytelling bubbles and the characters and the art artwork of comic books as part of the medium to tell the story.
• 19:50
  So it isn't, you know, it isn't a lazy man's way of telling a simple story. It's a medium in itself. And there are lots and lots of while there's no while there's no solitary format for how to write it.
• 20:04
  There are lots and lots. There's lots and lots of advice on how to write it and make your stories memorable.
• 20:09
  Yep. Well, that is all the time that we have for today. I want to thank you very much, Philip, for coming and being our guest, being our first guest on Starfish Storytellers and for sharing Hunter Hunted with us.
• 20:23
  You know, I really love talking about sort of the format and and just hearing the way that you storyboarded it.
• 20:31
  It was you know, it was really interesting. And to our listeners, whether you hear us locally from the BTV studios in Bedford, Massachusetts, or across the globe on such podcast channels as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Amazon Prime.
• 20:46
  Thanks so much for listening. We hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll see you again next time.