Meet the Creator II

Pt. 2 - Travis the Author

As a young artist everything I drew had a story to it.  The more I would draw, the more creatures I would create, the more the storylines began to link and intertwine.  Story was everywhere.

But I didn’t realize I was a writer.  I excelled easily in English and Literary classes, but since I was drawing all the time, I just thought I was an artist.  Then as I went to college, I was programmed to think of myself as an illustrator.  I was young, so I was just going along with the pre-defined path the university wanted me to follow.  I eventually snuck in a few creative writing classes, but I felt like I was cheating on my illustration program.

I eventually found some benefit in discovering animation, because I had opportunities to pitch short story concepts.  Story was a big part of animation, so I felt at home, though it was discouraging being limited to ideas tailored to fit our limited abilities.  My imagination was far too big and too inexperienced to pull that off efficiently.  In the end, the university wanted you to either be an illustrator or an animator, pick one and be the best at it.  I was rather nervous to admit I was fascinated by both.  

Even worse, I was afraid to admit that deep down inside I was a writer as well.

But something changed after college.  I didn’t get my dream job. Maybe the university was right, I should have picked one talent and stuck with it.  But I was too obsessed with them all. I bounced around with freelance work, sometimes part time in my industry, sometimes part time in any job to pay the bills.  The world was slowly trying to crush me. I refused, I would try twice as hard to stand out in my industry, and with every failure, it just made me hungrier for a much greater achievement.  But the world was beginning to win.  Doubt began to infect my confidence; I began to question if I was creative at all.  It seemed everything I did to get a job in the creative industry had failed.

But there is a certain perspective you gain at the bottom of a figurative pit.

I began to think of anything I could do, anything I felt I had talent for that I could use to make a living in this world. I began to focus on what I wanted to do. So, I began to write.  I wrote short stories, I wrote screenplays, I wrote essays, I wrote lists and lists of notes of any daydream or story I wanted to tell.  

I still didn’t get that big screen Hollywood offer that would change my life.  No. But my writing and storytelling mixed with my illustration background led me to some of my first jobs in the industry, and because of my storytelling abilities, it quickly blossomed into an Art Director career.  It’s like I could breathe again, I found my way into a creative career, I enjoyed what I was doing, I was able to create stories, tell stories both verbally and visually.  I was having fun.  But it wasn’t enough.

My time spent in the pit of doubt left emotional scars that had to be avenged.

My drive to write doubled, then tripled as I was motivated to leave my mark on this world.  But I was hitting a wall, I felt like I had all these dreams that were being caged.  I was focused on screenplays and film.  But I knew what the film industry was like.  I knew what it takes to fund a film, and the screenwriter is such a minor role in all of it. I began to question if it was worth the effort.  

Then a random epiphany completely changed my life.

Why was I limiting myself to the film industry? Film is limited by budgets, by corporate studios, by networks of who knows who.  Why was I limiting my stories based on a business model? I realized, I needed to write my story for the sake of the story, not for the sake of the business.  I needed to write a novel.

It was like watching a garden grow in sped up time-lapse motion.

The characters, the events the storylines all began to flourish in a world without limitation.  My notes went from a few pages to a few hundred pages.  The characters began to grow, evolve, become real.  The world I was creating began to make sense with an extreme surge in story scope.  What I thought should be one book, became two, then three, then I began to see the timelines of these characters and events as a complete life stream.  I could look far into the past and far into the future.  My stories were simply just moments of stepping into their existence.

But this kind of writing takes a lot of time.

I still had my fulltime job, I was still highly immersed in short story writing, and short screenplay writing, it was part of my day-to-day work. I was mastering the art of publishing short story animations. But if I wanted my novel to be done, I had to use any moment possible.  Daily commute, lunches, thinking and solving story issues while stuck in traffic jams or waiting in lines.  All of my free time revolved around making this story the best it could be.  

It took me a couple years to get through the first few drafts, but I wouldn’t want it any other way.  It gave me the time to think through the storylines of this first novel and how they connect to the much larger story world I had in mind.  I had the opportunity to review and revise again and again and again.  I wasn’t a young rising author, I was trying to jump into an industry in motion with no name or leverage, so I had no room for weak plotlines and uninteresting characters.  Every character needed to feel real and authentic, and every event had to feel natural.  There is no “destiny” in my stories, only choices.  I had to create a story so great, that readers would be afraid to miss it. 

I have yet to see if I’ve succeeded in that, but that is what motivates me.  The next step was to submit my manuscript to literary agents and begin the path to publishing.  I began to learn more and more about the publishing industry, how to get noticed and how to get involved.  I prepped query letters and began to build my list of agents and publishers.  But those haunting words by Robert Frost plagued my mind. I never submitted my manuscript.  Not once.  

It was like trekking across miles of forest and mountains to find the ocean, only to wonder what was on the other side of that blue horizon.  

This story would have had a different ending if I wasn’t also obsessed with animation.

Coming up next, Travis the Animator….