If You Had No Fear, What Story Would You Tell? - Mark W. Travis

[@ajtaylor8750]

This is a great question to ask because this could be the one that leads to you writing a game-changing story like no other. When you write something that scares you, you end up creating something magical.

[@filmcourage]

Great comment AJ!

[@MarkWTravis]

That's a beautiful insight, AJ. You are so right. I'm happy that you have enjoyed this one clip. I'd love to hear your thoughts when the rest of the interview is posted.

[@ajtaylor8750]

@@MarkWTravis Thank you. I will definitely be coming back to check out thr rest of the interview to hear more.

[@gnarthdarkanen7464]

It's been said that "as a creator" if you're not just a little bit terrified when you start a project, you're probably not pushing hard enough outside the "comfort zone" to do something profound. Now, that's not to say you're only destined to create crap. There's plenty of room to create things that aren't profound... BUT in the list of little indicators that something has a chance at greatness, there's probably a little part of you that SHOULD be a little terrified about it, too. It's part of what I mean whenever I say, "As Storytellers, we take chances." ;o)

[@MarkWTravis]

@@gnarthdarkanen7464 Great point, Gnarth. Thank you.

[@filmcourage]

Have you ever asked yourself, "If I had no fear, what story would I tell?"

[@NiinaSKlove]

Film Courage No, but now I have. Thank you for yet another brilliant video. 🙏🏼✨

[@atlbike]

Mr Travis has the gift of enunciation. He speaks every word. Add that to superb pacing, it makes for effective communication. I'm going to watch and see if that is a trait for the more effective communicators among FC guests. I know it's a problem with many of the aspiring actor we see in the local indie film community

[@MarkWTravis]

Thanks so much, Chris. I appreciate your comments and observations. I, too, have a pet peeve about people who do not speak clearly, especially when giving a speech, being interviewed or performing in film or on stage. I hope you follow the rest of this interview and share more comments.

[@comedypros]

I am not actually familiar with Mark Travis work, however I read his book and i have never annotated a book more than his. Because of him, I was able to direct my first feature film and give me the confidence to approach it with no anxiety. There was still stress during production, but his work covers that as well and how to overcome them.

[@MarkWTravis]

comedypros ... how nice to meet you via these posts. Thank you so much for your supportive comments and I'm thrilled that my book helped you so much. Please stay in touch.

[@comedypros]

Mark W. Travis thank you Mark! Your words have made a big impact on my life. I’m writing my next feature and will be breaking out your book again when the time comes to developing it :) all the best, Dan

[@LisaMurray]

I love Mark Travis’ work. He’s amazing.

[@MarkWTravis]

Lisa, how nice to hear from you. I hope you are well.

[@LisaMurray]

Mark W. Travis hi Mark! I finished my first feature documentary which screened in Sept at Valley Film Festival in NoHo and now I’m getting back into screenwriting and acting. Thinking about connecting with you about developing something based around my experiences with traumatic deaths. It almost took me completely out but I’m still here and now have 2 podcasts and I started a film festival! I’ve never forgotten what I learned from you. You’re the real deal.

[@atallguynh]

I'm doing this now, writing about living with mental illness, especially re: blurred lines between spiritual experience and psychological perception. It's scary as heck. Old saying: "Courage isn't having no fear, it's doing what needs to be done regardless of the fear."

[@thac0twenty377]

ive been through that. balls out man. hope i get to read it someday

[@kleindavid9416]

honestly: I think I feel what you mean, the topic is very "exciting" - or scary, or difficult. Good luck, also would like to read it one day

[@folarin95]

Film 🎥 courage is doing a great job. thanks guys.

[@KimTownsel]

Deep and original info. Thanks.

[@l.k.kladitis3516]

Also, thanks for yet another fantastic interview! You all at Film Courage make some of the best content on KZbin!

[@filmcourage]

Hi L.K., thank you! Grateful to have you as a Member. Your support helps to keep us going. This is just a little piece of our latest interview with Mark. He is phenomenal, excited to share more.

[@moniquevamado]

So excited for a new Mark Travis interview! Thank you!

[@MarkWTravis]

Thanks, Monique. I hope you get to see the rest of the interview when it is posted. I'd love to hear your comments. Be well.

[@elsakendallmysojournal2398]

Sitting at LAX listening to this and softly sniveling into my face mask. Truth meter... 😌 I love this interview. Thank you, Karen and Mark, simply wonderful.

[@filmcourage]

Cheers Elsa, safe travels!

[@derekchristophertv]

Travis is one of the best teachers out there.

[@MarkWTravis]

Thanks, Derek. How great to hear from you. How are you?

[@derekchristophertv]

@@MarkWTravis Thank you, Mark. I'm on the mend, slowly, but getting there.

[@Indiia]

I just found him! I love the way he tells the stories! ❤️

[@filmcourage]

Great storyteller!

[@Rocky-dx5yr]

I believe our wounds are what unite us. It’s easy to let shame tell me that my pain is of no use to anyone, I shouldn’t expose my trivia to the light of day;I should stay paralysed as it’s all I deserve. There is no sound more healing than the stranger’s laughter, born from recognition of the sheer horror of a similiar experience. I really need to read a book with these tools in it; please Mark Travis, tell me your workshop is also in book form. I live in Sydney ; there is no travelling in my near future, but I would like to travel backwards with some of your tools n do a bit of excavating.

[@c.sexton4819]

Phenomenal interview! Thank you. 💖🥰

[@filmcourage]

Love this one, thanks for watching!

[@MarkWTravis]

Thank you for reading, C. I hope you enjoy the rest of the interview when it is posted.

[@JohnMoseley]

This business about telling the most painful stories over and over and finally being fine with it, again reminds me of Perls, Hefferline and Goodman's book 'Gestalt Psychotherapy'. One of the exercises fairly early in that is to go to the sort of pressure point memories, the worst ones, and just go over them over and over until you become able to cope. It's not a sort of CBT process of desensitization through exposure, it's that the more you do it, the more understanding you get of these memories - the more you see, for instance, that you had moral right on your side when an adult was screaming at you etc.or that something that scared you in the past needn't scare you now.

[@michaelmaccarthy7282]

Simply magnificent

[@rutanyaalda2222]

mark is an amazing human

[@anavonrebeur6121]

Thank you Karen. Life changing material . This Is the stuffs therapists make their lives of

[@l.k.kladitis3516]

I think if I really had no fear I wouldn't actually be able to tell my stories because a good many of them are about dealing with fear. But I get what you're saying. 😉 I suppose the stories which I am terrified of telling the most are the ones about my experiences with God and Christianity/spirituality in general...I guess I don't want people to know how I really see these things....I'd rather not be social media torched by my own religion (that's really not a great excuse though).

[@filmcourage]

Thank you for sharing L.K.!

[@JohnMoseley]

This is one of the reasons human beings came up with metaphor! See also: ambiguity. The fiction writer's routes to plausible deniability.

[@whengrapespop5728]

I think a lot of people can relate to you.

[@samwallaceart288]

I’d wanna write about why men are terrified of love, and how this terror drives men to violate everything they touch.

[@MarkWTravis]

Great idea, Sam. Go for it!

[@BtrDaze]

Let's write it together

[@sprechbarinberlin3843]

Mark Travis is a great storyteller.

[@filmcourage]

We second this! And more videos from this interview coming soon. Thank you for watching (Danke)!

[@MarkWTravis]

Thanks, Bettina. Great to hear from you.

[@shugo33]

Thanks for sharing 🙏

[@jodief8371]

The power of vulnerability

[@TheSepia1]

Thanku!! I needed to see this video!!!

[@jamespeck125]

That was a magical twenty minutes, of listening. Thank you.

[@filmcourage]

Thanks James, we weren't sure if this one would work. Nice to see people responding to it in a favorable way.

[@jamespeck125]

@@filmcourage I found it both profound and helpful, which isn't that common, with videos on writing. Loved the authentic pause by the lady, as he asked her the title question. Real cinema right there

[@SonnyGreenwichJr]

Now I want to take that course... From mostly cold Ireland! ☘️ ☮️🤘🏽🤠👍🏽☮️☘️

[@MarkWTravis]

Sonny, we'd love to have you in our next workshop. Stay in touch.

[@lonjohnson5161]

I read the title of the video and considered what fictional topics I might tackle if I had no fear. Then I watched the video. Writing this short post has been harder than writing a page in a screenplay.

[@JohnMoseley]

It's such a great question because it brings up something I'd never have thought of, not about the content but the mode of telling. I'd want to be screaming my story to the skies like some old testament prophet, rending my clothes, rubbing dirt and ash on myself and testifying furiously about what an unfair weedy little a-hole my dad was and what a pathetic ineffectual idiot my mom was, what a contemptible pair they made and how they screwed up my sister and I's upbringing. But when I think of going into the detail, my first reaction is, it's boring, it'd be boring for me to tell and boring for people to listen to, there's no high drama, just a sad, stupid story of daily attrition by dull, mean-minded sniping, sourness, pessimism, paranoia and absurd, undignified anxiety about what people thought of them. I'd be scared, in particular, that no one would get it, that all this stuff that hurt so bloody much would look like nothing in the telling and people would think I was being trivial and self-pitying, or that even if they could see how sad and stupid and unpleasant it all was, they'd say, 'Why are you bothering to rake over these old coals? Why can't you move on to something less dreary and more stimulating. No one cares about your sad little family precisely because it was so sad and small.' Or worse, they'd say, why are you blaming your parents? It's clearly you who was at fault, you were rotten. Of course it's me saying all this to myself first and foremost. In fact, at this point, it's only me saying it: I'm telling myself that the story of my life isn't worth telling, is too dreary and disgusting for anyone to want to hear about, and that therefore I should be ashamed of it and any desire I have to tell it. I'm putting huge pressure on myself in this respect, punishing myself anew for something I found punishing at the time, telling myself, not only did it hurt then, but you should be hurt again every time you try to talk about it. It's fine for people who have nice funny stories about their families to tell them, and it's fine for people who have big textbook family traumas to talk about those, but no one, absolutely no one, wants to hear about your horrid little life and the wretched creeps you shared it with. Just be quiet.

[@Rocky-dx5yr]

When I am really hostile towards myself in speech or deed, it comes from a wound. We aren’t born despising ourselves. Each life is small and tedious when magnified, if you are feeling small and tedious,, but from the outside looking in, it’s usually the humanity which is magnified. I would encourage you to try to write it, and read it, with the eyes you had as a newborn. And, getting back to what brought me here in the first place; I would like to do your workshop, but I live in Sydney-have you put the process into a book, so I can avail myself of it??

[@JohnMoseley]

@@Rocky-dx5yr Thanks, Rocky, though, just to clear up what might be some confusion in the last part of your post, it's not me who runs a workshop. I do have a couple of things to suggest that might be of interest: Paul Schraeder says he always writes to solve a problem, but never writes about himself; instead, he creates a metaphor for the problem and writes that, e.g. _American Gigolo_ was about a feeling of being unable to love. There's a lot in this business of fictionalising for the emotional release, as I'm currently finding in intensive form doing Corey Mandell's screenwriting workshop remotely online, from London (he's in LA). His method is like a way of creating powerful little machines for releasing deep emotion - at least for me - all via writing about totally fictitious characters and situations. It's seriously the best class I've ever done and I'm appalled at the thought that I might not have found it and would instead be limping on with my writing as I was. Far as I can tell, most of the other students feel similar. I honestly can't recommend it enough. Other than that, as I think I've mentioned in at least one other post below a Mark Travis video, the way he's talking reminds me a lot of gestalt psychotherapy. Half of the book Gestalt Psychotherapy, by Perls, Hefferline and Goodman, is a series of increasingly interesting exercises, many of which work quite similarly to what Travis talks about. Not necessarily of immediate, direct benefit to writing, but I found them amazing for the psychological insight into myself they delivered.

[@thelifeandtimesoftheunconv4536]

I would tell how death impacts us all

[@atallguynh]

Interesting... a topic people generally don't want to think about!

[@gnarthdarkanen7464]

Actually, this process does sound disturbingly similar to how therapists work with their patients... asking pointed questions... probing... pushing boundaries a little bit... and often being repetitive about the subjects and stories they extract from the patient. Obviously, in the case of the therapist, it's more about treatment of the emotional trauma, and so liberally peppered with coping mechanics and advice as well. BUT yes, Storytelling is often therapeutic, if not outright cathartic. ;o)

[@samwallaceart288]

gnarth d'arkanen - I once heard a comedian directly refer to his standup as being “free therapy”.

[@gnarthdarkanen7464]

@@samwallaceart288 I've heard the same, though I can't put a finger on who said it at the time, myself... Storytelling (comical or not) can be cathartic in nature. In comedy, you can learn that while you can't do anything else about some things in this life, you can ALWAYS laugh at them. In more dramatic work, you can revisit your own past events for parallels to the Character(s) you involve in the telling... AND you can explore those Characters from their own perspectives... maybe learn something about yourself and handling trauma... BUT exactly as described in the video, IRL Therapists dig and probe into your background and personal stories to get you to tell them repeatedly. It seems kind of annoying, to those not used to it, sort of like realizing this intelligent and well trained professional is playing dumb... BUT it gets you to dig and explore the past traumas and figure out what's really bothering you... or at least, lend you that power over the stories. SO on stage, the comedian may have just "delivered a gag"... BUT like a lot of comedy, the funny part comes from the weird levels of pure truth in it. ;o)

[@terrywitzu7874]

I've been told many times to write my life story. A high-compliment, but I can't escape the belief that people who write autobiographies are self-inflated assholes. Why not apply your interesting auto-biographical content to fiction. I really feel this would just result in a higher quality work of fiction. Isn't that what most of us do, anyway? I welcome any comments on my opinion. Agree, or disagree - always interested in what you all think.

[@anavonrebeur6121]

Most great movies begin with "Based on a real story". We love real stories. All of my books aré autobiográfical but i tell what happened to me as if that happened to someone else. So I preserve my privacy and all accusations of narcisism.

[@AnthonySherritt]

Anyone else dying to know what happened to Chipper? 🙏

[@davidram9511]

Please no movie about cv ,unless it’s one where the bond takes out China’s gov

[@ramdevcalope7653]

In Philippines the technique he's talking about is actually already been done here for 8 years and it's called: "FOUND-FILMMAKING"

[@Omnicient.]

I love the way she went blank with his first question! Typical!

[@cinemar]

A dull one.

[@romainlettuce118]

cinemar you couldn’t relate then. Which is both good and sad

[@cinemar]

@@romainlettuce118 okay thanks.