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prerequisite
for developing a good story.
This is one of many nuggets of time- and faith-tested wisdom that veteran TV and film producer Ken Wales shared with a small cross-section of Calvin students, staff, faculty and alumni during a daylong workshop on June 12, 2004, held on campus at DeVos Communication Center.
The second event to be sponsored by the newly launched Calvin Workshops in Media & Theatre, Ken Wales’ workshop, entitled “Finding and Developing the Right Story,” addressed the problems and opportunities of having a story to tell and guiding it to fruition in a finished form. Wales’ experience lies in guiding a story to the front of a camera, while workshop participants sought help in developing narratives in various media forms, including but not limited to screenplays, stage plays, novels, interviews, and songs.
At the end of the 6-hour session participants had some basic tools to get started, a little market savvy, and the inspiration to keep working on creative projects, keep cultivating new ideas — whether the story will find its conclusion in the form of a bound book or a film reel.
Starting with “the nudge,” as Wales referred to it — one’s instinct about the quality and interest a story may hold — a good storyteller possesses not only passion about the topic, but the ability to make it yield layers of meaning without having to explicitly depict every detail. Wales cited the parables of Jesus as a supreme example of such implicit storytelling.
Wales listed elements of content that are essential to most good stories:
a 
component
of jeopardy or danger; a change undergone by the main character; and a
satisfying conclusion. Drawing examples from of his own body of work,
including The Tamarind
Seed, a Cold War-era movie starring Julie Andrews, Wales elaborated
on these elements, illustrating how they instigate the forward movement
of the story and keep the audience engrossed.
Throughout the workshop Wales also pressed the importance of keeping one’s faith and values at the forefront of what one is doing or creating. “The stories you tell tend to reflect the lifestyle you lead,” he said. Implicitly, one could gather from this statement a piece of Wales’ own personal mission statement: a strong Christian who has been in “the biz” for 45 years, he has told stories through his work that can, like the short-lived but enthusiastically received 1990s CBS TV series Christy, encourage and uplift people, as well as express a hopefulness craved by many, but articulated by Christians as a hope instilled in, met through, and fulfilled by Jesus Christ.
Wales encouraged participants to stay on task with their projects. “It’s rare that a really well-written script does not get made into a film,” he asserted during the lunch hour conversation in the President’s Dining Room at the Prince Conference Center, alluding that a combination of talent, hard work, and persistence stretches a long way in the world of film and TV production. He knows, because this is a road he has already traveled. Fortunately for those of us who participated, he is now choosing to share his wisdom with those still early in the journey.
—Rachel Zylstra
