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Instinct Is Everything To Me
A Storyboard Life is an inspiring memoir about creativity, resilience, and discovering that life’s greatest opportunities often arrive disguised as setbacks. Why did you choose to tell your memoir through eighty-three “story frames” instead of a traditional chronological narrative?
The idea of storyboarding the book’s narrative appealed to me, especially given my background in film.
Each frame can stand on its own as a short story but they are still connected by the throughline one of my adventures in creativity and resilience.
The storyboard format also makes the book idea for travel, vacations, airplanes, waiting rooms––anywhere you might want to fill some time with something distracting, entertaining, and even at times, transporting.
Your career seems built on curiosity as much as planning. How important has following instinct been throughout your professional life?
Instinct is everything to me. Looking for opportunities that make sense, looking for the open door, looking for hints and suggestions, being open to whim, while trying not to take stupid or dumb risks. Instinct is honing that fine difference, then acting upon it.
Readers get wonderful glimpses behind the scenes of documentary production. What do you wish more people understood about the work that happens before audiences ever see the finished film?
It’s not glamorous and it doesn’t pay well.
It’s hard, and often tedious, frustrating, annoying, and sometimes even dangerous.
Each film usually represents years of fundraising, concept-vetting, storyline development, experts wrangling, location management, gear maintenance, traveling with a lot of sensitive baggage, talent availability, crew cooperation, and so many other tedious tasks. But viewers shouldn’t see any of that in the finished film.
What they should see (and what enables you to deal with and get through all the above) is the love of telling a good or an important story.
Personally, what I love most about documentary film production––apart from the finished film––is that it’s a team sport.
From writing and funding, to locations, to storyboarding, to shooting, to music to editing, and then marketing, it’s rare that every aspect of a film is created by just one individual. And to me, that’s a good thing. I’m still friends with people I worked on location with twenty-five years ago!
Many readers struggle when life doesn’t follow their original plans. What do you hope they take away from your story?
In my experience, life rarely follows your plans. And each time it doesn’t, that might just be a great time (to quote the Stoics) to pause and ponder how the obstacle might be helping you, might actually be offering you an opportunity to look for a better way forward.
For example, had I not been fired from my job––three times!–– I would not have had an amazing three-decade career working with hundreds of films.
I was dumped by my producer/financée just days after we bought a house together. It was a shock at the time to lose him, our house, and my job all at once.
Looking back, I am beyond relieved I am not still with him. Just as I can no longer imagine living with him, I also can’t imagine not having the life I’ve had instead.
Closed doors are just an opportunity to look around and see what other doors might be open, or at least not locked.
Call it God or the universe having plans for you if that helps, it doesn’t matter which. The important thing is training/disciplining yourself not to fall apart, but instead take a pause and see what other opportunities might be even better or more interesting for you.
They may not appear right away, but they’re there.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Website
A Storyboard Life begins on a freezing winter night when a young woman, broke and uncertain, chooses generosity over fear. The $20 she donates to a good cause soon blossoms unexpectedly into a 30-year adventure across more than 200 documentary films.
From rejection, divorce, and loss to unexpected triumphs and second chances, these behind-the-scenes stories reveal how the films she works with become both lifeline and compass. Frame by frame, each one offers a lesson, a plot twist, or a push to keep going.
Part memoir, part backstage pass, A Storyboard Life invites readers to discover how a most unlikely career was built on determination, creativity––and the power of story.
A Storyboard Life: From $20 to Two Hundred Documentary Film Adventures
Kristin Fellows’s A Storyboard Life is a warm, energetic memoir about a creative career assembled through instinct, persistence, and a remarkable number of unexpected encounters. Fellows organizes the book into 83 short “story frames,” a structure that reflects her decades in documentary filmmaking and lets the narrative move like a collection of vivid scenes. It begins with her losing a beloved job while six months pregnant, then follows her as financial pressure, curiosity, and what she calls “sideways thinking” pull her into public television and eventually into work on nearly two hundred films. The book’s central promise appears early, when Fellows imagines comforting her younger self: “You won’t believe the pivots and plot twists that await you.”
The early chapters are especially lively because Fellows understands how to turn small decisions into satisfying stories. A twenty-dollar PBS pledge leads to fundraising work. Following a stranger with nice shoes leads to documentary research. Sophia Loren’s bedsheets, a deserted island, and a chance meeting at a town hall all become links in the same professional chain. Her humor keeps these episodes from feeling like polished career mythology. When she explains why her unlikely film career began, she cuts through the inspirational language with the wonderfully blunt line, “But broke, we were.” That mixture of candor and comic timing gives the memoir much of its personality.
As the book develops, the documentary projects become more than colorful professional anecdotes. They influence the way Fellows understands grief, family, spirituality, aging, and responsibility. Her sister Karen’s illness and death form one of the memoir’s emotional centers, while her divorce, single motherhood, her parents’ final years, and the gradual independence of her children deepen the personal story. Encounters with artists, filmmakers, religious thinkers, activists, farmers, and other memorable figures continually feed back into her own life. Fellows presents creativity as a practical way of responding to upheaval, not simply as artistic self-expression.
The storyboard format suits Fellows’s conversational voice, though it also creates a deliberately episodic rhythm. Some chapters have the snap and shape of complete short stories, while others work as connective frames that move her toward the next project, relationship, or revelation. The large cast and abundance of film titles can be a lot to absorb, but they also convey the collaborative nature of documentary work. Fellows is generous about naming the people who opened doors, offered advice, trusted her with a project, or simply appeared at the right moment. That generosity makes the memoir feel less like a solo success story and more like a long record of creative exchange.
What I liked most is the book’s confidence that a meaningful life can reveal its shape only in retrospect. Fellows doesn’t claim to have followed a master plan. She watches one opportunity create another, then looks back and recognizes a pattern that wasn’t visible while she was living it. A Storyboard Life is an expansive memoir of resourcefulness, reinvention, and the strange intelligence of accumulated experience. It’s funny, candid, emotionally open, and deeply interested in the people behind creative work. By the final pages, the storyboard metaphor feels fully earned: each frame matters on its own, but its greater meaning comes from the life that emerges when all the frames are placed together.
Pages: 458 | ASIN : B0GMZBN15P
