Actor Kevin Costner describes 8-year project that grew into a graphic novel at NPC Book Rap

Kevin Costner loves telling stories, but he has had to pay for every project he believed in, the Oscar-winning actor and director, and now author told a sold-out National Press Club Book Rap Oct. 23.

“’Dances With Wolves’ was resisted by every studio two times around and I had to do it myself, Costner said. “When this book was concerned, I paid for that, too.”

Costner collaborated with co-author Jon Baird and illustrator Rick Ross to create "The Explorers Guild: Volume One: A Passage to Shambhala," a 784-page book that Ross described as “graphic fiction.”

A graphic novel is all panels while a novel has no pictures, Ross said. “We like to call it graphic fiction, which is something that incorporates both the text and images,” he said.

Costner and Baird began working on The Explorers Guild eight years ago, originally conceiving it as an animated movie. When the movie pitch fell flat, Baird began writing and sending pages to Costner who began by giving “general guidance, kind of in an editorial way, and then he was introducing characters, story lines and dialogue,” Baird said. “At a certain point, it ceased to be something that was mine. [It was something] that he was giving input on and it became something we were working on together.”

There are several more stories to be told about the characters in Explorers Guild, Baird said, but he wouldn’t commit to a “volume two.” Likewise, Costner wouldn’t commit to Explorers Guild becoming a movie.

“It was very important to me that this be what it wanted to be. It wanted to be a novel. Let’s let it exist as that and I’ll go carve the movie out of it someday” if Hollywood decides that it now likes the idea, Costner said.

Writing Explorers Guild was “a very lonely process,” Baird said, adding that Costner made it easier because “I believe he lives with these characters in his house and when I leave I am sort of transcribing conversations he has had with these living beings in his house.”

Costner, worried that Baird’s description would make him sound a little nutty, offered his own take.

“I would have to write things down. I wasn’t a babbling idiot in my living room. I heard voices in ‘Field of Dreams’, not here,” Costner said, referring to the voices that told Costner’s character, Ray Kinsella, to build a baseball diamond out of a cornfield.

Costner said he was pleased to be appearing at the Press Club with his two collaborators. The forum gave Ross and Baird time to shine, he said, acknowledging that the book is getting noticed because of his name. He turned down several TV appearances because his collaborators weren’t welcome, he said.

Costner, Baird and Ross were interviewed on stage by NPC President John Hughes. Angela Greiling Keane, former NPC president and co-chair of the Book & Author Committee, introduced the group.