FIREDANCE this Saturday: THE HERO'S JOURNEY
FIREDANCE this Saturday: THE HERO'S JOURNEY
The steps of the Hero's Journey, as I define them, are as close to a universal pattern for life, storytelling, and process that I've ever seen. It is wondrous to me that the pattern was hiding in plain sight, right there for our use.
Look at the first three:
1) Hero confronted with a challenge
2) Hero rejects the challenge
3) Hero accepts the challenge
This triplet can be "unpacked" extensively, but imagine writing a story about someone writing a story, and you can see how the first step applies pretty clearly.
Life craves homeostasis. We want to stay in a comfortable, familiar groove. We do the same things day after day in the same ways, with minor variations, until SOMETHING starts hurting, or SOMETHING seems like it would be really pleasurable. Last night, watching "80 For Brady" (which I loved), the challenge was to attend the Superbowl. Fun for all four of these retirees, but of MUCH greater importance for one of them. If you are going to be a writer, at some point you have to decide you want to write. Maybe an internal urge, or an external assignment or a dare. But SOMETHING has to stir the character out of the ordinary flow of their lives. Pain or Pleasure. I promise it will be one of the two…or both. Without a new motivation, you simply have the flow of life, and while some writers do indeed write stories about day-to-day life, the smaller the stimulus, the more delicate and refined the writing has to be. In most cases, if you look more carefully, you CAN find motivating pains or pleasures motivating the change--and most stories are about the moment at which something changes. This is cheating, because there is ALWAYS change, there are ALWAYS actions that move away from pain and toward pleasure. But in some cases the motivations are clear and obvious, and in others you have to dig.
Understanding this is key to writing: a person acts, and life responds. The person adjusts, and tries something else, all in an attempt to gain a goal or escape a trap. They get caught in dilemmas of course: there is ALWAYS a cost for anything you do, only if it’s the "missed opportunity" cost: you can't be in two places at the same time, or chase two rabbits at once.
So that second step: the PAIN or FEAR of action, is down the road, waiting, in almost any story. If it is EASY for the character to act, it’s a very placid story..and that's fine, if its what you want to create.
But your best stories of your own life, and the most engaging stories from others, the ones where you remember them, tend to be those where you, or the character, face risk, stress, strain.
Moving. Falling in love. Getting a new job. Dealing with a bully. Writing a story.
If you write a story about a writer, you KNOW that it can't just be that they wake up, sit down, write, get up, eat and play with the dog, shop, do some chores, watch TV, and go to bed to do the same thing again tomorrow.
You KNOW that the story really begins when they hit resistance:
Writer's Block
Social disapproval
Someone stealing their work
Dealing with unexpected success
Dealing with rejection
Think about ANY story of a writer, and if the writing is easy, then it is just background, and the REAL story is about something else happening in their lives.
What have YOU seen in such stories? I've seen writers swept up in spy adventures or the end of the world. With evil dopplegangers. With haunted hotel rooms. Lost manuscripts (great episode of the Dick Van Dyke show!)
STORIES START WITH A STEADY STATE SITUATION, BUT THE REAL PLOT ENGINE STARTS WITH THE RECOGNITION OF A PROBLEM.
SOMETHING is eventually going to be an irritant, or a potential wonder, and THAT will change the pace or direction of their lives.
Just as a story idea about a writer affected YOUR work flow. Were you writing it because it sounded like fun? You needed the money? A class prompt? What was your motivation (if you want to REALLY get meta, you're writing a story about someone writing a story about someone writing a story!)
Dig into their motivations positive or negative. Are the difficulties internal, external? Time or money pressure? A noisy environment? An interrupting family? Self-doubt or lack or knowledge? Maybe a competing party or trip? How about inability to decide between two stories (the challenge THEN is to make a decision!)
Note that every line of the story is its own little story. Every paragraph. Every page. Every chapter. Wheels within wheels within wheels. And every day you have new challenges. And those challenges will be large or small, and overlap confusingly: you will begin THIS challenge, be in the middle of THAT challenge, be stalled on the OTHER challenge, and be completing ANOTHER challenge.
Wow. Just wow. The beauty of the Lifewriting method is that if you adapt these tools, you are using the SAME tools to PLAN a story, WRITE a story, and LIVE your life. When these cycles approach congruence you are just…living a story you are writing about your own life as a writer, including the writing. Moving between levels, refining the tools. Organizing the tools. Instead of mastering totally different tools, you are mastering ONE major set, and when you have, you can integrate ANY other tools you want--you know exactly where they fit.
All of that comes from understanding that first step: BECOMING AWARE OF THE CHALLENGE.
And obviously, this doesn't have to be about writing. I would challenge you to name ANY life challenge we can't put on that pattern.
This Saturday we're going back to the "roots" of Lifewriting, and we'll really dig into this first step. The PERFECT approach is to apply this to your own "Life Story", one of the first steps of the Lifewriting process.
NOTE: We're BACK AT NOON this week! Thank you all the people who were flexible enough to join us at a different time last Saturday.
Steven Barnes is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Firedance LIVE!
Time: Apr 15, 2023 12:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87410831917?pwd=UkF3SHNmV25FaktxSHZnOUJyVjVjZz09
Meeting ID: 874 1083 1917
Passcode: 056462
