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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:
- Hero confronted with a challenge
- Hero rejects the challenge
- 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…