The Hero’s Dead-End Journey
Might have been thirty-five years ago that I was in an autograph party on Ventura Boulevard in Van Nuys California. A comic book/SF shop. I believe this was before Dangerous Visions bookstore existed. nyway, a guy in his fifties came into the party. He was a moderately well-known writer: I’d seen him speak at conventions, and thought it was kind of him to come to one of a young writer’s first autograph sessions., and after a brief conversation he gave me his business card. I’ll never forget what it said: “Freelance Hack and Literary Mechanic.”
I was a little disturbed by that, but thought little more of it before I heard that he’d drunk himself to death, less than a year later.
I never knew him, but it seemed to me he had offered me a tremendous gift. I’d focused my whole life on finding Paths of Power, routes that successful people use to get their results…and it seemed to me that those successful Hero’s Journeys can be usefully contrasted with UNSUCCESSFUL journeys, so long as you don’t spend more than 20% of your time studying them. 80% needs to be focused on what actually works.
So…call him “Matt” and ask…why did “Matt” go so wrong that he ended up destroying himself? What was the pain?
And while I’ll never know for sure, I could sure write a story about someone who did what I know about what Matt did. And it isn’t a happy story.
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Once upon a time there was a boy-child named Matt. He liked to play, and dream, and read, and tell stories. As he grew older, he discovered he was GOOD at telling stories, that people cheered when he wrote them, and that he enjoyed sharing himself in that way.
And he asked himself: could I make my way in the world telling stories? You see, he like all children looked out at the world, saw adults doing mysterious adult things, and knew that one day it would be his term to step into that arena. So many of them seemed unhappy with what they did, justifying it only because they were protecting and providing for their families.
He wanted more. HE would tap directly into the well-spring of his creativity. He would create his world without splitting himself into two different worlds. He would be whole.
Matt began to write, and after a while achieved a measure of success. Sold books, and made enough money that he could quit his job. NOW he’d made it!
Then one day his agent told him that a particular book had caught an editor’s eye, and the editor wanted another of THOSE. And if Matt could write it, he could get a larger advance. And when Matt went to conventions, fans told him THEY loved that book too, and would like to see more of them. And girls flirted with him, “glowing” at him, telling him how much they loved that book.
The secret is that Matt hadn’t thought much of that book. It hadn’t been his best work. Hadn’t been about a subject close to his heart. It had been “clever” enough, but nothing that moved him.
But…he went ahead and wrote another like that, and people cheered, and the money came in, and deep inside Matt said: “wow. They suck.”
Because his heart and soul went into another book. Other stories, and those works, the things he would have written for free, the things that were dear to the spirit of the child who had started his journey, were forgotten, ignored, projects abandoned.
Because people did not want the things he felt most precious, he did not respect them. They were clods, dummies, shallow.
But…he wrote for them. And what did that make him?
Freelance = Someone who works without a safety net, swinging from job to job.
Hack = someone working at a low level of quality, especially one who had the potential to do better.
Literary = the art of philosophical expression using the written language, especially language and structure that references previous written work.
Mechanic = someone who manipulates gears and cogs to fix machines, as opposed to an “artist” who creates something living and spiritual connected with their deepest selves.
He had, in other words, whored out his ‘Little Boy’ for money, in the service of people he did not respect. From there, there was no way to love himself, and the very discipline that used to give him pleasure was a source of pain.
Alcohol dulls pain. It also blocks creativity, by dulling senses, cutting you off from your emotions, and destroying your ability to consciously and voluntarily go into “flow.”
Now we have a loop. You are doing something you don’t respect, for people you don’t respect, and now you aren’t even good at it any more. The self loathing leads to the need to dull the senses, the alcohol diminishing the capacity to get the only benefit remaining from the process: money.
Worse would be fans of the early work telling you how much more they enjoyed it. Reinforcing the sense of contempt. Perhaps one day you say “I’ll change this! I’ll go back to what I was!”
But…when you step off the path chasing fool’s gold, you can lose sight of the path. You forget what you did to get you there. And now, stripped of the delusion that you are “just fine” you wander in the darkness, wondering how something that once brought you pleasure now brings you pain.
Food, drugs, alcohol and meaningless sex all dull this need. All just leave you more and more desperate and numb. And eventually…the escape from pain becomes important than living your life.
And it all just slips away.
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I’ve had moments I could have taken the Devil’s Bargain. Betrayed a friendship for money. Work on a toxic project for money. Something as simple as realizing the story editors at The Outer Limits and Twilight Zone kept changing the race of my characters, casting whites in roles written for blacks, using the lamest excuses imaginable.
The truth is that they just didn’t want to. That people most enjoy seeing people who look like them. A simple truth, covered with lies and smiles, so that I was writing award-winning roles and powerful healing metaphors that were being hijacked away from the community that needed them most, and the deepest part of my existence, the little boy who had looked out at the cinematic world and asked “where am I?” was churning out work, getting well paid, but being told: “you are too ugly to our eyes to cast someone who looks like you. We’ll cast someone who looks like US. But we’ll pay you well.”
Money isn’t enough. It never is. You have to START with connecting to your own heart, and telling the stories you hold dear. And if you need your “adult” self to hold down a day job so that your “child” self can play, then DAMMIT, DO THAT. Do NOT make the creative child pay the bills. The child’s job is to play. It is the ADULT’S job to pay the bills.
And…if you are lucky enough that the output of that child finds an audience? Embrace and nurture that connections,a nd be true to it.
And…if you are smart enough to set your “adult” to learning marketing, such that it handles the Outer world with the “child” safe in the Inner? Most of the most successful people I know either split themselves into Artist and Marketer, or find an agent or manager to handle this “adult” role.
But they do NOT whore the children of their hearts. They just DON’T.
The good news is that most of the time, it isn’t the job that creates the inauthenticity — it is your lack of creativity. I’ve written animation, comic books, and episodes of “Baywatch” with truth in every one. Something I loved in every one. Something my “little boy” would have written for FREE in every one. And that made it alive.
The first episode of the immortal “Baywatch” was like this. A chance to work for television and deepen my portfolio, I hadn’t ever seen the show until they sent me a bunch of VHS tapes. I pitched them an episode called “Rescue Bay” about a little girl who wanted to be a lifeguard when she grew up…but was diagnosed with aplastic anemia and wasn’t going to live long enough. Hobie, the son of David Hasselhoff’s character, falls in love with her. That’s right: ‘Love Story” on the beach. Absolutely.
But I took it seriously. Love DOES hurt. The people we love DO die. And we live our lives in the shadow of that endless valley.
And so if the emotions were as valid as I could make them…it was honest work, not “hack”. If the people were as real and the world as real as I could make them, I was being an artist, not a “mechanic.”
And there was one line that spoke to a truth I believed with all my heart: “love isn’t two people looking at each other. It is two people looking in the same direction.” At its peak, “Baywatch” was seen by a BILLION PEOPLE every week. That means that, if I could thread the commercial needle, I could get something I believed, something truth, something meaningful, into the cultural discussion.
I had done something good, and the little boy in my heart was happy with me. At the same time that I was supporting my family. At the same time that I was developing my skills and serving the world.
All of that, just by asking myself how I could turn this opportunity into something real.
Whatever you do, at every moment of your life, you can find a way to connect it to your heart, to your commitments in the world, to your dreams. There is ALWAYS a way with any ethical and moral choice. It is up to you, as an adult, to find a way to make that connection.
Do that…and the child within is safe. And then…you are being an adult, doing the rough, hard things that adults have always done to protect their children.
You are doing the right work, and that is its own reward.
Namaste
Steve