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What Is The Challenge?
We’ve welcomed almost a hundred new people to Lifewriting yesterday, and I think it may be time to go back over the basic principles again. I also spoke to Jason about them yesterday, and he was engaged…so it can’t hurt. ALL my teaching starts here, as it was the first breakthrough I had, the realization that story structure matched the human perception of reality, the “this is the way life is.”
The trick is that if your stories DON’T follow a pattern that the average person recognizes as reality, they will only appeal to people with a rarified taste, those educated to understand and appreciate abstractions, minimalizations, inversions, and story aspects which require knowledge of very specific past works. These are intelligent and worthy audiences, but they are of course SMALLER than the audiences that can just roll into an MCU movie and simply gawk. Aim for the smaller audiences, and you will be the darling of the coffee houses and art schools, and frankly, you can make a fine artistic career.
But it is important to first understand the basics BEFORE you go off hunting for the abstract and elevated. The specific interpretation of the Hero’s Journey used by Lifewriting has a very specific design. It respects Campbells original work but is not bounded by it. The steps are chosen because:
- They can be found in works of fiction worldwide, through all time.
- If one looks at the creation of a book, script, or story as a “journey” you can apply them to the ACT of writing, not just the “structure” as…