Then there’s a story that look you in the eye, and suddenly you know, just from the way it stares at you, that someone needs to write it, because it’s a story that must be told. You realize that you also know no one else is going to write that particular story. So, since it needs to be written, and since no one else is going to do it, you get started on it.

As you work, you begin to see that it’s a lot more intense than you thought it was going to be. Possibly even depressing at times. Maybe even the most depressing thing you’ve ever written. It gets to the point where you know every step of plot and every thought of every character, but you can’t write the words down simply because the words themselves weigh a thousand tons each, and moving them from wherever it is these stories come from into the world of words is hard.

Do you give up? No. You can’t give up. Every time you think about it, you see that story staring at you, looking you in the eye, not saying anything. Why doesn’t it say anything? It doesn’t need to. All it has to do is look at you and you know. No one else would write it, and it’s too important a story not to be written.

So you plow on, powered by the knowledge that this story must be written and someday it might just change the way the world thinks. How could you pass up an opportunity like that?

Which brings me to The Reason I write. Besides the fact that I can’t help myself and writing is as natural and automatic as breathing, I write, because I want to change the way the world thinks. I want to make people ask questions and find their own answers. I want take the world that we know, turn it on its head and set it spinning in the opposite direction from normal, because when someone else sees that, they might reject it out of hand, but it might also make it easier for them to accept something a little closer to normal but still outside their comfort zone. If we can stretch peoples’ minds and help them think outside themselves and then help them look more deeply into themselves than they ever have before, what kind of world could we then build together? I want to help people see more possibilities and sometimes the best way to do that is to begin with an assumption along the lines of “there are no impossibilities”.

So, I’m going to keep working on this story that’s staring at me. Hopefully someday you’ll see it in a bookstore or on your electronic reading device or in a library, and maybe you’ll read it because the cover caught your attention (or maybe you’ll see my name on it and it’ll ring a vague bell of recognition), and then, perhaps, the way you see the world or the way you see yourself will change for the better, and all because this story was written.

So, how does any of this relate to identity?  Well, I’m only changing my physical shape.  I am less bulgy and more curvey.  My tummy is leaner and my sides are slimmer.  I have more energy.  I get less sick and I get sick less often.  (All this after only ten pounds!)  The way I see myself has changed.  I have more self-confidence.  I’m happier.

Much of this is at least partially psychological.  I have won a victory in my battle against unhealthy weight and therefore I feel better about everything.  I also have a huge amount of hope that I can continue to lose the rest of the weight I need to lose.  It now seems possible where before I seriously doubted that I would ever be able to get rid of any of this extra flab.

I feel like I am becoming a better person, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the idea of being thin.  I am less grumpy, kinder, more forgiving, and less often depressed.  Most importantly, I like myself more.  It’s not that I never loved myself.  I’ve always loved myself – that’s part of why I wanted to lose the weight in the first place.  I love myself enough to want the best for myself, and that includes my health.  I like myself better now, because I’ve worked through a challenge.  I’ve been courageous and determined.  I’ve persevered, and I haven’t just survived.  I’ve thrived.  I like this version of me a lot better than the me who sat around and moped because she couldn’t lose a single pound.

Weight loss is a battle and a lifestyle.  You can’t relax for a minute, or if you do relax, you have to expect some consequences.  You have to find a system that works for you that you can maintain for months, possibly years.  Even after you lose the weight, it doesn’t end there.  If you let yourself go back to your old habits, you’re going to gain back every single pound, and possibly even a few extras.  You have to adjust your lifestyle so that you maintain your weight.

And the best part is, none of this feels like a burden to me.  The real burden is having the extra weight and not being able to get rid of it.  This whole lifestyle thing with the calorie counting and the exercising – that’s a blessing!  It’s a way out of the burden.  (Yes, the puns were intended.  Burden/weight; get it?  Sorry.)

The final bit of philosophical awesome that comes out of this losing ten pounds thing is that if I can change myself like this, and do something that for a while I honestly thought was truly impossible, how many other things are there in my life and in myself that I can also change?  It may be true that some things are impossible, but we can’t know that for sure until we try to change them.  If don’t admit that something is impossible and if we continue to try to make it possible, we might just succeed.  It’s when we admit that something is impossible and stop trying to change it that it really becomes impossible.  Even then, it doesn’t have to stay impossible.  If we decide to change it and make it possible, then maybe it will become possible after all.

This quote was said by famous dancer, Isadora Duncan, who invented the technique and art form that later became known as Modern Dance.  Before Isadora Duncan, dance was rigid, stiff, and not considered a purely artistic expression.  After Isadora Duncan, everything changed.

When I think of dance today, I think of so many different kinds from so many different places in the world.  I also think of artistic expression where the human body is both canvas and medium.  I cannot imagine a world where all dance was restricted to predetermined movements.

To me, Isadora Duncan is an example of the kind of impact a single person can have not only on those who work with her daily but also on the entire world.  Our worldwide culture is forever changed because of Isadora Duncan’s dance philosophy.  We will never be the same again, and it’s because she infected the world with her ideas.

And then I come back to this quote, “You were wild once….Don’t let them tame you.”  We are wild when we are children.  We run across the grass, play in the mud, tear holes in our clothes, forget to put our shoes on before we go outside.  We don’t think in terms of what the right answer must look like or that a certain answer has to be wrong.  The world is what the world is and everything is possible.  As we grow into adults, we are trained to believe that the world functions in a specific way, that certain answers can only be right if they look a certain way, and that some answers will always be wrong no matter what they look like.  We stop running through the grass and playing in the mud.  We never forget our shoes before we go outside, and if we ever tear holes in our clothes it suddenly seems like the world will end.  In short, we let “them” tame us.

And why should we?  What if we didn’t wear the same pair of shoes two days in a row?  What if we let the right answer be the right answer no matter what it looked like?  What if, when we find a wrong answer, we don’t just let it die, but instead we find the question that makes it a right answer?

Of course, there is nothing wrong with wearing shoes outside or looking for right answers or knowing when an answer is not the one you’re looking for, but there’s no reason we can’t still be wild about it.

I almost had to pull over and check my gps if only to verify that I was still in the 21st century.

Anyway, I came away from the experience a happier classicist.

The problem I have with this phrase is this:  by limiting yourself to non-conventional ideas, you have given yourself a limit.  When you don’t allow yourself to use what’s “inside the box,” you create a sort of inverted box, so to speak, where you must only think outside these certain lines.

I think that true innovation comes from combining something from convention with something that is completely unconventional.  In writing, this is where speculative fiction blossoms.  Yes, there are dragons and magic and what have you, but these characters and forces still follow the same conventional means of storytelling – there’s a protagonist with one goal and an antagonist with an opposing goal and they fight it out until somebody achieves something (whether what they achieve is the goal they started with or not is another matter).

So, I would like to propose a new phrase:  “The box is a lie.”  Demolish the lines between conventional and unconventional.  Allow yourself to play with all of the ideas that are out there, no matter where they came from or where they’re going.  There is no box.

However, there are children living in the United States today, aged ten and under who can’t remember.  They weren’t there.  They didn’t live through it.  They don’t remember what it was like before that day.  The only world they know is the one that came after.  Ten years from now, these children will be adults, in college or the workforce, maybe even starting families of their own, and then there will be a second generation of children who only know the world after that day.

In the same way, many people in the United States don’t remember the world before Pearl Harbor, or what it was like before a president was assassinated riding in an open-top car down a city street.  There are a lot of things we can’t all remember, but that’s why it’s so important for those of us who do remember to share what we remember with those who don’t.  That way, it won’t be forgotten.

On September 11, 2001, there was an attack on the soil of the United States.  Four airplanes were hijacked.  Two crashed into the World Trade Towers, and the Towers collapsed.  One crashed into the Pentagon, directly into a section that was already under construction.  The last one, which was meant for another important building (possibly the Capitol Building, the White House, or Camp David), went down in a field in Pennsylvania, because the passengers on that plane weren’t going to sit down and let them hurt anyone else.  On that day, there were countless acts of heroism, and there were too many lives lost.

When it happened, I was in my high school auditorium, at a class council meeting.  I found out when I got to my next class and the teacher already had the TV turned on and set to the news.  I spent the rest of the school day watching the news in my classes until they sent us home early.

What do you remember?

I think this is a bad idea.  Perfection is hard.  Flawless is impossible.  Infallible is wishful thinking.  Also, if we didn’t make mistakes, we wouldn’t have things like cheese, sandwiches, or potato chips.  Look it up if you don’t believe me.

The problem is that when we fail at something there’s this automatic negative reaction that makes it hard to see that mistake as the opportunity it really is.  This is especially true when it comes to writing.

I cannot count how many times I’ve started out writing one thing only to end up writing something else.  Yeah, I wrote the final product by accident, but that accident turned out to be way more awesome than the thing I started out with.  This blog post, for example, was going to be an essay on a randomly generated word (“strip”).  I worked at it for a while, but I just couldn’t come up with anything worth sharing with the internet.  At first, I started to feel like a failure, since I couldn’t get the essay “perfect,” and that was when I realized that I needed to give myself permission to fail.

If we can give ourselves permission to fail, then we can also give ourselves permission to try again, and maybe this time get it right.

12 index cards, a pen or marker, and a notebook with writing utensil or a computer

Preparations Before You Start the Exercise

On each index card, use the pen or marker to write one of the steps in the Hero’s Journey:

• Ordinary World
• Call to Adventure
• Refusal of the Call
• Meeting with the Mentor
• Crossing the First Threshold
• Tests, Allies, Enemies
• Approach to the Inmost Cave
• Ordeal
• Reward
• The Road Back
• Resurrection
• Return with the Elixir

The Simple Exercise

1. Shuffle the 12 cards in whatever way you prefer, so long as you cannot tell which one is which
2. Draw each card randomly and set them face-up in the order in which you drew them
3. Write a story or outline of a story using the order of the cards you drew.

Advanced Rules (you will need more index cards)

• If you’re doing this activity as part of a writing group, each writer can write a brief description of a character on a character card, shuffle these together and draw randomly after they draw the order of the Journey.  This character must be the main character.
• You can also add cards for the different Archetypes (Mentor, Shadow, Threshold Guardian, etc.) and add character cards.  Draw a character and then an Archetype.  That character must play the part of that Archetype.
• Start an index card file box of character possibilities.  Whenever you have an inspiration for a potential character, or type of character (such as college student or rocket scientist) add it to the file.  When you feel that you have used a certain character or type of character in a story that is fully written and may or will be published, remove that character’s card from the file so that you don’t accidentally reuse it (unless it’s on purpose).  Use this file of characters when you do these writing exercises.

Of course you can also make your own additions or changes to these ideas and create a writing exercise that is completely unique to you.  You are your own writer, so find something that inspires you, and use it!

This writing exercise was inspired by the book The Writer’s Journey, Mythic Structure for Writers, by Chris Vogler.

In the final chapter of The Writer’s Journey, Vogler tells a true story out of his own life about life and death and how following a certain path led him to safety.  I won’t attempt to retell that story here, because I think is perfectly told in his book.  I am going to spoil the quote he used:

“In the midst of life’s journey I found myself in a dark wood, for the right path was lost.”

That’s right.  This quote is from the Inferno, by Dante, and I can’t think of a better quote for this chapter.  You see, the thing about good stories is that they come out of real life, and the Hero’s Journey model can be applied to your daily life.  For example, if you wanted to bake a cake, here is how the Hero’s Journey might play out:

1. Ordinary World/Normal Day at Home
2. Call to Adventure/See a cake commercial, have a craving for a cake
3. Refusal of the Call/I’ve never baked a cake and I have no idea where to start or how to do it, maybe I shouldn’t try
4. Meeting with the Mentor/Happen to notice a cookbook and take a look at a cake recipe, only to discover that it doesn’t look so hard after all
5. Crossing the First Threshold/Leave the house to go to the store to buy the ingredients
6. Tests, Allies, Enemies/driving through stoplights and traffic, arriving at the grocery store, collecting ingredients
7. Approach to the Inmost Cave/heading toward the check out line
8. Ordeal/getting through the check out line
9. Reward/having bought the ingredients
10. The Road Back/driving home, through stoplights and traffic
11. Resurrection/making the cake
12. Return with the Elixir/I now get to eat my cake!

Of course, there are half a dozen other ways that you could play with this analogy, but I’m sure you get my point.  If you’re ever stuck for ideas try looking at your own biography.  I mean, if a cake isn’t exciting enough for you, try replacing the word “cake” with “magic spell” or “clone” or “top-secret government device”.  Let your imagination go from there.

This Concludes my Series of Blog Posts directly on The Writer’s Journey Mythic Structure for Writers by Chris Vogler.  For further information about these topics, please read the book.  My next post, however, will involve The Writer’s Journey as it will be a writing exercise I’ve come up with based on The Writer’s Journey.