Monday, July 25, 2016

Are you on a Life Journey, Searching for a Secret De-Coder Ring? You've found it.

Imagine for a moment that you are in the middle of a journey that doesn't always make sense to you, but, nevertheless, is one that you have always felt was important, and still feels important even today. You wish to remain on this path until the journey ends. No, you're not bored with being on this journey. In fact, you have a sense of anticipation and excitement about where the journey may lead. For the sake of this essay, let's imagine that you can't wait to see how your journey turns out.

That journey is your life.

And now let's imagine that you are traveling along a road, and that one day you happen to look down and there by the side of the road you find a secret de-coder ring (in the form of a book). Someone left it there. Could someone have left it expressly for you?

You pick up the book and open it, and from the first moment you cast your gaze upon its first page and begin reading or de-coding the messages written there, you find this work helps you make sense of all the mysteries you've been struggling with all these years. You can use it to understand your journey at a deeper level. But that's not all.  What if this secret de-coder ring explained everything about life and even explained how to live, while at the same time allowing you to interpret and make sense of everything so that the explanations and your interpretations are always aligned. They never work at cross-purposes. If you came upon such a secret de-coder ring (only it is actually a book) you would exclaim, "Eureka!" You would extoll this book's praises to all your fellow wayfarers who are also journeying on trails and over trodden paths of their own making.

Well, that's how I feel about The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (Third Edition) by Christopher Vogler.

"Eureka!"

In crafting his book Vogler not only gives us tools to understand our own life stories better; he also gives storywriters of all kinds valuable guidance on how to tap into powerful myths as they go about structuring their stories.

Vogler sets out the communication objective for this book in the Preface to his Second Edition: "In this book I describe the set of concepts known as 'The Hero's Journey,' drawn from the depth psychology of Carl G. Jung and the mythic studies of Joseph Campbell. I tried to relate those ideas to contemporary storytelling, hoping to create a writer's guide to those valuable gifts from our innermost selves and our most distant past. I came looking for design principals of storytelling, but on the road I found something more: a set of principles for living. I came to believe that the Hero's Journey is nothing less than a handbook for life, a complete instruction manual in the art of being human."

Vogler believes that try as we writers might, it is difficult for us to resist the temptation of casting either ourselves or a stand-in character in our work as a hero. As any successful writer will tell you, simply undertaking and surviving the creative adventure-journey of writing one's inner story qualifies the author for hero-status. But Vogler goes further, saying that those of us who are not writers can't help but create a hero's journey for ourselves, a journey that tugs at our heartstrings far deeper than any sentimental romance ever could. He says that casting ourselves for such a story is part of being human. Or, conversely, as we weave our story or myth and tell ourselves our story, we create the truly whole, human being that we become as we grow into that role.

"The Hero's Journey is not an invention, but an observation," writes Vogler. " It is a recognition of a beautiful design, a set of principles that govern the conduct of life and the world of storytelling the way physics and chemistry govern the physical world."

Let's focus in on this term "hero" for just a moment. I'll bet we all think we know exactly what we mean when we use that term. It comes from the Greek word heros, that means "To Serve and Protect," which also happens to be the motto of the Los Angeles Police Department. Clearly firemen and police officers can or should always be heroes to us.

However, in real life, as well as in novels, and movies, things can be a bit more complicated. I'll bet you've run across the terms "tragic flaws" or "tragic hero" before. You may even have reason to believe that in your own hero epic story that you are living out, your hero may be flawed in one way or another. No one's perfect.

When you read The Writer's Journey, you learn there are many kinds of heroes, and all of them are exemplified in movies and novels that we are familiar with and dearly love to watch again and again because they mean so much to us. Here is a list of heroes that are discussed in this remarkable book:

-Willing and unwilling heroes

-Anti-heroes

-Group-oriented heroes

-Loner heroes and

-Catalyst heroes

This is just one example of the depth of insight that Vogler gives us. Indeed, I propose to provide you with additional depth over the next four months. Each month I will go into detail about one aspect of the content of Vogler's work and how it illuminates so much about the kind of hero journey each of us is creating for ourselves as we, hopefully, figure out what our lives are all about, as well as the lives of our characters either in the novels, comic books, songs, screenplays, operas or plays that we write.

In next month's EWA, I'll detail a key mythical journey-story that runs through so many great novels and movies that we know and love. You will understand how these works reflect, in one way or another, the writer's journey and why they are so endearing and valuable to us.

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