Developing Story Ideas Page 14

  The Hero’s Journey: the folklorist Joseph Campbell identified narrative tropes common to many of the world’s folktales. Hollywood covered similar ground by correlating film types, audiences, and box office receipts. What Campbell saw was male dominated, but heroines make journeys through life too.

  I find it fascinating that all three authors tell stories that enact what the folklorist Joseph Campbell believed was a universal structure, which he called the hero’s journey. In his Hero with a Thousand Faces he asserts that:

  We first meet the hero (or heroine, of course) in a world familiar to them.

  He receives a call to action involving a mission.

  Often he first refuses the call.

  The call is repeated more urgently.

  Reluctantly accepting the challenge, the hero passes into a new and unfamiliar world.

  Along the path, he/she faces increasingly severe tests of courage, ingenuity, persistence, faith, and so on.

  Along the way he meets both helpers and hinderers—allies, counselors, tricksters, and enemies—some helping, others making matters more complex and difficult for the hero to solve.

  There is usually a mentor from whom to learn.

  Approaching the ultimate problem, he (or she, of course) faces the supreme test.

  Passing it leads to the supreme reward.

  Tested and strengthened, he returns to the normal world bearing the elixir of wisdom.

  Campbell’s limitation is that he sees hardly any heroines. The heroic journey will be familiar from Peter Jackson’s epic Tolkien trilogy, the Harry Potter films, or any Disney feature. Early Hollywood box-office returns showed what strength and durability lay in traditional forms and characters. The medieval troubadours and roving theatre companies of earlier centuries must have made similar discoveries.

  Going Further

  The Internet is a rich source of fairy tales and other traditional stories. By entering a title plus two or three key words into a search engine, you can locate any number of fascinating interpretations for each.

  Caution: use the books in the list below to assist you in rethinking something you have already written, not as a starting point for a new idea. You would risk paralysis from trying to write within too elaborate and constricting a plan.

  Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 1973 (The classic cross-cultural study examining the archetypal hero in light of modern psychological ideas. Using fairytale narratives of many cultures, Campbell discusses the three stages of the heroic journey—departure, initiation, and return—and a lot more besides. There are many other publications by and about Campbell).

  Roemer, Michael. Telling Stories: Postmodernism and the Invalidation of Traditional Narrative. 1995 (Roemer is a filmmaker and film teacher with a background in philosophy. His book is a radical, passionate, and highly literate exposition of the ancient roots of storytelling, and a defense of them against the depredations of Deconstructivist theory).

  Vogler, Christopher and Michele Montez. The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters, 3rd ed., 2007 (This work is deeply indebted to Joseph Campbell’s work and shows how closely the folklorist’s paradigm fits Dorothy’s career in The Wizard of Oz as well as those of hundreds of other screen heroes and heroines).

  16 Dream Story

  The work in this chapter invites you to break with a major writing enemy—over-control. Of course, no writing can happen without some control, but as we have said, some of the writing rules instilled by misguided educators kill all pleasure in writing.

  Writing is a two-part process. Generate new material fast and intuitively so you can set down your mind’s inventions. Call on your powers of analysis and restructuring later when you edit. Never wear two hats at once; it overheats the brain, leads to self-censorship, and knocks you flat with writer’s block.

  Assignment 16–1: Writing a Dream

  Use the material from the journal of dreams you have been keeping and, most importantly, preserve its zany logic in your writing.

  Step 1: Use a dream or dreams to write a treatment for a story that might last, say, five minutes of screen time. Do not worry about a tidy beginning or ending, or about conventional story logic. Instead, be true to the mood and jagged logic of dream itself. To be true to its spirit, feel free to alter, augment, or splice incidents together.

  Step 2: Separately define themes or messages the story seems to be developing.

  Write somewhere secluded so you set down whatever comes into your head. Normally our minds only move in complete freedom when asleep and dreaming, so this chapter aims to explore what one can create when awake and not too hobbled by self-censorship.

  If you record your dreams over a period of months or years, your thematic preoccupations will emerge—along with your demons, archetypes, and unfinished business in life. What more could a storyteller ask?

  Being true to the distinctive logic of dream is a rehearsal for accepting how things happen in life. Evict all the clichés in your mind by celebrating the sheer oddity of the real, as the Dada and Surrealist movements did early in the 20th century.

  Your dream journal will probably echo principles important to anyone working in the arts, namely:

  Emotionally loaded dream narrative is open, sparse, visual, and nonliteral

  An open story invites the audience to decompress what the narrative withholds

  Vital elements often arrive in nonlinear juxtaposition

  Putting tension and tone ahead of logic reflects how we experience pressured situations

  Dreams and poetry require an effort that makes us remember their meanings

  Lengthy dialogue devalues words, but brief verbal exchanges during a flow of physical action raises the value of language

  Withholding information means delaying answers to your audience’s questions, postponing closure, and thus maintaining tension. Profound messages seldom take shape easily, but we never forget what took hard work to acquire.

  Discussion

  Dreams are often very cinematic and rich with structural and symbolic possibilities. Surrealist art of the 1920s and 1930s, influenced by advances in psychology, made use of the idea that the subconscious mind uses dreams to express subconscious preoccupations as myth, symbol, and metaphor.

  Dreams offer an interpretation of the chaotic, surreal experience we call waking life. They do it poetically by using story, symbol, and metaphor.

  When you come to discuss the dream assignments, ask the following questions:

  What is the dream’s structure, and does it have a crisis?

  Is there a myth or folktale similar in form?

  What gives the principal characters their centrality?

  Are the characters flat or round, and what do they represent?

  Has the writer implied a meaning, and do you agree with it?

  What are the most daring and dreamlike aspects of the work?

  Examples

  Dream Sequence 1 (Chris Darner)

  An average-looking man in unassuming clothing is led along a path, carved into a sheer sea cliff. In front of him a short, crooked man keeps up a brisk pace. The average man slows and sputters in his walk, staring out at the vastness of everything around him. Below the two travelers is a deep-green ocean, its waves crashing up far below them, a salty white mist rising into the air. The two continue on the narrow trail, the crooked man constantly pulling and tugging at the average man. The path bends up ahead and the crooked man pulls more eagerly than ever, increasing the pace to a near jog.

  As the path curves around the cliff, land comes into view—lush tropical vegetation and a white-sand beach. The average man scans the new view and his pace slows. The crooked man doesn’t notice, however, and continues on his brisk pace, leaving the average man slowly drifting farther behind. The average man continues his scanning, stumbling along the trail. His eyes catch a small raft floating down below in the sea.

  He holds up his hand to shade his eyes and hel
p him focus in the bright light. Slowly the image comes into focus. There are two brothers frolicking in the water. They both look very similar and could very likely be twins. They have plain, muted features, appear to be about 25 years old and are extremely obese. Wearing nothing but small bathing suits, their bodies resemble white walruses, their flesh rippling with every movement. The average man can hear faint echoes of their laughing and giggling mixed with the sounds of the crashing waves still below him. The two brothers chuckle and chortle, playing in and around the raft. They take turns pulling their massive frames up into their small boat and then falling back off the side of the raft, which folds and stresses under their weight. The average man sits there stunned, his movement along the path having halted seconds into the observation.

  The crooked man returns and curtly pulls at the average man, though not out of spite. The average man stumbles along the path, once again following the crooked man. He glances back one last time, hears the twins playing on the raft, then twists around to follow the crooked man, who is leading as eagerly as ever.

  The author writes:

  This dream sequence seems to develop upon a theme outside my current theme list but does touch upon one. The main theme of the piece is alienation and being somewhere intimidating and foreign. The crooked man pulls the average man along because he is either unable to maneuver in the unfamiliar territory or is hesitant. When the average man sees the brothers he stops and watches them. While I didn’t write in his internal reactions to the situation, they hopefully read as uncomfortable, and that he somehow feels it is indecent. This response, and anywhere you are uncomfortable with people around you, does touch partially on my theme of fear of either being or becoming that which you hate. In other words, the average man sees something in the brothers that he sees, or could see, in himself.

  My themes have been finding their way into my writings, both inside of class and out, fairly consistently. One theme that I do notice in my writings is alienation and a feeling of being somewhere forbidden or taboo. This dream sequence illustrates that fairly well.

  Although imagery is only minimally rendered, the visual texture of this dream is stark and vivid. Of the four characters, three are physically deformed. The crooked man is the average man’s guide, a sort of stunted Father Time, bustling their journey forward. There is an implied polarity between the ends and the means, because the old man is wholly focused on the purpose of the journey, while the average man wants to linger and gaze around him. As he takes in the natural and beautifully evoked seascape, his gaze is captured by the two fat, white walrus boys. Their play is repulsively fascinating, and he goes on watching voyeuristically until chivvied by his guide. These twin souls are a phenomenon that he feels he must not dwell on, yet he cannot help looking back at them over his shoulder as the crooked man tugs him forward. From the author’s notes, the average man seems to be witnessing his own worst fate—pale obesity with only another version of himself for companionship.

  Dream Sequence 2 (Michael Hanttula)

  An immaculately clear sky, radiant blue. Tall grass that has been worn to a light brown by the beaming sun sways playfully in the cool breeze. A trail stretches far across this land, snuggled between a long body of water and rolling hills. It is absolutely quiet, except for the grasses, which seem to snicker as they rub against each other. There is a group of young men hiking along this mountainous trail. The sun is beating down on them, browning them like the grass, and the calm expanse of the dark lake beckons them to divert their path. They pause and contemplate a swim when their attention is stolen by a curious crack in an enormous boulder behind them.

  One of the men investigates the crack, which is formed by a large stone plate that seems to be slowly dismembering itself from the larger portion of rock. Behind this plate, the man finds a small opening that leads inside the boulder. The rest of the group, increasingly curious, join the young man.

  They cautiously creep inside this enormous rock to find a stone-walled room with an abundance of ceiling height for what it lacks in floor space. It could have been an antechamber to a medium-sized pyramid. There is a large stone statue of an indiscernible figure standing before them, draped in a dark gray and black linen; it watches them, it watches who enters. A dark tunnel streams off to the right; it is not very inviting. They find the lengthy doorway-like hole to the left of the figure much more appealing.

  Character archetypes, symbolic and primal as Tarot cards, often appear in dreams. Are they hardwired in our genetics or instilled by our culture? Narrative archetypes seem equally inherent. How else could dreams, mostly so fragmentary and random, sometimes be so true to narrative tradition?

  In a bit of a nervous fright over a possible forthcoming adventure, they scurry through the length of the “doorway.” Three enormous stone slabs slam down behind them—meant to trap them individually. Now in a new room, they find a large pit taking up a good area of the floor before them. Its depth is unknown, for it beams an intense light upward. The high ceiling is surprisingly dark given the intensity of the light. Returning from the heights of the ceiling down the length of the near wall are three gigantic stained-glass windows with gothic arches and no particular design, yet apparently medieval. On the ground, the group discovers a plenitude of odd-shaped stones. Some resemble religious objects—crosses and ankhs. The friends decide that they have had enough of this adventure and pick up the stones to beat out the stained glass windows. One of the windows “pops” out of its molding and slips outward. The ground below is now a few hundred feet down. Looking out of this new portal, they see old-growth redwoods that have grown past the height of their view. This exit is not an option.

  Turning back toward the room, they see a small ledge on one side of the gleaming crater. They shimmy their way across to the other side, fearful of plummeting to its possible depths. As they reach the other side, they are met by a small cliff (of about three feet or so) that is topped with a fairly severe incline. The only way out seems farther within. They attempt to climb this subterranean hill but find that its composition is of such loose dirt that their arms are buried to the shoulders by the time they can manage a grip. Just as it seems impossible, one of the group discovers another way out, a passage to the right side. They hurry through the tunnel and find themselves landing on the edge of a pool.

  A white-bottomed pool with bright lights illuminating it, one you might find in a suburban residence, yet underground. Floating in the pool are dozens of severed human appendages, mostly full arms and legs. Yet the pool’s water is clear. One of the boys jumps in and swims safely to the other side. Following his lead, the others jump in. Just as they do, a large dragon’s head that the boys hadn’t seen before emerges from a far side of this medium-sized pool. It’s red with fiery eyes, made from durable plastic. One may have seen its like at an amusement park. Opening its mouth to toast the group with flames, it coats the clustering youths with a fine watery spray. They hop out of the pool, happy to be alive and beaming with adrenaline.

  The room continues on one side, apparently naturally formed pillars leading off into the darkness. However, on the other side is the tunnel they had seen before in the antechamber. They rush through it, laughing at the statue as they make their way out the boulder’s entrance. Enraged by their lack of respect, the statue transforms into a human, shielded by a box over her head, and chases them away.

  The author writes:

  It’s rather difficult to find any overwhelming themes or direct purpose to this dream, but it does seem to deal with adventure, religion, mortality, and the bond between friends. Odd, because this was a recurring dream that I once had with each new set of friends, and have not had since the last time that I had a unified “group” of friends.

  It seems as if my interests, thematically speaking, have been expanded to also include the loss of innocence, alienation, and the conflict of wanting to “do good” in a corrupt environment.

  This dream was delivered as one enormous, formless
paragraph, so I took the liberty of inserting paragraph breaks. These make it easier to read and understand because they highlight important transitions between stages. Make no mistake, this astonishing dream is a textbook example of the hero’s journey and many of its symbols. So often dreams are fragmentary and illogical, but close analysis of this one shows a strong structure. Consider:

  Act I

  The sunburned young gods amid the trail/sun/water/hills of normal life.

  The call to adventure in the cracked rock with its passageway leading into the hill.

  The first chamber guarded by the draped stone figure. The Problem is to get past the gatekeepers and penetrate to the heart of the catacomb.

  Act II

  A one-way passage leading to the second chamber containing religious symbols/church windows/blinding light from (hell?) below.

  From here, there are at first two blocked routes of escape.

  But a third way leads to the third and inmost cavern.

  Escape from the inner cave is only possible via the supreme test—passing through the pool of severed limbs.

  Act III

  Finally they must run the gauntlet of the statue that comes to life, an enraged maternal female that chases them blindfold, like the figure of Justice.

  For the band of friends, their lightly undertaken journey into the hill, with its three caverns, and the return, proves to be a supreme test of endurance, courage, and collaborative problem solving. Facing the terror and mysteries of the journey, but emerging unharmed through cooperation and ingenuity, they seem to prove the value of teamwork.