Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014
The all-important journey
Plot/story, struggle, and connections
Character, setting, and types of stories
In this chapter
· Your hero’s journey
· Creating power struggles
· Making character connections
· Dealing with disconnections
Many creative writing teachers are fond of maintaining there are only two types of stories: “someone went on a journey” or “a stranger arrived in town.” Regardless of the particulars—in this case, the journey and the town—stories must contain conflicts and at least a little reconciliation. When various phenomena (cultures, generations, genders, hoods) encounter each other, conflict is bound to occur. Likewise, when human beings make connections, some form of love and understanding occurs.
A character, like you and me, is someone capable of change. Story is the process of that change. The transition may be alive to dead, ugly to beautiful, ignorant to wise, callous to compassionate, certain to uncertain—or the reverse of all these things. The important thing is that the change occurs because the character confronts a situation that will change his or her assumptions and somehow shake up their beliefs.
If a story succeeds, we as readers will have our capacity for empathy enlarged by having lived in a character’s skin for the duration. And typically, it hinges on these questions:
· Where does the protagonist want to go? What does he or she desire?
· What are the obstacles encountered? What discoveries are made, and what conflicts arise?
· What does he or she do to overcome these obstacles? What decisions does he or she make?
· Is the goal reached? Is it expected?
Now it’s time to have a closer look at how these questions get woven or built into a story.
The all-important journey
Heroes have challenges to overcome, and often those challenges take the form of journeys. You can see this form in an old legend like Beowulf, all the way up to the most recent blockbuster Hollywood action film. In fact, it’s not surprising that heroic epics like Beowulf and The Iliad have been made into twenty-first-century movies because their stories still resonate with viewers.
What exactly is it that resonates from such stories across centuries? A professor named Joseph Campbell spent much of his life studying and explaining the life principles embedded in the structure of ancient stories. What he discovered after researching hero myths from hundreds of cultures is that they’re all basically the same story told in infinitely different ways—that is, they involve a hero or protagonist and a journey.
How does this relate to creative writing? It enables you to write stories that make sense and are satisfying to your reader. However, it’s important to remember that the hero’s journey is a guideline only. Like grammar, once you know and understand the rules, you can break them. Nobody likes a rigid formula—at least creative writers usually don’t. And the hero’s journey is not a formula. It gives you the understanding you need to take familiar expectations and then turn them on their heads in creative defiance. The values of the hero’s journey are what’s key: they are symbols of universal life experience.
It’s important to realize that the journey can be outward to an actual place (think The Wizard of Oz) or inward to the mind, the heart, the spirit. Sometimes the journey of the story ends in fulfillment, sometimes not. Sometimes the goal is reached and proves not worth the trip; sometimes a detour leads to a paradise or a kind of hell. As the writer, you get to decide where your protagonist’s journey leads.
Here’s an example of a journey the begins a creative nonfiction piece titled “Coaches”:
Did I hear you asking about the old man? I thought so. He has become a regular feature and, I dare say, something of a conversation piece along this desolate stretch of Outer Banks national seashore where one may still ride out onto the beach in a 4-wheel drive truck or jeep and churn through treacherous red sands until, like some sportsman’s mirage, that whimsical portion of land and water presents itself where it is the fisherman’s hope that current, tide, wind, and a dramatically sloping sandbar will have conspired to create a place where the tastiest of blues, croakers, spot, drum, and sea trout will have gathered together in eager anticipation of his hook. There he will park, bait, and cast out his lines. Then the waiting, short or long, as the sun arcs and swings high above the Atlantic, passing east to south and then sinking low behind him to the west, playing tag as it were with the horizon and marking by cloud-interrupted degrees the unfolding of another day at the beach.
It is probable the careful observer will divine something of the curious quality of the old man in question before he ever steps forth from his vehicle—before it even rolls to a stop on the shell-littered prominence he has chosen for it—for following his rusty black pickup, hovering above it, will be the scores of shore birds that have learned to recognize the truck and its treats—the innards, heads, and tails of fish, as well as the unwanted sandwich crusts—that fly forth from its tailgate, hurled by the old man, when he has cut away or consumed that which he desires for himself. I hope you will appreciate, then—will see, as I do—that when the old man drives toward us down the beach, assortment of sea fowl in tow, the collective image of motion is less suggestive of a land-loving black truck grinding its way, axle dragging, through deep heavy sands and more the quaint impression of a miniature galleon cutting through a heavy sea, holding its course true, gulls and albatrosses flapping about its masts.
When at last the old man finds his place in the sun, a chief requisite of which must be that he can discern no other vehicle along the shore in either direction, he will cast anchor by way of emergency brake and disembark, squinting at the water’s morning glare as he does so. Studying him closely, as he studies the rolling tide, you will note that though wanting in height, he presents a physique unusually broad and strong for a person of his seventy-odd years. Indeed, a dormant, hunched power seems to lurk disguised behind those tanned shoulders that slope gently forward from decades of bending at hoe, plow, work bench and—in a much different arena of experience—absorbed both the punishing physical blows of tacklers and the gut-wrenching emotional lows of narrow losses in the course of enduring the heavy mantle of great athlete and, later, great coach.
Yes, there is still much of the coach and athlete about him: in the careful way he manages both his fishing lines and the menagerie of animals that dwell on his inland farm, as well as in the games he plays on the beach to ward off idleness when the fish are not biting. Chief among these diversions is a variation of golf he has created for himself which involves the ocean, the dunes, and even the sporadic holes of the fiddler crabs. Rusty eight- or nine-iron in hand, up and down the beach he goes, keeping score for himself and his imaginary opponent, who might be an acquaintance, sports celebrity, or relative. Though I was never exposed to any country club sports and possess no affinity for golf, the old man insists I am one of his most difficult imaginary opponents, having taken him into overtime, pressed him to the point of defeat, many times.
As he plays, his eyes never wander far from his lines and when there is a hit—when short vigorous tugs bend the top of one of his poles—he drops his iron and rushes to take up one sport in place of the other. Athlete and coach he may be no longer, yet he cannot give up his games. They remain his great passion.
Indeed there is no happier time for him on the beach than when the fish are running and he is pulling them in as fast as he can pry them off his hooks, rebait, and cast again. And that happiness extends into evening when, back at his little cottage, beer close at hand, the cooler is flung open and the day’s catch spills forth onto the cutting board.
“Clean ’em and eat ’em, by George!” he will declare if someone is present, or even if someone is not, and commence to chopping and gutting the fish with a rusty old steak knife, taking periodic sips from his Budweiser, greasy fingers sliding around the aluminum. Perhaps he will hum one of the mountain songs of his youth or elect to cut in silence. He requires no audience to savor his victory.
Although it sticks mostly to a seaside setting, this piece manages to afford the reader a panorama in space and time—as well as details that particularize both the setting and the manner of protagonist they’re getting to know. Do any changes take place in the character during this opening journey? What does the final line of the passage say about the character as a person?
WRITING PROMPT
Write about a time you started out on a trip but failed to arrive at your destination. Make yourself the hero or central consciousness in this telling. What was the obstacle—weather, accident, mechanical failure, human failure, human conflict? Characterize both the people involved and the setting through significant detail; give a sense of the trip itself. What changed from your beginning expectations? How did you change?