The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, Third Edition

But take hope, for writing is magic. Even the simplest act of writing is almost supernatural, on the borderline with telepathy. Just think: We can make a few abstract marks on a piece of paper in a certain order and someone a world away and a thousand years from now can know our deepest thoughts. The boundaries of space and time and even the limitations of death can be transcended.

Many cultures believed the letters of their alphabets were far more than just symbols for communication, recording transactions, or recalling history. They believed letters were powerful magical symbols that could be used to cast spells and predict the future. The Norse runes and the Hebrew alphabet are simple letters for spelling words, but also deep symbols of cosmic significance.

This magical sense is preserved in our word for teaching children how to manipulate letters to make words: spelling. When you "spell" a word correctly, you are in effect casting a spell, charging these abstract, arbitrary symbols with meaning and power. We say "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me," but this is manifestly untrue. We know that words have power to hurt or heal. The simple words of a letter, telegram, or phone call can strike you like a hammer blow. They're just words — marks on paper or vibrations of air — but mere words such as "Guilty," "Ready, aim, fire.'" "I do," or "We'd like to buy your screenplay" can bind us, condemn us, or bring us joy. They can hurt or heal us with their magic power.

The healing power of words is their most magical aspect. Writers, like the shamans or medicine men and women of ancient cultures, have the potential to be healers.

WRITERS AND SHAMANS

Shamans have been called "the wounded healers." Like writers, they are special people set apart from the rest by their dreams, visions, or unique experiences. Shamans, like many writers, are prepared for their work by enduring terrible ordeals. They may have a dangerous illness or fall from a cliff and have nearly every bone broken. They are chewed by a lion or mauled by a bear. They are taken apart and put back together again in a new way. In a sense they have died and been reborn, and this experience gives them special powers. Many writers come to their craft only after they have been shattered by life in some way.

Often those chosen to be shamans are identified by special dreams or visions, in which the gods or spirits take them away to other worlds where they undergo terrible ordeals. They are laid out on a table to have all their bones removed and broken. Before their eyes, their bones and organs are split, cooked, and reassembled in a new order. They are tuned to a new frequency like radio receivers. As shamans, they are now able to receive messages from other worlds.

They return to their tribes with new powers. They have the ability to travel to other worlds and bring back stories, metaphors, or myths that guide, heal, and give meaning to life. They listen to the confusing, mysterious dreams of their people and give them back in the form of stories that provide guidelines for right living.

We writers share in the godlike power of the shamans. We not only travel to other worlds but create them out of space and time. When we write, we truly travel to these worlds of our imagination. Anyone who has tried to write seriously knows this is why we need solitude and concentration. We are actually traveling to another time and place.

As writers we travel to other worlds not as mere daydreamers, but as shamans with the magic power to bottle up those worlds and bring them back in the form of stories for others to share. Our stories have the power to heal, to make the world new again, to give people metaphors by which they can better understand their own lives.

When we writers apply the ancient tools of the archetypes and the Hero's Journey to modern stories, we stand on the shoulders of the mythmakers and shamans of old. When we try to heal our people with the wisdom of myth, we are the modern shamans. We ask the same ageless, childlike questions presented by the myths: Who am I? Where did I come from? What happens when I die? What does it mean? Where do I fit in? Where am I bound on my own Hero's Journey?

At one point when the Disney company was remaking itself in the 1980s, I was called upon to review the major fairy tales of world cultures, looking for potential animation subjects on the order of Walt Disney's colorful interpretations of European folk stories, like "Snow White" and "Cinderella" from the Brothers Grimm and "The Sleeping Beauty" from Perrault's collection of French fairy tales. It was a chance to re-open the mental laboratory to study old friends from my childhood that Walt Disney had not gotten around to tackling, like Rapunzel and Rumpelstiltskin. It was also a great opportunity for me to sample many kinds of stories from different cultures, identifying similarities and differences and extracting storytelling principles from this broad sample.

In the course of my adult wanderings through what is normally considered children's literature, I came to a few firm conclusions about stories, these powerful and mysterious creations of the human mind. For instance, I came to believe that stories have healing power, that they can help us deal with difficult emotional situations by giving us examples of human behavior, perhaps similar in some way to the struggles we are going through at some stage of life, and which might inspire us to try a different strategy for living. I believe stories have survival value for the human species and that they were a big step in human evolution, allowing us to think metaphorically and to pass down the accumulated wisdom of the race in story form. I believe stories are metaphors by which people measure and adjust their own lives by comparing them to those of the characters. I believe the basic metaphor of most stories is that of the journey, and that good stories show at least two journeys, outer and inner, an outer journey in which the hero tries to do something difficult or get something, and an inner journey in which the hero faces some crisis of the spirit or test of character that leads to transformation. I believe stories are orientation devices, functioning like compasses and maps to allow us to feel oriented, centered, connected, more conscious, more aware of our identities and responsibilities and our relationship to the rest of the world.

But of all my beliefs about stories, one that has been particularly useful in the business of developing commercial stories for the movies is the idea that stories are somehow alive, conscious, and responsive to human emotions and wishes.

I have always suspected that stories are alive. They seem to be conscious and purposeful. Like living beings, stories have an agenda, something on their minds. They want something from you. They want to wake you up, to make you more conscious and more alive. They want to teach you a lesson disguised as entertainment. Under the guise of amusement, stories want to edify you, build up your character just a little by showing a moral situation, a struggle, and an outcome. They seek to change you in some small way, to make you just a bit more human by comparing your behavior to that of the characters.

The living, conscious, intentional quality of stories is here and there revealed in familiar fairy tales, like the one the Brothers Grimm collected called "Rumpelstiltskin," the tale of the little man with his power to spin straw into gold and a mysterious desire to own a human child. The story is found in many cultures where the little man is known by strange and funny names like Bulleribasius (Sweden), Tittelintuure (Finland), Praseidimio (Italy), Repelsteelije (Holland), and Grigrigredinmenufretin (France).

This was one of the stories that posed challenging questions in the mental laboratory of my earliest childhood. Who was this little man, where did he get his powers, and why did he want that human child? What was the lesson the girl in the story was supposed to learn? Later in life, as I returned to contemplate that story as part of my work for Walt Disney animation, many of those mysteries remained, but the deep wisdom of the folk tale helped me understand that stories are alive, that they actively respond to wishes, desires, and strong emotions in the characters, and that they are compelled to provide experiences that teach us some lesson in life.

THE STORY OF RUMPELSTILTSKIN

The well-known tale begins with a lovely young girl in a dangerous situation, an archetypal damsel in distress. She is the daughter of a miller who brags to the king that his daughter is so talented, she can even spin straw into gold. The king, a literal-minded fellow, says "That's the kind of talent I like!" and locks her in a room in his castle containing only a spinning wheel and piles of straw, warning that he's going to have her killed in the morning if she doesn't spin the straw into gold as her daddy promised.

The girl doesn't know what to do and begins to weep. At once the door opens and a little man, or "manikin" as the tale says, comes in, asking her why she is crying so. Apparently he has been attracted by her strong emotions, as faerie folk are said to be. When she explains her predicament he says he can spin straw into gold, no problem, and asks what she can give him if he does the job for her. She hands over her necklace and he at once sits down and spins the straw, whir, whir, whir, into shining gold wire on a spool.

In the morning the little man has vanished. The king is very pleased with the gold, but being greedy, locks the girl into a bigger room with more straw, and again demands that she spin it all into gold by dawn. If not, she will die. All alone in the room that night, the girl feels hopeless and weeps once more. As if summoned again by her emotions, the little man appears a second time. This time she offers him a ring from her finger to get out of her predicament. Whir, whir, whir, straw is spun into gold.

The king finds bigger spools of gold wire in place of straw the next morning and is delighted, but again is greedy and locks the girl in the biggest room in the palace, stuffed to the ceiling with straw. If she can turn it all into gold by dawn he will marry her, but if not, she will die.

The girl's weeping in the locked room attracts the little man for a third time, but now she has nothing left to give him. So he asks her, "If you become queen, will you give me your first-born child?"

Thinking nothing of the future, the girl agrees. Whir, whir, whir, the mountain of straw is spun into gold. The king collects his gold and marries the girl as promised. A year goes by and the girl, now a queen, has a beautiful child.

One day the little man comes and claims the child as his reward for saving her life. Horrified, the young queen offers him all the riches of the realm, but the little man refuses, saying "Something alive is dearer to me than all the treasures in the world." The girl laments and cries so much that the manikin relents a little for, as we have seen, he is very sensitive to human emotions. He strikes a new bargain with her. If she can guess his name within three days, she will get to keep the child. But she will never guess it, he says confidently, for he has a very unusual name.

The queen stays up all night thinking of every name she's ever heard and sends out messengers far and wide to assemble lists of unusual names. When the manikin comes to see her the first day, she tries out all these names but none is right. On the second day she sends out more messengers to the distant corners of the kingdom to collect weird names, but again the little man's name is not among them and he goes away laughing, sure he will get to keep the child.

On the third day the queen's most faithful, far-traveling messenger reports that he's struck pay dirt. In his wanderings he didn't uncover any new names, but far away, atop a mountain, he did come across a little house, in front of which a fire was blazing, and around it was dancing a ridiculous little man. The messenger heard him shout a rhyme that revealed his name was Rumpelstiltskin.

The little man appears once more in the queen's room, sure she will be unable to guess his absurd name. But after two bad guesses ("Conrad?" "Harry?"), she gets it right — Rumpelstiltskin! The tale ends abruptly as the little man, crying out that the devil must have told her his name, stamps his right foot so furiously that it goes through the floor and sticks deep in the earth. With his two hands he seizes the other foot and literally tears himself in two!

A fitting end for one who has connived to take a human child from its mother. Or is it?

Who is this strange little man with his supernatural powers to enter locked rooms and spin straw into gold? Although the tale only calls him a "little man" or "manikin," he is clearly one of the faerie people of worldwide folklore, perhaps an elf or a gnome. The oral storytellers may have avoided calling him what he is because the faerie folk are notoriously touchy about their names and identities. But it is likely that any hearer of this tale in medieval times would instantly recognize the little man as a supernatural creature from the faerie world. Like other denizens of that world he appears when he wants to and only to certain people. Like them, he is interested in human children and attracted by strong human emotions.

From early times people have associated the faerie folk with a certain sadness, perhaps because they lack some things that human beings take for granted. According to one theory, they are unable to conceive their own young and are therefore fascinated by human children, sometimes kidnapping them in the night, as Shakespeare's faerie queen Titania snatched an Indian princeling as her darling toy in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Sometimes the faeries steal children from their cradles and replace them with blocks of wood or soul-less replica children called changelings.

The faeries' ability to feel emotions may be different from ours, for they seem to be curious about our emotional outbursts, and are in fact attracted to them. It's as if they exist in a parallel dimension but are summoned into our world by strong human emotions, as demons and angels supposedly can be summoned by ritual ceremonies and prayers intended to focus emotional energy. Some authorities hold that faeries do not know simple human emotions like love or grief but are intensely curious to know what they are missing.

Re-experiencing the story of "Rumpelstiltskin" as an adult, I was struck by how instantaneously the girl's tears of despair summoned the little man. Implied in the girl's weeping is a cry for help, a wish. If given words, it might be "Please, get me out of this.'" It appears the inhabitants of the faerie world are attracted to human emotions especially when they are focused into wishes. In this case, the wish is to get out of a desperate, hopeless situation. In the fairy-tale logic of cause and effect, the girl's shedding of tears is a positive action that generates a positive result. By crying, she acknowledges her powerlessness and sends out a signal to the world of spirits that surrounds us. "Isn't there someone with the magical powers my father claimed for me, who can get me out of this uncomfortable spot?" And the story hears, and responds by sending a messenger, a supernatural creature who has the power to grant her unspoken wish to escape.

However, as always, there's a catch. The price for getting out of her trouble is very high, escalating from material treasures, like a necklace or a ring, to life itself. But the girl isn't thinking about that right now. Having a child is a remote possibility. When she gets to that point, maybe she can work something out or maybe the little man will just go away. Whatever the risk, she'll agree to it to get out of that room and out of danger from the kings wrath. Her wish to escape, expressed by a strong burst of emotion, has called the little man and the adventure into being.

THE POWER OF WISHING

I began to realize that wishing may be an underlying principle of storytelling. The hero is almost always discovered in a difficult or uncomfortable situation, very often making a wish to escape or to change the conditions. The wish is often verbalized and is clearly stated in the first act of many movies. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy's song "Somewhere over the Rainbow" is a wish to escape to a land where troubles are far behind her. In Lost in Translation, Scarlett Johansson's character expresses the theme of the movie in a line in the first act where she says to Bill Murray's character, meeting in a Japanese hotel bar, "I wish I could sleep," symbolizing a wish for spiritual and emotional peace.

The expression of a wish, even a frivolous one, near the beginning of a story has an important function of orientation for the audience. It gives a story a strong throughline or what is called a "desire line," organizing the forces in and around the hero to achieve a clear goal, even if that goal may later be re-examined and redefined. It automatically generates a strong polarization of the story, generating a conflict between those forces helping the hero achieve her goal, and those trying to prevent it.

If the wish is not expressed by one of the characters, it may be implied by the character's dire situation. Audience members making strong identification with a character in trouble will make the wish themselves, desiring the hero to be happy, triumphant, or free, and getting themselves in alignment with the forces polarizing the story.

Spoken or not, the story hears the wish, seemingly attracted by the intense emotion contained in it. Carl Jung had a motto carved above his door, "Vocatus atque non vocatus, deus aderit," which loosely translated means "Summoned or not, the god will come." In other words, when the emotional conditions are right, when the need is great, there is an inner cry for change, a spoken or unspoken wish that calls the story and the adventure into being.

The story's response to the human wish is often to send a messenger, sometimes a magical little man like Rumpelstiltskin, but always some kind of agent who leads the hero into a special kind of experience we call an adventure — a sequence of challenges that teach the hero, and the audience, a lesson. The story provides villains, rivals, and allies to challenge or aid the hero and impart the lessons that are on the story's agenda. The story sets up moral dilemmas that test the hero's beliefs and character, and we are invited to measure our own behavior against that of the players in the drama.

The adventure has a special quality of the unexpected. The story is tricky. It acts in the roundabout, indirect, slightly mischievous way of the faerie folk who are its frequent agents, providing the hero with a series of unexpected obstacles that challenge the way the person has been doing business. It usually grants the hero's wish but in an unexpected way, a way that teaches the hero a lesson about life. Many of life's teachings can be boiled down to "Be careful what you wish for," which is a lesson taught by countless science-fiction and fantasy stories as well as love stories and stories of ambition.

WANTS vs. NEEDS

Through the triggering device of wishes, stories seem to like arranging events so that the hero is forced to evolve to a higher level of awareness. Often the hero wishes for something that she or he desperately wants at that moment, but the story teaches the hero to look beyond, to what he or she really needs. A hero may think she wants to win a competition or find a treasure, but in fact the story shows that she needs to learn some moral or emotional lesson: how to be a team player, how to be more flexible and forgiving, how to stand up for herself. In the course of granting the initial wish, the story provides hair-raising, life-threatening incidents that challenge the hero to correct some flaw in his or her character.

By imposing obstacles to the hero in achieving the goal, the story may appear to be hostile to the hero's well-being. The intention of the story may seem to be to take something away from the hero (like life itself.'), but in fact the real aim of the story is benevolent, to teach the hero the needed moral lesson, to fill in a missing piece in the hero's personality or understanding of the world.

The lesson is presented in a particular, ritualized way, reflecting a more universal principle we might call "Not Only... But Also" (NOBA). NOBA is a rhetorical device, a way of presenting information that can be found in "fortune-telling" systems like the I Ching and the Tarot. Not Only... But Also means: Here is a truth that you know perfectly well, but there is another dimension to this truth of which you may not be aware. A story might be telling you, through the actions of a character, that not only are your habits holding you back but also if you keep going in this direction your habits will destroy you. Or it might be telling you that not only are you beset with difficulties, but also these very difficulties will be the means to your ultimate victory.

In Lajos Egri's famous example from "the Scottish play," the premise is that Macbeth's ruthless ambition inevitably leads to his destruction. But Macbeth doesn't see it that way, not at first. He thinks only that ruthless ambition leads to power, to being king. But the story, summoned into life in response to Macbeth's thirst for power, teaches him a lesson in NOBA form. Ambition leads not only to being king, but also to Macbeth's destruction.

The words "but" and "however," as lawyers know, are very useful for setting terms and conditions, and can be powerful tools of rhetoric and storytelling. A story is like a long sentence or a paragraph, with a subject, the hero; an object, the hero's goal; and a verb, the emotional state or physical action of the hero. "So and so wants something and does something to get it." The NOBA concept introduces the word "but" or "however" into that sentence. Now its "So and so wants something and does something to get it, but there are unexpected consequences, forcing so and so to adapt or change in order to survive."

The aim of good storytelling is to get the audience to make the wish along with the hero. Stories do this through the process of "identification," by making the hero sympathetic, the victim of a misfortune or an understandable error of judgment. Good storytellers invite audiences to invest themselves in the fate of the characters by making them likeable or giving them universal drives, desires, and human weaknesses. Ideally, what happens to the hero is happening, on some emotional level of connection, to the audience. The story and the hero are not the only active agents in the drama. The members of the audience are also agents in the play, emotionally involved, actively wishing for the hero to win, learn the lesson, survive, and thrive. They identify with heroes in a threatened position where it appears their wishes may not be granted and their real needs may not be met.

The wishes of heroes are a strong point of identification for many people, since we all have wishes and desires that we secretly cherish. In fact, that's one of the main reasons we go to movies and watch TV and read novels — to have our wishes granted. Storytellers are, most of the time, in the wish-granting business. The Disney empire built its entire corporate identity around the belief in wishing, from its theme song "When You Wish Upon a Star" to the wish-granting fairy godmothers of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, to the genie who grants three wishes in Aladdin. Hollywood executives and best-selling novelists aim to know the secret wishes of their audiences and fulfill them. Popular stories of recent years have granted widely held wishes to walk with the dinosaurs, trod the soil of alien planets, seek high adventure in mythic realms or in times gone by, and outpace the boundaries of space, time, and death itself. So-called "reality television" grants wishes on a nightly basis, bestowing on ordinary people the thrill of being seen by millions and having a shot at stardom or riches. Politicians and advertisers play on the wishes of the public, promising to grant security, peace of mind, or comfort. A good technique of Hollywood pitching is to begin by asking "Did you ever wish you could —" (fly, be invisible, go back in time to fix your mistakes, etc.), connecting up the desires of the story's hero with a strong wish that a lot of people might have.

THE WISHES OF THE AUDIENCE

It pays to think about what audience members wish for themselves and the heroes in stories. As writers we play a tricky game with our readers and viewers. We evoke a strong wish through our characters, then spend most of the story frustrating the wish, making it seem that the characters will never get what they want or need. Usually, in the end, we grant those wishes, and show how they are achieved by struggle, by overcoming obstacles, and by reconsidering them, with the desire sometimes shifting from what the hero thinks she wants to what she really needs.

We thwart the deep wishes of the audience at our peril. Movies that deny the wishes of the audience to see the heroes ultimately happy or fulfilled may not perform well at the box office. The audience will inwardly cheer for poetic justice — the hero receiving rewards proportionate to his struggle, the villain receiving punishment equivalent to the suffering he has inflicted on others. If that sense of poetic justice is violated, if the rewards and punishments and lessons don't match up to our wishes for the characters, we sense something is wrong with the story, and go away unsatisfied.

We have wishes for our villains as well as our heroes. I remember my mother, an astute critic of popular movies and books, muttering under her breath phrases like "I hope he dies a horrible death," when a villain had done something particularly heinous to one of her heroes on the screen. If the movie didn't deliver a poetically appropriate fate for the villain, she was disappointed and that movie went down in her books as a bad one.

Once in a while, the strategy of thwarting the audience's desires is effective, to challenge the assumptions of the watchers, to reflect a harsh view of reality, or to depict a tragic, doomed situation as a kind of warning to the audience. For example, in the novel and movie Remains of the Day, the butler to the family of a British lord spends his entire life failing to connect emotionally with other people. His wish, we might say, is to have a sense of tight control over his personal life, one area where he does not compromise. This masks a deeper desire, the need to make an emotional and physical connection with another human being. The audience forms a strong wish for him to be happy, to seize an opportunity for intimacy that comes his way late in life. But, true to his tragic character, he doesn't take the chance for change, and the movie ends with the feeling that though he has gotten what he wants (privacy and control), he will never get what he needs, or what we wish for him and ourselves. It plays as a cautionary tale, a warning to us — if we don't take up the opportunities that life offers us, we could end up frustrated and alone. In this case, our wish to see the character happy is superseded by our need to realize that we could end up in the same sad situation if we don't open up to opportunities to love.

The focus on wishing that gives life to many tales is but one of the verbs that activate the emotional mechanisms of story. Wishes must be translated into action, dreams must be made real, or else the story, and perhaps a person's life, will stagnate, stuck in an unrealistic, endless fantasy of daydreaming. Wishing is important, for it is the first step in a pyramid of mental states, the yearning of a seed to grow into something great. It forms the initial intention of a story, or the beginning of a new phase of someone's life. "Be careful what you wish for" applies in a multitude of cases, as stories show us over and over that a wish is a powerful act of the imagination. The idea is constantly affirmed in stories that human imagination is extremely powerful, especially when focused into a wish, but that it is difficult to control. The wish and the imagination work together to create a mental image of the desired thing, person, situation, or outcome, so vivid that it calls the adventure into being, and launches the hero in the direction of seeing how the wish will actually be fulfilled, usually in an unsuspected and challenging way. The image may be faint and hazy in the beginning, or detailed but highly idealized and unrealistic, a fantasy of the future uninformed by real experience.

But for a story or a person's life to move along it is necessary to pierce the bubble of fantasy, and to convert wishing into something else — doing, the next step of the pyramid. The essence of movies is the director's command, "Action." Do something, actors. The root of the word "actor" is "do-er," someone who does something. Dreams and wishes must be tested in the crucible of reality, in action, by doing.

PROGRESSING FROM WISHING TO WILLING

Encountering conflicts and obstacles can force characters to evolve to a yet higher level on the pyramid of emotions, that of willing, which is quite a different mental state than mere wishing. Martial arts and classic philosophies teach people to develop a strong will, so that wishes can be transformed into actions, so that even when distracted or set back by obstacles, the developing personality can return quickly to the center line of its intention. Will is a wish concentrated and focused into a firm intention to achieve a goal step by step. Wishes can evaporate at the first setback but the will endures.

Willing is a kind of filter, separating those who only wish from those who actually take responsibility for improving themselves and pay the price of real change. With a focused will, a character can take the blows and setbacks that life hands out. Martial arts strengthen the will, as stories do, by delivering a series of blows and falls that toughen the student. Challenging and stressful situations are repeatedly introduced so that the developing person becomes more resilient, accustomed to conflict and opposition, and determined to overcome any obstacle.

Like making a wish, making an act of the will calls forces into motion. A strong act of will sends out signals to the world. Here is someone who wants something and is willing to pay a high price to get it. All sorts of allies and opponents will be summoned by such a declaration, each with its lesson to teach.

Like wishing, the will must be managed. A will for power can be dangerous, and an overly strong will can overpower and victimize weaker ones. But the development of a strong will, outgrowing the stage of simple wishing, is a necessary stage of human development.

There is a connection between needs and willing. Both evolve from the idea of wishing or wanting. Once you progress beyond wishing to knowing what your needs truly are, you can focus your vague wishes into much more concentrated acts of the will. All the levels of your being can be aligned in the direction of achieving a clear and realistic goal. The girl in "Rumpelstiltskin" starts as a passive victim, just crying her eyes out and sitting alone in a room wishing to be anywhere but there. When she is a little older and realizes she needs to protect the life of her child, she develops a will and applies it again and again until she accomplishes her goal.

The language of movies and fantasy, particularly that of the Disney variety, tends to show us the magical power of wishing but often stops short at that point, leaving the other steps of the pyramid unsaid but implied. Often fantasies are dedicated solely to exploring the mechanisms of wishing, developing the "Be careful what you wish for" concept to show that wishes might have to be refined or re-stated to adjust to reality, without necessarily evolving into the more powerful and focused mental state of willing an outcome. Sometimes an entire story remains in the wish mode by ending not with the development of a strong will, but the forming of a new wish, simply transferring unfocused desire from one object to the next.

Wishing and willing can be selfish mental states, and there are undoubtedly other possible steps higher on the pyramid of human emotional development, which might include learning to love, learning to have compassion for other beings, or in a few highly spiritual stories, learning to transcend human desires entirely to merge with a higher form of consciousness. But it's clear that wishing and its more evolved form, willing, are important tools for storytellers and necessary stages of everyone's development. Wishing in particular seems to invite a story to come to life and consciousness, launching an adventure that may teach us valuable lessons in survival.

And what about poor Rumpelstiltskin, tearing himself in two because he can't have the child he wants for unknown purposes? The outcome of the story doesn't seem fair. True, he has tried to kidnap a child from its mother, but what if he has a right to the child? The Queen has a bad record of motherhood, having bartered her child's life for her freedom, and the presumed father, the King, would make a menacing role model for a child, having threatened to behead his future wife. For all we know, the little man might have made a better parent to the child than either of them. Rumpelstiltskin loses the child because the young Queen is able to meet his seemingly impossible conditions, but what if he has a right to custody of the child, and not because of the deal he made with her that night? After all, what is there to do in an empty room for three nights when all the straw has been spun into gold?

QUESTIONS

1. Have you noticed examples of characters making wishes early in stories? Give an example and tell how the wish was granted (or not) by the story.

2. What has been the role of wishing in your life? Have you learned to be careful what you wish for? Is there a story in that experience?

3. What are your short-term and long-term wishes, and how can you convert them into will and action? How would that work for characters in your story?

4. Can you think of examples of a story providing an unexpected answer to a character s wish? Write a story around the idea of someone wishing for something.

5. Are there wishes expressed or implied in other classic fairy tales and myths? How are the wishes granted or denied? Write a modern version of a fairy tale or myth and use the concept of wishing.

6. Read a myth, view a movie, read a book and analyze what universal wishes the story satisfies. What human wishes are expressed in your story?

7. Are there such things as fate or destiny? What do these terms mean to you? Do they have a role any more in modern life?

8. Brainstorm around the concept of wishing. Write the word in the center of a blank page and then around it write all the things you have wished for or are now wishing for in the future. See if some patterns emerge. Are your wishes realistic? What happens when your wishes are granted? What is keeping you from granting your own wishes? Apply the same exercise to a character. What is he or she wishing for? How do they convert wishing into will to achieve their goals?

A persistent feature of the Hero's Journey is that its stories tend to be polarized like two essential forces of nature, electricity and magnetism. Like them, stories create energy or exert force through polarities that organize the elements present into opposing camps with contrasting properties and orientations. Polarity is an essential principle of storytelling, governed by a few simple rules but capable of generating infinite conflict, complexity, and audience involvement.

A story needs a sense of oneness — unity — to feel like a satisfying and complete expression. It needs a single theme — a spine — something to unite it into a coherent work. But a story also needs a level of two-ness, a dimension of duality, to create tension and the possibility of movement. As soon as you choose a single thought or character to unite your story, you have automatically generated its polar opposite, a contrary concept or antagonistic character, and therefore a duality or polarized system that conducts energy between the two parties. Unity begets duality; the existence of one implies the possibility of two.

As soon as you imagine two points in space, you have generated a line of force between them and the potential for interaction, communication, deal-making, movement, emotion, and conflict.

If your story is about the single quality of trust, the possibility of suspicion immediately arises. Suspicion is necessary to test and challenge the concept of trust. If your main character wants something, there must be someone who doesn't want her to get it, who brings out hidden qualities in your hero by opposing her. If not, there's no story. We enjoy stories that are polarized by a struggle between two strong characters, like The African Queen or Driving Miss Daisy, but we are also entertained by stories polarized by great principles of living that tug the characters in two directions at once, so they are torn between duty and love, for example, or between revenge and forgiveness. Many a show-business tale like The Buddy Holly Story is polarized by loyalty and ambition; loyalty to the group that the hero grew up with versus the demands of ambition that require ditching those people when the hero moves to a new level of success.

Every aspect of the Hero's Journey is polarized along at least two lines, the inner and outer dimensions and the positive and negative possibilities for each element. These polarities create potential for contrast, challenge, conflict, and learning. As the polarized nature of magnetic fields can be used to generate electrical energy, polarity in a story seems to be an engine that generates tension and movement in the characters and a stirring of emotions in the audience.

We live in a polarized universe, both as a physical fact all around us and as a deeply ingrained mental habit. On the physical level we are ruled by the very real polarities of day and night, up and down, earth and space, inside and outside. Our bodies are polarized, with limbs and organs distributed to the left and right sides, and a brain whose left and right sides have quite different responsibilities. We are polarized as a species, coming in two basic models, male and female. Polarized categories like age and youth or life and death are realities that no one can ignore.

The Universe itself seems to be polarized into systems like matter and energy, matter and anti-matter, atoms that carry plus or minus charges, positive or negative poles in magnetism and electricity. Our entire galaxy is polarized, a spinning disk of stars, dust, and gases that has definite north and south poles and its own polarized magnetic field. And of course the whole world of modern computer technology has been generated from a simple binary system, 0 and I, a polarized off-on switch which apparently can yield infinite computing power from one little polarity.

Polarity is an equally pervasive force as a habit of thinking. We often act as if all questions have a right or wrong answer, all statements are either true or false, people are either good or bad, normal or abnormal. Either a thing is real or it isn't. Either you are with me or against me. Sometimes these categories are useful, but they can also be limiting and may not adequately represent reality. Polarization is a powerful force in politics and rhetoric, allowing leaders and propagandists to mobilize anger and passion by artificially dividing the world into "us" and "them" categories, a simplification of the world that makes it easier to deal with, but ignores many intermediate or alternative points of view.

However, polarity is a real phenomenon in human relationships and an important engine of conflict in storytelling. Characters in relationships strongly tend to become polarized as part of their process of growing and learning through conflict. Polarity follows certain rules, and good storytellers instinctively exploit them for their dramatic potential.

THE RULES OF POLARITY

I. Opposites Attract

The first rule of polarity is that opposites attract. A story is in some ways like a magnet with its mysterious, invisible power of attraction. Two magnets, properly aligned, with the south pole of one pointed at the north pole of the other, will strongly attract each other, just as two contrasting characters can be drawn powerfully to one another. The clash of their differences attracts and holds an audience's attention.

Two lovers, friends, or allies may be attracted to one another because they complete one other, perhaps clashing at first because they possess contrasting qualities, but discovering that each needs something the other has. Unconsciously, people may seek out those whose strengths and weaknesses balance weak and strong qualities in themselves.

Hero and villain may be locked together in a struggle, drawn together by circumstances but operating in strongly contrasting, polarized ways that show the whole range of possible human responses to a stressful situation. Nations may be drawn into polarized conflicts because of radically opposed ways of perceiving reality.

2. Polarized Conflict Attracts the Audience

A polarized relationship naturally generates conflict as the characters at two contrasting extremes explore and challenge each other's boundaries, concepts of the world, and strategies for living. We find this endlessly fascinating. Conflict, like magnetic energy, is attractive, automatically drawing the attention of the spectator. As a magnet or a magnetized object has the power to attract certain metals like iron and nickel, so a polarized, conflict-filled human situation attracts and focuses the attention of an audience or a reader.

3. Polarity Creates Suspense

Polarity generates not only struggle but also suspense about the outcome. Which world-view will triumph in the end? Which character will dominate? Who will survive? Who's right? Who will win, who will lose? What are the consequences when a hero chooses one side or the other of a polarity? A polarized system attracts our attention initially because we all perceive that our lives are sawed back and forth by similar contradictions and conflicts, tugging us in many directions at once along multiple lines of polarity, such as man and wife, parent and child, employee and boss, individual and society. We continue to watch with interest to see how the polarized situations will turn out, looking for clues about how to handle these challenges in our own lives.

4. Polarity Can Reverse Itself

When the conflict heats up after several rounds of conflict between the two sides in a polarized drama, the forces that draw two people together may reverse themselves, changing from a force of attraction to a force of repulsion. Two magnets that have been stuck together will fly apart if one of them is flipped so that its polarity is reversed. A moment before, they had been so strongly attracted to each other that it was difficult to pull them apart, and the next moment it's almost impossible to force them together, so strong is the force of repulsion.

Among the curious properties of electrical and magnetic fields is the fact that the polarity of these systems can abruptly reverse itself. The direction the energy is flowing in alternating current electrical systems flips back and forth from positive to negative fifty or sixty times a second, while the magnetic fields of heavenly bodies reverse polarity infrequently but on some mysterious timetable. For reasons that are poorly understood, the giant magnetic field of the sun reverses its polarity every eleven years or so, generating immense storms of radiation that wash over the earth like invisible tsunamis and disrupt communications and electronics worldwide. Scientists believe the magnetic field of the Earth has flipped poles many times over thousands of years, presumably making magnets and compasses point south for much of the lifetime of the planet. Reversals of polarity on this giant scale seem to be part of the life cycle of stars and planets, like a gigantic heartbeat.

Such reversals are also part of the life cycle of a story. They may be temporary, quick reversals of attraction or power within a scene, or they may be major hinges or turning points of a story. Within a scene, a quick change of polarity might happen because one of the lovers gets a new piece of information that reverses his or her attitude, say from trust to mistrust, or from physical attraction to disgust. The piece of information might turn out to be false, only temporarily challenging the attraction of opposites, but it creates tension along the line of energy that connects the two characters, and that tension makes good drama.

5. Reversals of Fortune

Reversal of polarity in a story can be the abrupt overturning of a character's fortune, a change of luck or circumstances that switches the prevailing conditions from negative to positive or vice versa. Good stories have at least three or four of these reversals for the main character, some have many, and some are even constructed so that they produce reversals of fortune in every scene. In fact, that might be a good minimum requirement for a scene — that it produce at least one reversal of fortune for someone on some level of the story. A shift in power, the underdog standing up to the bully, the fates dealing a blow to the victorious athlete, a lucky break or a sudden setback, all these are reversals of polarity that punctuate a story and give a sense of dynamic movement. The moments of reversal can be thrilling and memorable, like the scene of Norma Rae standing up in the factory to organize the workers.

ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPT OF REVERSAL

Aristotle in his Poetics describes the essential dramatic device of the reversal. He calls it peripateia, which refers to the "Peripatos" or covered walkway of Aristotle's Lyceum where he used to walk and talk with his students, developing ideas as they strolled back and forth. Perhaps he used the structure to demonstrate his logic, building up an argument forcefully as they traversed the colonnade in one direction, then demolishing it just as thoroughly on the reverse trip.

Aristotle says the sudden reversal of a situation for the protagonist can produce the desirable emotions of pity and terror in the audience; pity for someone who suffers undeserved misfortune, and terror when it happens to someone like us. A story captures our emotions by putting someone a little like us in a threatening situation that reverses the hero's fortunes a number of times. Think of the reversals of fortune in movies like Papillon, Shakespeare in Love, or The Far Side of the World, with the sympathetic characters alternating between moments of freedom or triumph and periods of danger, disappointment, and defeat.

Reversals of fortune in the life of a hero are inevitable and they make for good entertainment, holding our attention as we watch to see what will happen next, and wonder if the positive or negative energies will dominate at the end of the story. Even if we know the outcome, as in the movie Titanic, we enjoy watching how the contest plays out and how the characters react to the ups and downs dealt out by fate or the playwright. In a well-constructed story these repeated reversals accumulate power, adding up to the emotional impact that Aristotle claimed was the point of it all: catharsis, an explosive and physical release of emotion, be it tears of pity, shudders of terror, or bursts of laughter. The reversals, like drumbeats, impact our emotions, triggering reactions in the organs of our bodies. By Aristotle's theory, these drumbeats were supposed to accumulate tension in the bodies of the audience members until the biggest beat of all, at the climax of the play, released a pleasurable shudder of emotion that was believed to cleanse the spirit of poisonous thoughts and feelings. Stories retain their power to release cathartic emotions which is still a profound human need.

CATASTROPHIC REVERSAL

Since the beginning of Greek drama in Aristotle's day, the name for the biggest reversal in a character's fortunes has been "catastrophe." "Kata-" means "over" or "down" in Greek and "strophe" is "turn" or "twist", thus a catastrophe is an overturning or down-twisting. "Strophe" may also refer to a strap or a strip of leather or a length of plant fiber that could be woven into a basket, and is the parent of our words for strip, stripe, strap, and strop. It suggests that a play is a kind of weaving in which the strands of the plot, the fortunes of the various characters, interlock and crisscross, typically with the fortunes of the antagonist going up when the luck of the hero is going down and vice versa. A strophe in a classical Greek drama was a turning movement across the stage by part of the chorus, which recited a critical line of text to accompany the move. This was balanced by an opposite turn by another part of the chorus reciting an answering line of text, called the anti-strophe. It made the drama into a kind of polarized dance with the movements and phrases representing contradicting threads of thought or emotion within the society. We speak of "turning points" in stories and these are usually examples of reversal, with the biggest one, the catastrophe, coming just before the end of a classically constructed drama, and having, we hope, the cathartic effect that Aristotle recommended.

6. Recognition

In the ancient world a favorite device for bringing about an emotionally charged reversal was a recognition scene, in which the disguised identity or secret relationship of a character is revealed, and the fortunes of the characters are reversed. These are scenes where long-lost lovers are united, where cruel tyrants realize they are about to execute their own sons, where the masked superheroes are unveiled, where the Prince puts the glass slipper on Cinderella's foot and realizes she's the girl of his dreams.

A mainstay of Robin Hood movies is a scene where King Richard, who has been creeping around England in disguise to see what's been going on in his absence, throws off his outer robe to reveal the rampant lions on his surcoat. Robin and all his men instantly recognize him as the King, falling to their knees in reverent awe. It represents a moment in the story when the tide decisively has turned.

A recognition scene makes a good climactic reversal when a character has been going around in disguise, like Tootsie or Mrs. Doubtjire. Often it represents the catastrophe of unmasking that the hero has dreaded but it also is the opportunity for emotional honesty and self-acceptance. That the apparent disaster turns out to be the means of dramatic fulfillment makes for a double reversal.

7. Romantic Reversals

A kind of current, like magnetic current or electric current, flows through the invisible lines that connect characters in stories and people in relationships. We feel a certain flow of energy with some people and want to be with them, and we can sense when the flow of energy is strangled, blocked, reversed, or completely cut off. We know when there is "good chemistry" or a "spark" between two actors in a romance, two buddies in a comedy, or two rivals in an adventure, and are disappointed when there isn't enough current flowing in a relationship. We feel something when the polarity of a friendship or romance reverses itself, flipping from a strong force of attraction to one of repulsion.

In stories of romance the two lovers may go through several cycles of reversal, alternating between attraction and repulsion or trust and suspicion, as in Hitchcock's romantic spy thrillers North by Northwest and Notorious, or movies like Body Heat, Casino, Fatal Attraction, etc. The romance may begin with attraction, based on noticing superficially similar tastes or sensing that the other person can supply the elements missing from one's personality. We perversely enjoy watching the reversal of this situation, as the lovers inevitably discover their partners are quite different than they first appeared and are temporarily driven apart. After several reversals of attraction and repulsion, the lovers usually end up in alignment, the forces within them lined up in harmonious energy that promotes their connectedness, unless of course you are portraying a tragic, doomed love affair.

On the other hand a love story might begin with initial repulsion and mistrust, which will gradually reverse itself to attraction as the lovers overcome their differences and discover common ground, although there may be several reversals of polarity and episodes of attraction and repulsion along the way.

8. Polarity and the Character Arc

One of the dependable polarized plot forms is the genre of buddy comedy/adventure, in which two mismatched heroes go through a two-tiered adventure together. On one level, the outer dimension, they are cops, spies, or ordinary people battling some external enemy, creating a polarized struggle between good and evil. But on another level, an inner or emotional dimension, they are in a polarized relationship with one another, usually turning on a sharp contrast in their lifestyles, philosophies, or background. They may want the same overall, external goal, but they go about it in wildly contrasting ways, generating conflict, drama, suspense, and humor through polarity. Examples include Trading Places, the Lethal Weapon series, Zoolander, the Rush Hour movies, etc.

These stories became formulaic in the 1980s and '90s, where I read a lot of them that studios like Disney and Fox were considering. However predictable they became, they were a fascinating laboratory for studying the myriad ways that writers deal with the kind of story they call a "two-hander," one that has two protagonists or heroes but in a polarized, antagonistic relationship with another.

The first written story we know of, the epic of Gilgamesh, is the prototype for all polarized buddy adventures to follow. A playboy king, Gilgamesh, is so out of control that his people pray to the gods to send someone to distract him. They send him a real challenge in the form of a huge wild man of the forest, Enkidu. They battle at first, become good friends, battle monsters together, and fully explore the polarity of two different kinds of manhood. The adventure takes a tragic and more noble turn at the death of Enkidu, which sends Gilgamesh on a spiritual quest for the elusive secret of immortality.

A polarized relationship, be it a friendship, partnership, alliance, or romance, allows for a full exploration of character as the two people, representing opposite ends of a spectrum of behavior, find their standards and habits intensely challenged by energy that is just the opposite of theirs, perhaps outgoing where theirs is shy and private, or highly organized where their lives are chaotic. Here is a partial list of possible polarities within a relationship. Entire stories could be built around each of these pairs of opposites. I'm sure you can think of many more.

THE DOCTRINE OF CHANGE

A polarized relationship of opposites may temporarily reach a state of equilibrium or balance, but most polarized systems don't stay balanced for very long. Energy is always flowing, creating change. One side of the polarity exerts force on the other. When a situation is extremely polarized, when the two sides have been driven out to their most extreme positions, there is a tendency for the polarity to reverse itself. According to the ancient Chinese philosophy of the I Ching, the doctrine of changes, things are always in the process of flowing into their opposites. Extreme idealists can turn into cynics, passionate lovers into cold-hearted haters. Abject cowards have the sleeping potential to become heroes, and many saints began as great sinners. This eternally changing feature of reality is described by the Taoist symbol of Yin and Yang, the two comma shapes flowing into one another, each with the seed of its opposite deep in its center.

The more polarized a system is, the more likely it is to reverse its polarity. This can happen little by little, in graduated stages, or it can come about catastrophically and all at once. Under the stimulus of conflict with a polarized opposite, a character will begin to oscillate, to swing like a pendulum, further away from the opposite at times, closer at other times. If the stimulus is continued to a certain tipping point, the character may flip polarity, and become temporarily aligned with the opposite pole.

The shy person, impacted repeatedly by an outgoing person, will retreat and advance, but if the stimulus continues, he or she will make a comical or dramatic reversal to experiment with the unfamiliar experience of being confident and highly social. Movies like The Nutty Professor or As Good as It Gets use this technique to explore the extremes of behavior and show us characters gradually and then drastically reversing their polarity.

The reversal may be almost imperceptible at first, trickling bit by bit like grains of sand in an hourglass. For example, in the classic screwball comedy Topper, a man who has been rigid, disciplined, and meek his entire life enters into a polarized relationship with two playful ghosts, the Kirbys, who are loose, free, and rebellious. At first Cosmo Topper is driven to even greater rigidity to counteract the wild energy of the Kirbys. But this extreme position is unnatural and inherently unstable. Under continued challenge from the Kirbys, Topper experiments tentatively with the free, loose behavior of his polar opposites, then retreats to comfortable rigidity, repeating the process several times until reaching a tipping point where he can no longer resist, and gives himself over completely to their madcap strategy for living, totally reversing his polarity. In the end, he reverts to something like his old, meek behavior, but now has access to his freer side and is happier for it.

Sometimes, however, the reversal of polarity happens early in the story and all at once, in a catastrophic collapse of the effort to maintain an extreme, polarized position. In Fargo, William Macy's character topples a lifetime of following the rules by reversing polarity to become the planner of a kidnapping that goes disastrously awry. Liar, Liar shows us a man who has lied to everyone and kidded himself his entire life suddenly forced to tell the truth in all circumstances thanks to the powerful birthday wish of his sincere and honest son. In both cases we see the characters torn between their old polar positions and catastrophic new conditions that place them abruptly at the opposite end of the spectrum.

9. The Other End of the Spectrum

When a character goes through a reversal of polarity, what happens to his or her partner in the polarized relationship? Some of these partners exist only to catalyze change in a main character, and will not change much themselves. The Kirbys in Topper aren't going to suddenly turn into spineless weaklings like Cosmo Topper had been. But they may shift their point of view a little, realizing they've been too hard on him or that their meddling has caused him problems that they have to solve. When a character reverses polarity, the laws of polarity suggest that there be some reciprocal movement from the character or force at the opposite pole.

When Character A makes a seismic polarity shift, Character Z at the other end of the spectrum in the relationship may also take a little vacation from his or her comfort zone, or may be driven to a complete reversal himself. It can become uncomfortably crowded at one pole if both people in the relationship are suddenly expressing the same kind of energy.

If Character Z has been habitually lazy, and has come to depend on a habitually energetic Character A to do all the work, it can be alarming when the energetic A suddenly decides to experiment with laziness. No one is left to do the work, and Z, who is lazy by nature, may be forced into the unfamiliar role of the worker, with potentially comic results. In movies like Trading Places, characters get to walk in each other's shoes, experiencing unfamiliar worlds, undergoing temporary reversals, and experimenting with unfamiliar behavior. Analyze This is built around two characters reversing polarity in opposite directions, as Robert De Niro's gangster character discovers his softer side and the habitually soft psychiatrist played by Billy Crystal is forced to act like a tough guy to survive.

10. Going to Extremes

Experimenting with any polarized system involves going to the extremes. Comedy or tragedy may result as people who have habitually leaned to one side of a polarity not only experiment with the unaccustomed opposite quality, but take it to the limit. Those who have been shy take new-found confidence too far, becoming obnoxious instead of suave or self-assured. They overcompensate, missing the point of balance. They may then retreat to the opposite extreme of sullenness or some other exaggerated form of their original behavior. Eventually, through a series of such pendulum swings they may learn a new way to behave, somewhere in the middle ground.

Learning how to handle any quality is a process of finding the boundaries by experimentation. In many polarized relationships, one person is more experienced and has already made a fool of himself in long-ago experiments, so now he knows precisely how to handle women, cards, guns, cars, or money. To the inexperienced person it's all new, so we get to watch him or her making the beginner's hilarious mistakes.

Often there is a reciprocal area where the experienced person is weak, and is forced to make a comical effort to master the unaccustomed quality, such as politeness, sincerity, or compassion. However, the more experienced person will likely not have as far to travel in his or her path of learning as the inexperienced person.

11. Reversal of the Reversal

In effect the characters are learning from each other, shocked into it by contact with someone who is a polar opposite in one or more dimensions of behavior. They reverse polarity in order to experiment with behavior that is outside of their normal comfort zone. However, rarely is this the end of the story. There is usually at least one more reversal, as the characters recover from the temporary insanity imposed by the story and return to their true natures. It is a very strong rule in drama, and in life, that people remain true to their basic natures. They change, and their change is essential for drama, but typically they only change a little, taking a single step towards integrating a forgotten or rejected quality into their natures.

Having learned something useful by their first reversal, they may retreat to the pole that represents their true nature, but they end up in a little different place from where they started. This is realistic character change, an incremental movement rather

than a total 180-degree reversal. Complete and permanent reversals of polarity are rare in stories and in life.

If a story has done its work, the character has experimented with something unfamiliar, realized that some special quality was lacking, and incorporated some aspect of that quality into his or her life. He or she returns to their general comfort zone, but to a more nearly balanced position nearer the center, not polarized to either extreme.

In the process, the character and the audience get to experience all points along the spectrum, both the extremes and a range of positions in between. In most cases it's not desirable or realistic to end up exactly in the middle of the two positions. Most stories end with the characters back more or less on the side of the polarity where they started, but several steps closer to the center and the opposite side. The characters' range of possible behavior now avoids the extreme positions and overlaps a little into the territory of the opposite side, producing a more balanced personality that leaves room for the formerly unexpressed quality. This is a good place to end up, because from this position the character can retreat to his or her old comfort zone if threatened, but still reach across to experience something of the opposite side.

In the Chinese system known as the Book of Changes, this is considered a more stable state, more desirable than extreme polarization. In a throw of three coins, two heads and a tail or two tails and a head symbolizes a stable, more balanced and realistic situation, whereas a throw of three heads or three tails represents a situation that is too polarized, too much of one thing, and must certainly collapse or reverse polarity soon, becoming its opposite.

Any character who begins at an extreme or is driven to it is ripe for a process of polarity reversal.

12. Polarity Seeks Resolution

Sometimes the two big ideas or life-ways that have been polarized throughout a story will seek resolution by converting into something else, a third way that resolves the contradiction between the two elements.

The classic Western Red River shows two ways of living sharply polarized in the form of the older and younger men played by John Wayne (Tom Dunson) and Montgomery Clift (Matthew Garth). Dunson is brave but bull-headed, masculinity taken to its most macho extreme, while Garth's softer style is radically different, merciful where Dunson is ruthless. It is an almost Biblical polarity, like the difference between the wrathful, jealous Old Testament God and the gentle, compassionate Son of God depicted in the New Testament. Their struggle turns deadly, with Dunson swearing he will hunt down and kill Garth, who has been like a son to him. They fight at the climax and it looks like the polarity can only be resolved by the death of one party or the other, but this tragic fate is avoided by the intervention of pure female energy. The young woman played by Joanne Dru (Tess Millay) breaks up the fight with a gunshot and reminds the men that "anyone can see you two love each other." The men realize she's right and stop fighting. Dunson declares he'll change his cattle brand to reflect his acceptance of Garth, and the polarity is resolved. The two opposing styles of living are resolved into a third way, one that balances Dunson's extreme masculinity with feminine emotion and compassion. It makes dramatic sense, for it was Dunson's rejection of the feminine side in the early part of the film that set the whole plot in motion, when Dunson refused to take his lady love along with him on his journey to Texas.

We could say the protagonist's point of view or style of living is the thesis of the story. The anti-thesis is the antagonist's opposing viewpoint and style. The synthesis is whatever resolves the polarized conflict at the end. It may be a restatement of the protagonist's wishes or world-view, incorporating new learning or strength gained from the clash with the antagonist. It may be a radical new approach to life that the hero finds, or it may be a return to the hero's original position, but even then it will always be shifted a little by the polarized struggle the hero has been through. Typically heroes learn something from their polar opposites and incorporate this into their new pattern of behavior.

The resolution of some polarized stories could be the realization that the polarization itself was false, based on a misunderstanding, or that it was totally unnecessary if the seemingly opposed parties had simply communicated better in the beginning. Polarized romantic comedies can be built entirely around misunderstandings to show the difficulty of male-female communication, but might end with the lovers realizing they had been saying the same thing all along.

13. Polarized Universes

Polarity is a meta-pattern, a system that operates at all levels in stories, from large-scale clashes of cultures to intimate human relationships, all the way down to polarities within individuals. On the big scale a story can show a polarized clash between two cultures, generations, world-views, or philosophies of life. Ancient myths were polarized by eternal struggles between gods and giants or between primordial elements like fire and ice. Most Westerns put the hero into a town or a situation that is sharply polarized between pairs of opposing forces: Indians vs. the cavalry, cattle barons vs. immigrant farmers, ex-Confederates vs. ex-Yankees, etc. Film noir and the genre of "cops-and-robbers" split the world into polarized levels, the sun-lit upper world of law-abiding society and the shadowed Underworld of the criminals. The movie Titanic is polarized between the worlds of upper and lower decks, representing the classes of society and the conflict between desire for control and desire for freedom. The Terminator and Matrix movies are polarized between humans and machines, the Star Wars movies between dark and light sides of the Force. Platoon is polarized by a young soldier's choice between brutal and humane ways of going through a war, represented by two older men with contrasting approaches to survival.

14. Inner Polarity

A story can be built around the polarities that sometimes exist within a person, as explored in stories and movies like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Fight Club. Psycho shows us a man who has internalized the feminine side of his dead mother, and half the time speaks in her voice. Stories like these externalize and make visible the usually unseen dualities of personality.

There is no better dramatization of a polarized inner struggle than the chilling scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, where Gollum alternates between the good and evil sides of his own personality. The good side is what remains of his original identity as an innocent hobbit, Smeagol, and it resists temptation heroically, remembering the kindness and humanity shown by his master, Frodo. But eventually the wheedling, crafty, evil side that has degenerated into Gollum triumphs with fierce hate and jealousy, reversing the power balance within the character. The polarity of the character had been aligned towards hope for Gollum's salvation; now it is aligned to the certainty that he will betray the hobbits in his greed to have the Ring. Polarity was used here to show an inner struggle in a divided self.

15. Agon

Around the globe, people have imagined the creation of the world as a polarized situation. God divides light from darkness and the heavens from the earth. Primordial gods wrestled monsters of chaos in the earliest stories of creation, and the earliest dramas were religious rituals re-enacting these polarized struggles. In the ancient world, where abstract qualities such as luck, love, war, and victory were personified, humanized, and worshipped as gods, the potent force of polarity was recognized in the person of the Greek god Agon, the force of struggle and conflict, ruling over athletic events and contests of all kinds, even legal disputes, for agon also means a judgment. In an athletic event or a courtroom, a judgment is being made about who is the best or who is right.

Agon was pictured as a young athlete carrying a pair of jumping weights called "halteres" in his hands. The weights gave the jumper an extra boost on long jumps and may have been a symbol of some quality associated with Agon, perhaps an extra edge he gave to the athlete who prayed and offered sacrifice to him. There was an altar of sacrifice dedicated to Agon at Olympia, where the Olympic games were held. Not much is known about Agon or his "backstory" but he may have been part of a family of Zeus s children who were responsible for other qualities that had roles to play in the lives of athletes, such as speed, victory, competitive spirit, and even chaos.

The spirit of Agon is imbedded in the polarized terms "protagonist" and "antagonist". We cheer for the protagonist in the struggle or contest, and we wish for the defeat of the antagonist.

The English word "agony" derives from agon and signifies that the process of struggle is sometimes painful and arduous. The word is sometimes used as one pole of a polarized expression, as in the title The Agony and the Ecstasy or the phrase from TV coverage of the Olympic Games, "the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat." These phrases describe the dramatic emotional extremes that a polarized agon can generate. To antagonize someone is to create an agon or conflict with that person where none existed before.

AGON: THE ARGUMENT OF THE PLAY

In ancient Greek drama, the "agon" was a formal debate between two characters in which their contrasting views of a current public issue were presented, judged by a chorus. We could still find use for the word to describe the main philosophical debate or clash of lifestyles in a play, novel, or film script. Movies like Wall Street and A Few Good Men and TV shows like The West Wing dramatize an agon, a kind of debate about a current social issue.

MODERN-DAY PUBLIC AGON

An "agon" among the Greeks and Romans also meant a formal competition to determine who was best at a given skill such as singing, composing plays or music, delivering speeches, etc. As in our modern star system of awards, prizes were given for the best performances of the year. These "agonic" competitions were organized like our sports leagues, with local and regional competitions leading to a national contest held at a great yearly festival in the capital. We still have a strong need to arrange this kind of agon each year to determine which team or performer is the best in the region, the country, and the world. Each stage of our athletic system pits pairs of teams and individuals against each other, recreating the polarized agon time after time until there are only two teams or people left for the final contest. Agon thrives in the eternally popular game shows and competitive "reality" programs of the day.

THE PERSONAL AGON

At the personal level, an agon was any challenge that pitted one side of a person's makeup against another. For example, the mind is always trying to master the lazy tendencies of the body. The struggle of the artist with her work is an agon, pitting her will to bring creativity into form against all the forces that make it difficult. Or the agon can be a person's struggle with some external condition that makes life challenging, such as a birth defect, an accident, or an injustice.

All the entertainment of the ancient world was based on the polarizing principle of the agon, and it seems to have an almost magnetic affect on us even today, in our sports, in politics, and in entertainment.

16. Polarity Gives Orientation

Magnets are widely used for purposes of orientation. A magnetic compass automatically orientates itself to point north, and from this we can determine south, east, west and all points in between. Polarity in a story serves a similar function, giving the audience orientation about the characters and situation, from the simplest level of white hats and black hats to represent good guys and bad guys, to the most sophisticated psychological dramas. Polarity lets us know who has the power and suggests how it might shift. It signals us who we are to be aligned with in the story and helps us understand how all the characters and situations are aligned with one force or the other.

Most of the time, you have to play fair with the audience and not make it difficult for them to get their bearings in a story. A polarized town, family, or society, a polarized agon between contrasting opponents, a polarized personality about to reverse itself, all these can help the audience determine what is up and down, right and wrong, in this story. They can quickly align themselves for or against characters depending on their choices about the polarized condition in the story. The writer can then start sending positive or negative energy into the scenes, bringing temporary victory or defeat to the characters until the final resolution.

Of course, some stories deal precisely with the grey areas, the kinds of characters and situations that are remarkable and interesting because they aren't obviously polarized. Some artists don't want to take sides or push their characters into simplistic categories. There is room for this artistic approach, but polarities will still naturally arise simply from having two characters in the same room at the same time.

CONCLUSION

As noted, polarities are useful tools in stories and are a practical way of organizing reality, but they can be misused to oversimplify situations that may actually be quite complex. Audiences are sophisticated these days and while they enjoy stories that are strongly polarized, they enjoy them more when they are also nuanced with small shadings and contradictions that make stories and characters seem realistic, even when dealing in worlds of pure fantasy. Like any technique, polarization in a story can be heavy-handed and too obvious. Polarization without shading or the possibility of change would quickly become boring, just two people shouting at each other. The fun is in seeing a tiny seed of the opposite quality coming to life in a polarized character or situation. It may only come to life for an instant, showing the possibility of reversal but then snatching it away forever, or it may work its way slowly until the character or situation reverses polarity dramatically.

Polarities in politics, sports, war, or relationships can divide us, but they also have the possibility of uniting us when we have been through a struggle together. An old soldier may have more in common with his former enemies than he does with his grandchildren. Polarized family feuds will sometimes dissolve when after many years neither party can remember what all the fighting was about.

Polarities in stories form a conceptual framework with which to organize ideas and energy, building up positive and negative charges around selected characters, words, and concepts. They may serve a survival function for us in dramatizing useful distinctions about behavior, and in identifying patterns in human relationships. They serve an essential dramatic function by stirring us up, triggering emotional involvement and physical reactions in the organs of our bodies. Words on a page, actors on a stage, images on a screen can pull us this way and that until we have a small but potentially significant emotional release, for when we laugh at the characters in a funny movie, we are laughing in part at ourselves. When we cry over the fate of the characters in a tragedy or a romance, we cry in part for ourselves. When we shudder in terror at the latest horror film or novel, we shudder for ourselves. We sense our part in the great polarities, spirit and matter, male and female, life and death, good and evil, and we find healthy release in stories that explore their workings.

QUESTIONS

1. "To be or not to be, that is the question." Shakespeare uses many dualities and polarities in his plays and sonnets, using twins, pairs of lovers, and contrasting ideas such as the relationship of Prince Hal and Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV parts one and two, where they are flip sides of the same coin of knighthood, Prince Hal representing honor and Sir John dishonor. Read a Shakespeare play and see how many polarities you can find in it. What is the effect of these polarities on the reader or audience?

2. Review a movie such as Pulp Fiction or The Fellowship oj the Ring from the Lord oj the Rings trilogy. How many dualities and polarized relationships can you detect? Do they add to the dramatic experience or are they just repetitious?

3. Compile your own list of polarities. Pick one at random and see if you can generate characters and a story from it.

4. "Agon" means contest or struggle but also can be a central challenge in someone's life, perhaps something temporary that comes up, or it could the one great thing he or she must wrestle with throughout life. What is the agon in your life, at the moment and over the long run? What is the agon of your character?

5. Agon can also be used to describe the central debate or issue of a drama. In this sense, what is the agon or main argument of your play, movie script, computer game, short story, or novel? What qualities are being contrasted, and what are the arguments for each side?

6. Here is the list of pairs of polarized opposites from this chapter. Can you think of a movie or story that uses each polarity as a plot device?

7. What are the polarities in your family? If your town was the location of a Western, how would a stranger riding into town find it polarized? How does polarity operate at the national level?

8. Have you ever experienced a reversal of polarity in your own life or in someone around you? Describe this and how it made you feel.

9. How do polarities work in a half-hour TV show? Watch an episode of a show and identify the polarities and moments of reversal.

10. Look at two of your favorite teams or athletes competing for a championship. What are their contrasting qualities, their strengths and weaknesses? How does the winner exploit these polarities?

Several times in this book we have used the word catharsis, referring to a concept found in the works of Aristotle, one of his terms that has survived to become part of the general theory of drama and narrative. It is a critical concept, the point of drama according to Aristotle, and its roots go back to the beginnings of language, art, and ritual.

We have little chance of ever knowing for sure what Aristotle meant by catharsis. His work has come down to us in shreds. Less than half of what he wrote survives and most of that comes from rotted, jumbled manuscripts found under a building. Scholars disagree vigorously about what Aristotle meant by catharsis and there is even a theory that the word was inserted into the Poetics by an over-eager copyist at a place where the text was garbled, because Aristotle had promised in an earlier book that he would eventually get around to defining catharsis.

Whatever it meant to Aristotle, the word has come to mean something to us: a sudden release of emotions that can be brought about by good entertainment, great art, or probing for psychological insight. Its roots are deep in our spirits and in the history of our species. If we look back a little into the origins of drama, we might find that catharsis has always been a desired effect and in fact is the mainspring of the dramatic experience.

To find the origins of drama, narrative, art, religion, and philosophy we have to cast our minds back to the time when human beings were in their earliest stages of development. Through a few miracles of preservation, we have windows into the soul of those times, through the marvelous cave paintings and sculptures that have survived from as early as forty thousand years ago. We know from these breathtaking, life-like rendering of animals and hunters that the people of those times made pilgrimages deep into the belly of the earth, and must have performed some rituals in which they played the parts of the animals they hunted or the forces of nature that they perceived around them. Through these rituals, the beginnings of storytelling and drama, they must have tried to master or appease these powers. Joseph Campbell recognized one figure from the cave paintings with his antlered costume as a shaman, a go-between, embodying the spirit of the animals his people depended on for life.

A physical catharsis or emotional reaction is hard to avoid when going into a deep cave, even today. If you go as they went, long ago, with only fitful candles to light your way down the narrow tunnels, you can't help but feel the weight of the earth and imagine the forces and beings that might be lurking there in the endless darkness just outside the glow of your flame. There is still a sense of wonder when coming out into a big cavern deep in the earth, especially when its walls are painted with huge animals that seem to leap across the ceiling in the flickering candle light. It would be a perfect stage to initiate young people into the mysteries of the tribe, its deepest beliefs, the essence of its compact with nature.

I can testify to the still-impressive power of a candle in a dark place to animate things. It is the cheapest but most effective of special effects. I was visiting Hamlet's castle at Elsinore, or Helsing or as the Danes call it, on a tip of Denmark, facing Sweden across a short expanse of water. In the frigid crypts of the castle is kept a brooding statue of Denmark's version of King Arthur or El Cid, shown as a rugged Viking sitting on his throne with a drawn sword across his knees. He is Holger Danske, Ogier the Dane, one of Charlemagne's paladins and Denmark's legendary protector in time of need. Troops of Danish schoolchildren and tourists are marched past the statue to stand shivering before it, marveling at the illusion of life, for at the feet of the statue is a candle, or rather these days an electric imitation of a candle, a small flickering light. In the otherwise darkened crypt, so like a cave, the erratic light casts a nervous glow over the statue's features, and shadows dance and shift on the chamber walls. In an eerie way that makes the hair stand up on your arms and the back of your neck, the stone image seems to your eyes and your Stone Age nervous system to be distinctly alive. You could swear the Viking chieftain is asleep but breathing, about to wake up and surge off his pedestal at any moment. It makes a convincing theatrical illusion that the country's eternal fighting spirit is slumbering but ready to return to action when needed. No doubt the ancient people felt the same awe as flickering torches and oil lamps made the giant horses and bison gallop across the cave walls.

A feature of some commercial cave tours in the modern world is to turn off the electric lights at some point so the visitors can get a sense of the pure blackness of the lightless cave. Perhaps our ancestors used a similar dramatic technique in their cave rituals, putting out the oil lamps and torches so the young initiates could experience the deep dark. For some it would be terrifying, for others, soul-expanding, and some might be visited with visions that made them feel connected to the animals or the powers that made the world. Perhaps the paintings are memorials of those visions, amended and painted over by successive generations of initiates.

Emerging from a cave is another hazardous passage, climaxed with the feeling of relief upon emerging into sunlight and open space once again. For some there is a feeling of transformation, of having died in some sense down there, or having come very close to death and other eternal forces, and now coming to new life on the surface.

Ancient people undoubtedly had other places that served a similar function of enhancing dramatic experiences and evoking a religious feeling, such as intimate groves of trees, natural amphitheatres, isolated mountain tops like Mt. Olympus, sacred wells and fountains, or arrangements of monumental stones. Trees could be planted in rows or in circles to create spaces that enhanced a group feeling of awe and connection with greater forces. In those spaces rituals were performed that tried to link the world of people to the world of the gods. People played the parts of gods, heroes, and monsters to enact the drama of creation and the stories of the ancestors. The first plays may have been the texts of these rituals, recited at first by a chorus but with actors gradually taking the parts of individual characters.

As humans made the transition from nomadic hunting to the settled life of farmers in societies like those of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley, drama found different theatres of expression and dramatic forms, with a new emphasis on time and the vast calendar of the stars.

On the fertile, muddy plains on the banks of great rivers, people built civilizations that needed dramatic rituals to bring order, unity, and a shared sense of purpose to a large population. By communal effort they fashioned river mud into bricks and built huge temple mounds that were like artificial mountains, connecting their society to the heavens and providing a stairway to the world of the gods.

These temple pyramids or ziggurats also served as spectacular backdrops for highly theatrical presentations designed to evoke a healthy religious feeling in a whole population.

These religious spectacles were staged with exquisite precision to a calendar set by a giant celestial clock, the movement of the sun, moon, and stars across the sky. Lives were short but people accumulated thousands of years of observations that could be passed down by various forms of notation. They paid particularly close attention to the exact turning points of the year, the spring and fall equinoxes and the summer and winter solstices, the four points marking the change of season. The great festivals of the year were held at these times, with a greater festival marking the beginning of the New Year.

Their interest in the cycles of time was practical, a life and death matter. A delay of as little as a few days in planting or harvesting could mean that a crop would fail and there would be nothing to eat through the winter, dooming most to die. Even in earlier times the hunters knew that the movements of the animals and the fruiting of the trees follow the celestial calendar.

The dramatic meat of these seasonal turning point festivals was the staging of an elaborate adventure, in which the king or the statues of the gods "disappeared," supposedly having been kidnapped, stolen away, or killed and dismembered by dark forces of chaos. The whole society pretended to mourn them, giving up the pleasures of life for a period of time in sympathy with the kidnapped or dead gods or king.

In some versions of seasonal festivals in ancient Babylon, the statues of the gods were actually removed from the temples and buried in the desert or destroyed. Later in the festival they would be returned to their rightful positions or replaced with new ones, triggering great relief and celebration by the people.

Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough persuasively makes the case that many societies pass through an early stage where the office of king is a temporary job, held only for a set period of time, perhaps just one year. In the most primal of these societies the old king is either executed or must fight a ritual combat with the new candidate. The sacrificial death of the old king cleans the slate and pays for the mistakes of the past year. Gradually, popular or very powerful kings managed to extend their rule but the tradition of sacrificing the old king ran very deep and was often represented symbolically in the customs, traditions, and ritual pageants of the mound-building cultures. The literal sacrifice of the king and his replacement with a successor was replaced by a mythological death and rebirth, like that of Osiris. The king was identified with the god who had died and come back to life again, and acted out his death, dismemberment, and rebirth in dramatic rituals rather than by actually dying.

The scholar Theodore Gaster described four types of ritual in the ancient world of the Near East that followed one another in a seasonal sequence of Mortification, Purgation, Invigoration, and Jubilation, all related to the death and rebirth of the god or king. Sometimes all four elements could be combined in an elaborate ritual drama that involved all the members of society as actors in the play, whose stage was the whole city, and whose subject was the death and rebirth of the god-king. Gaster says ancient ritual drama was of two types, rituals of kenosis or emptying, and rituals of plerosis or filling. Mortification and Purgation emptied the body and mind, cleansing and purifying them while giving a taste of death, and Invigoration and Jubilation rituals filled and satisfied the people while re-invoking the principle of life.

Performing these rituals at the seasonal turning points was a symbolic but also practical way of allowing the whole society to cool down after a strenuous season of work. As we now grant ourselves frequent holidays to punctuate the year and break our work into manageable, bearable spans of time, so did our ancestors sensibly stop the drumbeat of the work routine from time to time, but very consciously and purposefully.

In the Mortification and Purgation phases they shut down as many of life's systems as possible, using mourning for the absent gods or king as a pretext to give a rest to all commerce, labor, lawsuits, etc. Shops, warehouses, and factories were closed. The hearth fires that burned in every home were put out, and the great fire that burned eternally in the temple was extinguished too. Even the processes of the body were shut down, and people fasted, stopped talking, and gave up life's pleasures to become more quiet and contemplative for a few hours. It was considered a time out, time outside of time, a grinding down of the giant clock, and in some calendars the festival days were not given numbers or names, signifying that this was sacred turning point time, not subject to the ordinary daily rhythms.

Mortification meant bringing the body near the point of death by fasting, but also denying oneself any of the little pleasures of the body. They believed the body needed to be humbled or mortified from time to time, so it knows the mind is the master. The absence of things that were normally taken for granted created a renewed appreciation for them. It also focused the minds of the people and reminded them of the possibility of death that was always near.

Lamentation was an important part of the ritual at this point. People were supposed to meditate sympathetically on the death of the hero-god-king until the tears ran down their faces. Special songs were composed with the aim of triggering the emotions of grief and sorrow. The dramatic form of tragedy was developed from the rituals, chants, and dances of mourning that tried to evoke sympathy for the suffering god or king. Tragedy comes from the word "tragos" or goat, because goats were often used as sacrificial stand-ins for the yearly sacrifice of the king.

The Purgation phase of seasonal rituals was marked by cleansing the body and the environment as much as possible. People would bathe and anoint themselves with oil to symbolize the shedding of an old skin from the previous season. Houses and temples would be cleansed with water and fumigated. Bells and gongs would be rung to chase out unclean spirits. Fireworks have been used in China for centuries for this purpose.

Purgation was both metaphorical and literal in these ancient societies. Mentally and metaphorically, people were supposed to purge themselves of sour feelings, resentments, jealousies, and so on. But they were also supposed to cleanse the body of impurities by fasting and even by inducing vomiting.

Catharsis was a medical term in Aristotle's time for the natural processes by which the body eliminates poisons and wastes. It comes from the word "katharos" which means pure, so a catharsis is a purification, but it can also be a purgation, a vomiting up or violent expelling of impurities. Sneezing is a cathartic reaction to rid the nasal passages of impurities.

In the Poetics, Aristotle used the term "catharsis of the emotions" as a metaphor, comparing the emotional effect of a drama with the way the body rids itself of toxins and impurities. The Greeks and other ancient peoples knew that life is hard, involving many unpleasant compromises and the eating of much crow. Emotional impurities and poisons build up in the body just as physical ones do, and can have catastrophic effects if not purged at regular intervals. They believed that people who get no emotional release from art, music, sports, dance, or drama inevitably will be overcome by poisonous feelings that will surface as aggression, hostility, perversion, or madness, all things dangerous to the society. Therefore they institutionalized purging and purification of mind and body with seasonal festivals that artificially induced catharsis on a quarterly schedule. Drama was a sacred thing, not available for daily consumption, and confined only to the important turning points of the year.

The fasting and purging created a condition of extreme dramatic suggestibility in the population. It was then that the whole society gathered in the squares and streets of the city-state to witness a spectacular dramatization of some great event in the mythic history of the culture. The people were not a passive audience, but took an active part in the dramatic presentation. The city itself with its gates, processional avenues, and towering temples became the stage set for an enormous collective re-enactment of creation, a great battle between gods of order and chaos, or the death and rebirth of the god-king.

The Greeks adopted the general patterns of these seasonal dramatic rituals and made them part of their yearly calendar of religious festivals, built around the doings of gods like Apollo and Dionysos. The great Greek tragedies and comedies evolved slowly from ritual re-enactments and recitations of poems about the gods and heroes, and originally were conceived as religious ceremonies, sacramental acts designed to have a beneficial effect on the spirit. The magnificent outdoor theatres of ancient Greece were originally built as temples dedicated to the god Dionysos, one of the dying and rising gods. The plays enacted there were intended as the dramatic climax to vast religious pageants, and they were carefully designed to bring about the emotional effect that Aristode called catharsis, a feeling of pity and fear evoked by watching the unfolding fate of a hero. The hero of a Greek tragedy was a stand-in for the old god-king, undergoing a sacrificial death on behalf of all the members of the society, and bringing about a catharsis in the members of the audience through sympathy with his or her sufferings.

In Athens, along with dramatic rituals honoring Apollo and Dionysos, seasonal festivals were organized around the myth of Demeter and Kore (Persephone), a primal mother and daughter who once ruled over an endless summer of abundance. Their story tells how the seasons began, and its festivals are timed to coincide with the seasonal rhythms of planting, tending, harvesting, and surviving the winter. Their drama's Call to Adventure was the kidnapping of Persephone by Hades, lord of the Underworld. The rituals re-enacted her kidnapping in October, at the Thesmophoria, three days of festivals exclusively for women. This was the emptying, introducing the time of Mortification and Purgation.

In the myth, Demeter's grief at the disappearance of her daughter brings about a terrible season in which the earth lies barren as the goddess of the harvest neglects her duties in order to mourn and search for her daughter. Demeter becomes the hero of an epic quest, playing many roles as she seeks out her daughter in the Underworld and induces the gods to make a deal with Hades to allow Persephone to return to the world of light and life, at least for part of the year.

Kore/Persephone's return was celebrated at festivals called the Lesser Eleus-inia in February, marking the return of spring.

Every five years, the Greater Eleusinia, the greatest festival in the Greek calendar, was held in September. Some of the carvings from the pediment of the Parthenon depict these jubilant ceremonies, when the young horsemen of Athens would fetch the sacred objects from the temple of Demeter and march them to a special shrine, the Eleusinion, at the base of the Acropolis. The story of Demeter and Kore was acted out in secret ceremonies of great emotional impact for a select group of initiates, using all the effects of lighting, music, dance, ritual, and staging to bring about the desired catharsis.

Nowadays we may use the term catharsis more broadly to mean any kind of emotional release or breakthrough. Catharsis was adopted by the psychological community to describe a therapeutic process in which repressed thoughts, fears, emotions, or memories are deliberately brought to consciousness, triggering an emotional release or breakthrough that is supposed to relieve anxiety and relax tension. Movies and stories as well as art and music can have a role to play in triggering a psychologically healthy cathartic reaction.

THE CATHARSIS OF COMEDY

In the classical Greek system, it was recognized that balance is needed in a dramatic presentation or else it can be overwhelming and exhausting. They added comedies to the ritual line-up to relieve the emotional intensity of the tearful tragedies with some cathartic laughter for contrast.

Comedy belongs to the "plerosis" or filling up portion of the ritual cycle. Once emptying and purging have been fully experienced, it's time to fill up again with something healthy, tasty, and life-affirming that stimulates Invigoration and Jubilation.

The word comedy comes from "komos" which means "the revels," a wild party or orgy. Rituals of Invigoration in very ancient times involved a big feast in which eating, drinking, and all kinds of merriment were encouraged, to make a vivid contrast with the somber tone of the Mortification and Purgation rituals that preceded it. One aspect of comedy is the stirring up of sexual urges. Greek comedy often dealt with power struggles between men and women and celebrated sexuality with exaggerated costumes and situations. Freud considered that there was a strong linkage between laughter and sexuality, and of course sex is a natural catharsis that relieves tension.

The Greeks thought two or three heavy doses of tragedy would do a good job of mortifying and purging you, and a dose of comedy was just the right finish to a ritual cycle, sending you back into the next season of the year refreshed, psychologically cleansed and reborn, and cheerful. As they used to say in vaudeville, "Always leave 'em laughing."

RETURN OF THE LIGHT

A feature of the seasonal rituals in ancient times was the re-lighting of the sacred fire in a central temple, symbolic of the victory of life over death. The flame would then be passed from person to person, carrying home candles or small oil lamps from which the individual hearth fires could be re-lit to Invigorate the culture. The hearth fire would be used to cook a feast that was consumed as part of the Jubilation that concluded the seasonal cycle.

Some of these rituals survive in various ways around the world today. I witnessed one remnant at a Greek Orthodox Easter service in New York City. Part of the Lenten observations is to cover the beautiful painted statues and icons with purple cloths and put out the candles for a time, symbolically evoking grief and lamentation over Christ's suffering, death, and burial. Then, at a moment symbolizing the Resurrection, a large Paschal candle is lit in the darkened church. In the

Greek Orthodox church in New York, the congregants had brought along small candles which they lit from the big one. At the end of the service they exited the church, but the ritual went on as the families walked home or got into their cars, carefully shielding the flames from the wind, preserving the light of the new season to kindle their own symbolic hearth fires in their homes, just as people used to do thousands of years ago. In similar ceremonies in Jerusalem, Greek pilgrims will even carry home the sacred flames on specially chartered airplanes.

When we deal in drama or narrative today, we are building on forty thousand years of tradition and experience. Humans have always sought orientation and emotional release through drama. Although our entertainment is more evenly distributed throughout the year, we still partake of some of the seasonal ritual effect. New shows on television are typically launched in September, time of the fall equinox. Going to movies with family at holiday times or watching particular holiday films like It's a Wonderful Life each year is an emotional tradition for many people. Certain kinds of movies seem to be associated with specific seasons. In general we like love stories and sport stories in the spring and summer, while more thoughtful dramas tend to be released in fall and winter. The winter solstice, roughly coinciding with the Christmas and New Year's holidays, is a good time to release big fantasy pictures, especially those that comprise trilogies that can be run over successive year-end holidays. Summer is the time for the blockbusters and action pictures.

THE POWER OF THE SEASONS

We are not so conscious of the seasons these days since we are somewhat insulated from their effects, and most of us no longer live by the rhythms of planting and harvesting. However, the seasons still have their power over us, affecting our lives and our moods in ways both obvious and subtle. The seasons of the year and seasonal holidays can be useful to the writer, providing natural turning points, a measure of the passage of time, and distinct emotional associations. The passage of a single season makes an effective time frame for a movie (That Championship Season, Summer Catch) or a story's four-movement structure could be built around the passage of the seasons (The Four Seasons'). A change of seasons in a story can signify a change in the hero's fortunes or mood. A story could be built around a character who is disastrously out of synch with the rhythm of the seasons.

In your writing, remember that the purpose of everything you're doing is to bring about some kind of emotional reaction in your reader or viewer. It may not always be the full-blown explosive reaction of catharsis, but it should have its effect on the organs of the body, stimulating them through repeated blows of conflict and setback for your hero. You are always raising and lowering the tension, pumping energy into your story and characters until some kind of emotional release is inevitable, in the form of laughter, tears, shudders, or a warm glow of understanding. People still need catharsis, and a good story is one of the most reliable and entertaining ways of bringing it about.

QUESTIONS

1. What role do holidays and the seasons play in your life? What role in your stories? Do you associate the holidays with emotional catharsis? Do your characters?

2. What happens if you resist or ignore the rhythms of the seasons? What happens if you don't participate in the seasonal rituals of your culture?

3. How is the seasonal cycle of catharsis played out in the world of sports? Do we get more catharsis from playing athletic games or from watching them?

4. Why are competitive reality shows and talent contests so popular? What is the catharsis that they provide?

5. What is the effect of experiencing a dramatic catharsis in a group? How is watching a movie or play in a packed theatre different from reading a book, playing a computer game alone, or watching television at home? Which do you prefer, and why?

6. Has reading a book or watching a movie, play, or sporting event ever triggered a feeling like catharsis in you? Describe that experience and try to make the reader feel it too.

7. What was your most memorable holiday experience? Could that experience be material for a short story, a one-act play, or a short film script? Would a character in it experience a catharsis?

8. What role does fashion play in the seasonal cycle? Are we manipulated by the fashion industry or is it natural to wear different colors and fabrics for each season?

9. What seasonal rituals are still practiced in your community? Do any of them use dramatic effects to create catharsis? What feelings are stirred by these rituals?

10. Where are movies going in their search for situations that will trigger some kind of emotional or physical reaction? Is it harder to stimulate people today, and what will moviemakers and storytellers of the future use to bring about catharsis?

Although we use our minds to process and interpret stories, much is going on throughout the rest of the body as we interact with a narrative. We react to art and to stories about our fellow creatures with the organs of our body. In fact the whole body is involved, skin, nerves, blood, bones, and organs.

Joseph Campbell pointed out that the archetypes speak to us directly through the organs, as if we were programmed to respond chemically to certain symbolic stimuli. For example, big-eyed infants of any species trigger a reaction of sympathy and protectiveness, or cause us to say things like "How cute!" Puss-in-Boots from the Shrek movies knows how to exploit this deep emotional trigger by making his eyes huge when he wants sympathy. Emotions are complex processes, but on one level they are simple chemical reactions to stimuli in our environment, a fact that storytellers have always used to get their emotional effects.

Certain images or tableaux have an automatic emotional impact on us, felt in the organs of our bodies. A tableau is a figure or several figures in a setting, enacting some primal scene that either affects us intuitively, on an almost animal level, or that has become charged with emotion because of long tradition. The Last Supper, images of the Madonna and child, and the Pieta depicting Christ's mother cradling her dead son's body are all emotionally loaded religious tableaux. Similar images with equal force existed in earlier cultures, like the Egyptian goddess Hathor nursing her child or Isis tenderly assembling the scattered pieces of her dismembered husband Osiris. Images of beings in conflict, people in combat or gods and heroes wrestling with monsters, cause tension in our stomachs as we identify with one or another of the combatants. Images of protective or generous spirits (kindly grandmothers, angels, Santa Claus) give us a warm feeling of comfort. Representations of sympathetic characters in physical torment evoke a physical response, as in graphic medieval art depicting the Crucifixion and the martyrdoms of various saints like St. Sebastian who was shot full of arrows.

Classical Greek drama used startling visceral effects on stage, like Oedipus appearing with his eyes torn out, to elicit a strong reaction in the bodies of the beholders. The language of Greek plays could be bold and brutal, hammering at the audience with vivid word choices that suggested violent blows and the spilling of blood. Often a bloody act was committed off-stage, but described with stomach-wrenching detail, or the shocking evidence was displayed in the form of blood-soaked clothing or actors portraying corpses.

The Romans took this to extremes in their version of Greek theatre which became more degenerate and cruel as the Empire stumbled to its death. Symbolic or simulated acts of violence were replaced by real ones, with condemned criminals suffering the fate of the fictional characters, literally bleeding and dying on stage to amuse the Roman public. Gladiators stepped into plays to enact mythological combats and actually fought to the death in the theatres.

In the late 1700s, the puppet character of Guignol was imported from Lyons to Paris, where his brash, violent nature gave birth to a whole wave of plays known as Grand Guignol, whose object was to provide thrills of terror and shudders of horror with the realistic depiction of torture, beheadings, dismemberments, and other insults to the human body.

Observers of the first impact of moving pictures on the public remarked on the realism and physical power of the images on the screen, causing audiences to jump back when a train approached or flinch when a gun was pointed at them for the first time in The Great Train Robbery.

In the 1950s and '60s, Alfred Hitchcock was known for provoking physical reactions in his audiences, and he was a master organist, playing the viscera like a mighty Wurlitzer in tension-filled movies like Psycho, The Birds, and Vertigo, but he was not alone, for all good directors know instinctively how to use their tools to make us feel something, physically and emotionally. They employ everything in the toolbox — story, characters, editing, lighting, costumes, music, set design, action, special effects, and psychology — to bring about physical responses such as holding the breath in suspense, gasping in response to surprises, and exhaling in relaxation when the on-screen tension is released. In fact, the secret of drama may come down to control of the audience's breathing, for through the breath all the other organs of the body can be regulated.

In the 1970s the special effects—laden movies of Irwin Allen (Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno) were heralded, and sometimes condemned, as a new wave of visceral entertainment, playing to the body rather than the mind. With the arrival of the modern special effects masters of the Spielberg and Lucas generation, movies were able to seduce the eye and the other organs of the body ever more convincingly.

Along the way there have been many experiments to enhance the physical effects of entertainment and drama, from the burning of incense at Greek rituals to modern technical marvels like 3D, IMAX, and mechanized seats that vibrate in time to on-screen machine-gun fire. In Roman theatres and stadia, the presence of gods could be suggested by sprays of perfumed vapor and showers of fragrant flower petals. In the 1950s experiments were done with 3D, "smell-o-vision," and "Percepto," an effect in theatres specially rigged for William Castle's unique effort, The Tingler, Seats were wired with buzzers that made them vibrate at supposedly shocking moments on screen, where a creature was depicted attaching itself to people's spines.

THE BODY AS A GUIDE TO CRITIQUING

It's not easy to critique your own writing work or that of others. It can be hard to articulate what's wrong, how the story made you feel, what was lacking. Sometimes the best way to measure a story's effect and diagnose its problems is to ask "How did it make me feel — in the organs of my body? Did I feel anything physical at all, or was I just having mental processes that didn't much involve anything but the brain? Did it make my blood run cold? Did it make my toes curl with horror or delight? Did it make my nervous system alert as if the dangers the hero faces were actually threatening me?" If not, there may be something missing, an appeal to the body, a physical threat, an emotional tension.

As a professional evaluator of stories I became keenly attuned to the emotional and physical effects a manuscript could have on me. I came to depend on the wisdom of the body to determine the quality of the story. If it was bad and boring, my body would grow leaden and the pages would weigh a thousand pounds apiece. I knew it was bad if, as my eyes scanned down the page, my head kept drooping and I nodded off to sleep. The good ones, I noticed, the ones that ultimately made good movies, had the opposite effect on my body. They woke me up. The organs of my body came to life one by one. The body became alert, light, and happy, squirting fluids into the pleasure centers of the brain, "the proper pleasure" as Aristotle called it, of experiencing emotional and physical release through a well-told, cathartic tale.

As we watch a good movie or are engrossed in a good novel, we actually go into an altered state of consciousness, with a measurable change in brain waves detectable by the tools of science. Perhaps changes in the rhythm of the breath, combined with focusing the attention on the imaginary world of the story, bring about this almost hypnotic effect.

When I started critiquing screenplays and stories for a living, I soon found that what I was really reporting was how they had triggered chemical reactions in the organs of my body. The organs squirt fluids, all day long, as we react to various emotional and physical situations in our environment, and its no different when we watch a movie or imagine scenes from a novel. When we are stressed or frightened, our adrenal glands transmit a chemical jolt through the body, sending signals to increase the heart rate and pace of breathing. When we are in shock from seeing traumatic or frightening things, our bodies send messages to shut down certain processes to preserve a core of life in an emergency.

The word "horror" derives from the Latin word for bristling and reflects the body's automatic reaction to uncanny events, things that upset the normal order. Such sights trigger a physical reaction in the skin of the arms that resembles the response to cold air. Tiny muscles cause the hairs on the arms to stand up, a reaction called "horripilation," that means "bristling hair" or hair standing on end. Horror is hair-raising. Some scientists think this may be a survival from hairier times in human history, when having your thick pelt of hair stand up when threatened would make you look bigger and scarier, as many animals will swell up or ruffle up their fur when facing threats.

A tip for designers of sensory experiences: A sudden blast of chilly air can trigger a shuddering effect in audiences, especially if they are keyed up for it by some emotional or musical manipulation. The chill can trigger the graveyard shudder of fear or a more exalted form of physical reaction, like awe, wonder, or spiritual rebirth.

The effect of shuddering, in which the muscles of the body, especially the arms and back, involuntarily ripple or spasm, is associated with other emotional effects in addition to horror. Religious awe or deep psychological insight can produce shudders that can be very pleasurable, signs of grace, endorsement from the body of the Tightness of a thought. A shiver of this kind in French is called a "frisson," and I noticed the phenomenon when I concentrated hard on working out a story problem, especially when working collaboratively in open discussion with other people. In the course of trying out different ideas someone would say something that triggered a shiver of response in me. I would feel a tingle passing down my spine, almost as if thousands of small pebbles were rolling down my spinal column. It felt the way a rain stick sounds, one of those hollow wooden tubes with dried peas inside that makes a sound like falling rain. Sometimes other people would feel it too, or feel something like it, because I could see their bodies being jolted by it. The shiver ran round the room.

I learned to value those physical reactions because they were telling me I was in the presence of something true and right, something beautiful. In these story sessions, sometimes the answer to a story problem rang true, on many levels of my being, sending a subtle physical signal that elements were lining up to create a desirable emotional outcome, or that the story would now make better sense or be more realistic or funnier. It suggested to me that there is an inner grid of Tightness about art and emotion, and that our bodies respond with pleasure when we make works that line up with this grid, allowing emotional energy to flow at full power like electrical current. Solutions to story problems can have a certain beauty or elegance, as theories of physics or mathematical solutions are said to be elegant. Perhaps we sense that the solution is in harmony with some universal truth, some essential reality in the universe.

Stories appeal to the organs at different levels, and there is a hierarchy, an ascending order of emotional development that is reflected in the Indian concept of the chakra system. These are imagined to be a number of invisible but very real centers of life within the body, most of them located along the spine. There are seven principal chakras, each governing a different function, ascending from the crude physical needs of the body to the highest aspirations of the soul. Chakra means ring or circle and the chakras are conceived as ring-like centers of energy near important organs. They are pictured as lotus flowers that can be open or closed depending on the person's spiritual development. They form a map of the stages of a person's growth or at least potential for growth, for few people progress past the first three levels, having to do with sheer survival, sex, and power, all below the belt line. Some are lucky enough to progress to the heart chakra and experience love. Few reach the level of the throat chakra that allows for expression of the other drives. Writers and artists may be among these. With spiritual enlightenment the sixth chakra, in the region of the "third eye," can be opened, sometimes granting psychic abilities, and for a very few saintly people, the seventh or crown chakra may flower, showering the fully awakened person with a fountain of divine grace.

These symbols can be useful in charting the development of a character, giving metaphors for the stages of change and growth. Some people don't ascend the ladder of emotional development in proper order but may skip up to open two or more chakras at different levels, with very different effects and many possible combinations. According to some modern Hindu sages, Hitler may have been very open in the power and throat chakras, making him an effective communicator who could stir the emotions and marshal power with his voice, but he was probably shut tight in most of the other chakras.

According to theory, the chakras can be stimulated in various ways and each is responsive to specific colors, smells, and especially sounds. Supposedly, unhealthy chakras can be cleansed or opened by exposure to the vibrations of gongs, bells, drums, and trumpets. In movies, big emotional breakthroughs duplicate the opening of the higher chakras, and are enhanced and emphasized by climaxes in the music and action.

In evaluating story material for the Hollywood studios, I began to think about how modern entertainment plays upon the various emotional and physical centers of the body, and observed that good stories affected me in at least two organs at once, perhaps getting my heart racing with tension while making my throat choke up with sympathy for the death of a character. I needed to tear up, choke up, freeze up, or laugh it up, and the more of those physical reactions I felt, the better the story was. Ideally perhaps, all the organs of the body should be stimulated by a good story in the course of exploring all the possibilities of an emotional situation. My motto as a story evaluator became, "If it isn't making at least two organs of my body squirt fluids, it's no good."

Catharsis, discussed elsewhere in this volume, is the biggest emotional and physical trigger of them all. We may get it in small doses from almost every drama or story we see, but the big catharsis, a whole-body emotional and physical spasm that cleans out your entire system of toxins or triggers a complete change of orientation, is pretty rare. You wouldn't want to go through that disruption every day, for a catharsis usually means a radical reorganization of priorities and belief systems. But it does still happen now and then, when the story and the listener are lined up just right, and its the thing that makes so many people want to go into show business and the arts. They've felt it. In the presence of work that is beautiful and true, honest and real, something smashes you like a hammer striking glass and allows you to suddenly put your own experience into proper new perspective. You might have experienced that deep shudder of realization, a moment of profound connection with your family, your country, your humanity, with the divine, or the things you believe in. A story, once in a great while, can touch us at the deepest level, giving us a new view of the world or a new reason to live, perhaps when we are ready for that particular story to speak its truth to us. No wonder some people want to be artists and storytellers, to participate in that mystery, and create the possibility of that experience for others.

QUESTIONS

1. What sensations do you get in watching a powerful dramatic experience or a moving performance by a singer or other artist?

2. Think of a story that you particularly enjoyed or that meant something to you. How did it affect the organs of your body?

3. What symbols or tableaux are particularly moving or meaningful to you? How would you describe your feelings so someone else could experience what you felt?

4. How has your body reacted to frightening or life-threatening situations? Write a short story or short film script capturing this experience.

5. Watch a scary movie and observe how the filmmaker manipulates your breathing with editing, suspense, musical rhythms, color, etc.

6. What kind of scene stirs up the most emotion or the strongest physical reaction for you? Write a series of scenes aiming to evoke specific emotional or physical reactions — to bring a shiver down the back, to raise goose-bumps on the arms, to trigger tears or laughter.

So said Dante at the beginning of the Inferno and so I found myself at a certain passage in the journey of my life, hiking alone in the forest near Big Sur, California. I was in a dark wood, all right, and lost. I was cold, hungry, shivering, exhausted, and panicked by the thought of night closing in.

It had been a rainy winter, with storm after storm saturating the hillsides after years of drought. I felt pounded by heavy weather in my own life, and had come north to the sacred country of Big Sur to find some things I had lost: solitude, peace of mind, clarity. I felt I had failed in important areas of jobs and relationships and was confused about which way to move next. I had some decisions to make about my direction and knew instinctively that a plunge into the wilderness could give me a vision of the future to lead me out of my present confusion.

As I set out on the well-marked Forest Service trail that winds into the wild canyons of Big Sur, I noted a little sign that warned the trail was rough in spots. I expected the path to be wet and muddy in places because of the recent rains, but quickly found out I had underestimated the ferocious impact of the winter storms on the fragile hillsides. The whole mountain range was a vast sponge that was now draining slowly into the canyons, unimaginable amounts of water carving new canyons and streams. Time and again I rounded a corner to find that the trail ahead simply vanished for fifty yards because a whole hillside had washed away, trail and all, leaving a damp scar of crumbling shale and a waterfall cascading down the raw rock. The freshly exposed rock is easily broken into shards called scree that flow downhill almost as easily as water, and can be as treacherous as quicksand. I could see the trail continuing again beyond the stretch where the hillside had collapsed, and had no choice but to scramble like a crab across the shifting, slippery rock face, clinging by fingertips and toes, digging into the tumbling scree until I was back on the level surface of the broken path. It continued for a few hundred feet around a shoulder of the mountain, only to disappear again in another mudslide that had to be crossed by the finger-and-toe method.

At first this seemed exhilarating, just the kind of minor wilderness challenge that I was after. But after the third or fourth time of edging out across a sheer, unstable cliff face with muddy water streaming over me, the process began to take its toll. My arms and legs began to tremble from the unaccustomed exertion, my fingers and toes grew cramped. My core temperature dropped from repeated soakings as the cool air chilled my clothes and skin by evaporation. At times the whole hillside of yellow mud and shale seemed to be shuddering and slipping under me, flowing in a slow-motion mudslide. By the tenth crossing I was starting to get worried. The hike that was supposed to take an hour had taken three hours and there was no end in sight. I lost my footing a couple of times in the muck and barely caught myself, clinging to the crumbling rock with fingers cramped and arms shaking, knowing I would fall for hundreds of feet before I hit something solid and level.

And then, as my adventure led me around the cooler, shadow side of the mountain, I reached a vast, wet scar where a whole slab of the mountain had fallen away into a deep canyon, leaving a slanted field of jagged boulders the size of houses that would be challenging to cross. I didn't know whether to turn back or keep going. I began to measure my strength very precisely, recognizing a primal, instinctive hyper-awareness that comes when one is at the edge of death. For as I watched the sun sink into the tree-line, I felt my life energy draining, and realized I was in one of those classic California wilderness tragedy situations that you read about in the newspapers. Some fool gets himself stuck in the woods at night and falls into a canyon and breaks his neck or wanders lost for days until he starves to death. It happens all the time. Was this my turn?

With my heightened awareness I knew almost to the calorie how much energy was left in my body. I had brought little food with me, just a handful of trail mix, and had consumed that long ago, observing how the nuts and raisins instantly charged me with energy, only to send me crashing a few minutes later when I had burned them off in scrambling across the treacherous shale. How thin is the margin that preserves life. I knew that every step from now on was drawing on core reserves. I could almost see the sands in the hourglass of my life rushing inevitably down to nothing.

The question was whether to turn back or go ahead. The way ahead was uncertain. I couldn't see the trail picking up on the other side of the landslip and I knew it would be a difficult task to cross the rugged face of the scar, which was the only way to continue. It would take as much energy as I had already expended, maybe more, and there was no assurance that I would be able to find the trail again in the trees on the other side. I might just be plunging deeper into the wilderness with night coming on.

I thought about turning back and re-tracing the broken trail I had just traversed with such difficulty, but I knew with a terrible certainty that if I tried that, I would die. My hands were cramping up like claws and would be almost useless. My arms and legs were shaking and I was absolutely sure that I would fall if I tried to go back across three or four more of those muddy vertical rock faces, especially in the dark.

So I gathered my strength and continued on across the field of boulders, crawling like an ant, an insignificant dot on the flank of a mountain. I was impressed by the immense forces that had raised these rocks thousands of feet into the sky in the first place and now had torn down the mountainside. I finally made it across into the trees, winded, cold, and feeling at the end of my strength, but now there was a different problem. Where was the trail? There was no sign of it. Vague paths seemed to lead me deeper into darkness, into brambles, into impenetrable cool thickets like those surrounding cursed castles in fairy tales. I stumbled up and down the mountainside, my face and hands scratched by branches, hoping to intersect with the true path, but getting more and more hopelessly lost and frantic as night crept near. I had to get out of there. I knew it was a very bad idea to attempt to spend the night in the forest, unprepared. People die of exposure out here all the time. I noticed for the first time that air on a mountain flows at different times of day like a mass of water. Cold air seemed to be rushing downhill all around me, flooding the bottomless canyon and chilling my blood, dragging my spirits further down.

I dread that word "lost" and tried to deny it to myself, but I had to admit it. A whole host of unfamiliar sensations and thoughts came over me as I watched the shadows of the black trees march down the canyons. My heart pounded, my hands shook. The forest seemed to be speaking to me, pleading with me, calling to me. "Come," it said in a witch's voice of a million leaves rasping together. "Here is an easy end to your pain. Join us! Jump! Take a run and launch yourself off this cliff into this canyon. It will all be over in an instant. We'll take care of everything." And oddly enough, that plea sounded appealing and reasonable to some part of me, the part that was terrified, the part that just wanted this awful moment to be over.

But another sliver of my brain stepped back, and recognized that I was experiencing the common human psychological state known as panic. The Greeks, with their talent for naming things, called it panic because they believed it was a visit from the nature god Pan, goat-footed, flute-playing Pan, who can inspire mortals but also has the power to terrify them, overwhelming their senses with the awesome forces at his command, causing them to do foolish things and die.

I felt the presence too of the witches from the old European and Russian folk tales, fearsome figures who represent the dual nature of the primeval forest. The heroes of those tales learn that the witches, like the forest, can quickly break, destroy, and consume you, but, if you learn how to appease and honor them, they can also support and protect you like a kindly grandmother, hiding you from enemies and providing you food and shelter. At the moment, the forest was turning its nastiest and most seductive witchy face to me. There was something alive and evil and hungry out there, like the witch in "Hansel and Gretel" but stretched out over the whole forest. I was in big trouble.

I stopped and took a breath. That simple act brought a sudden surge of clarity and common sense to my panicked brain that was causing me to rush about like a terrified animal. I realized I had not been breathing properly, that my gasping and panting had deprived my brain of oxygen. Together with my exhaustion and the sudden chill, I was in a mild state of shock, blood rushing away from the head and extremities to preserve a core of life force and heat. I took a few deep breaths and could feel blood returning to my skull.

Instead of thrashing around pointlessly, I took in my surroundings and got in touch with something ancient and instinctive in me, a reliable inner sense of what to do in dangerous situations.

Just then, a voice came into my head, clear as sunlight. "Trust the path," it said. I truly heard this, as a spoken sentence that seemed to be coming from a deep part of me. But I smiled, scoffing at the idea. That's the problem, I said to myself. There is no path. I trusted the Forest Service trail and look where it got me. I've been looking for the path for half an hour and it's just not here. And in the larger sense, in the big picture of my life, over a period of years, I had also lost sight of the true way.

"Trust the path," said the voice again, patient and true. In that voice was a certainty that there must be a path, and that it could be relied upon to do its job.

I looked down and saw a little groove in the weeds — an ant trail. There, oblivious to my panic, ants were going about their tiny business in an endless column. With my eyes I followed the ant trail, the only path I could see.

It led me to a slightly deeper groove in the underbrush, a little trail used by field mice and other small creatures, almost a tunnel through the brambles. And soon that guided me to a broader path, a zigzagging deer trail that climbed the mountainside in easy stages. I started putting one foot in front of the other, following that trail. It led me out of the labyrinth, like Ariadne's thread leading Theseus out of the maze. In a few steps I came to a clearing, a mountain meadow were the sun was still shining. Across the meadow I found a well-maintained trail and realized I was back on an official Forest Service path, the right road, the way back.

As I walked along, calmer now, the way out of my personal confusion became clearer. "Trust the path," my voice had said, and I took that to mean "Keep marching ahead to the next stage of life. Don't try to go backwards, don't allow yourself to get paralyzed or panicked, just keep marching. Trust that your instincts are good and natural and will lead you to a happier, safer place." Then the hiking trail merged with a fire road, wide as two firetrucks, and in half an hour I was back on the highway where my blessed Volkswagen was parked. The sun was still blazing on the Western horizon, though I knew back in those canyons it was already deepest night, and I could have died there.

As I looked back at the mountains and forest that had just held me in their jaws, I realized I'd been given a gift with that phrase, Trust the Path, and I pass it on to you. It means that when you are lost and confused, you can trust the journey that you have chosen, or that has chosen you. It means others have been on the journey before you, the writer's journey, the storyteller's journey. You're not the first, you're not the last. Your experience of it is unique, your viewpoint has value, but you're also part of something, a long tradition that stretches back to the very beginnings of our race. The journey has it own wisdom, the story knows the way. Trust the journey. Trust the story. Trust the path.

As Dante says, at the beginning of the Inferno, "In the midst of life's journey I found myself in a dark wood, for the right path was lost." I think we're all doing that, in our various ways, finding ourselves through the journey of our writing lives. Looking for our Selves in the dark wood. I wish you luck and adventure and I hope you find yourself on your journey. Bon voyage.