I don’t know about you, but life just seems to pass me by sometimes. I have my head down, and I’m focused on my to do list. I’m lost in the minutia of my day-to-day existence. I have PTA and basketball practice for my son and voice lessons for my daughter and going to lunch with my husband and then there’s breakfast and supper and my mom needs help with her computer. Even as I chip away at my list, it seems to grow. Most of my time, I don’t think of myself as the hero in my own story. Being a hero implies taking charge of your life, having a life-shattering goal, facing obstacles and overcoming them, and eventually achieving success. My life often seems like a never-ending sisyphian labor. No forward movement, no end in sight. But what if that wasn’t so. What if I saw my life as the hero’s journey?
I’ll get back to that...
A quote: “Every character in a narrative is the hero of her or his own story.” Not sure where I saw it. This is something writers know, and it’s the secret to having well-rounded characters. You have to think of each character as a person with his or her own motives, and you have to make sure to incorporate the subtext that comes from those hero journeys.
For example, your main character, your heroine, is fighting cancer, but this guy she met in a bar just wants a meaningful overnight relationship. Her journey is fighting cancer, but his journey ~ equally valid, though not so earth-shaking ~ is to seduce her. Imagine their conversation.
Imagine how she might like his transparency and the quickness of his wit. She might be reminded of what’s good in life. He’ll know that she’s sad about something, but because his mother had depression when he was a child it will spark something deeper within him that prompts him to want to save her. And on it goes. They both have their journeys.
What we do as writers is make meaning. We take the messy stuff of lived experience and shape it into a coherent whole, an aesthetic object. Narrative is attractive to us all as human beings specifically because our lives feel so meaningless, so overwhelming, and writers provide that. Writers provide closure where there is none.
This is the more accurate quote from John Barth: “Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.”
This is something slightly different from the quote above. This is about real people living their lives. They are necessarily the heroes of their own stories. No one else might care, but to each person, her or his life is of the utmost importance. Writers are no different. We are on a journey that involves using language to mirror and shape the world. Each story or each novel is a goal, and we overcome setbacks and grimly stumble forward to achieve the creation of this thing, this work of art.
These stories or novels string together in a never-ending pursuit of something larger than ourselves. It has all the trappings of a hero’s journey. (Let me be clear: writers are not inherently what you would call “heroes” ~ though you could say they’re “my heroes.” They create the myths of heroes. Heroes are people who risk and sometimes lose their lives for the sake or other.)
I think it’s helpful for writers to think of themselves as pursuing a hero’s journey. It gives them a sense of purpose, a narrative for their lives that might otherwise feel mired in minutia. When framed in this way, they might be more productive, each novel a step on the way to a larger career. It’s like that old conceit of many fantasy novels ~ the hero travels in time and sees himself doing something, and because he sees himself do it he knows he can. Harry Potter calling his patronus is an example of this.
I think if we as writers see ourselves on a hero’s journey, in some strange way we’re destined to write and therefore writing is easier. We know we can do it because it’s in our destiny.
For me and for many writers (I would suspect), it is helpful to think of your life as a hero’s journey. Forget the minutia. You can make boundaries around your writing time because this is your fate, your goal, the way you’re going to save the world. It’s not about you being selfish.
It’s about this aesthetic object, this work of art, that has to come into being, and only you can do it. (There are these books that have moved me, have rocked me to the core. If I can do that for just one person, it’s worth it. That’s my goal, my mission, my raison d’etre.)
To be a writer requires an uneasy truce between utter humility and utter hubris. If you aren’t open and humble, your work suffers, but if you don’t believe you have something to offer the world, you’ll never get the work done. So do it: imagine your destiny. You are a writer.
