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 te
ach 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 Writer's Journey Page 31