The Writer's Journey

by Christopher Vogler

  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.