CHAPTER 8: AWAKENING THE INNER EYE: FROM DREAM TO DISNEY Using the power of waking dreams, emotional memory, and intuitive skills.
CHAPTER 9: THE VOICE OF THE STORY Finding the emotional connection to the story: from the specific to the universal. How to access and free your individual voice.
CHAPTER 10: TRANSCENDING WRITER’S BLOCK Creative people are those committed to risk. Serving soul while satisfying the marketplace.
CHAPTER 11: THE WAY OF STORY AS A LIFE PATH Process—not Product—serves Soul and succeeds in the end. Expanding horizons.
CHAPTER 12: A GUIDE TO THE WAY OF STORY WORKSHOPS
Prologue
IN THE BEGINNING was story. The caveman rushed back to his tribe and excitedly acted out his encounter with some Paleolithic beast. This was his story and forever after he would be remembered by this story. Stories have a sacred dimension, not because of gods but because a man or woman’s sense of self and her world is created through them. These stories orient the life of a people through time, establishing the reality of their world. Thus meaning and purpose are given to people’s lives. Without story, we do not exist. The Way of Story is how we discover who we are.
Chapter 1
In the Beginning Was
Story. . .
EINSTEIN WAS WRONG. “The world is made up of stories, not atoms,” as poet Muriel Rukeyser once said. Novelist John Steinbeck in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech remarked that “literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.” This is no less true today. From Shakespeare to Star Wars, from Dante to le Carre, the way of story is a journey of discovery forged by discipline and craft. Though it is craft that transforms the initial raw inspiration into form, storytelling begins within, and is as much as part of our past as our genetic structure.
Storytelling is not only the root of film, theatre, literature, and culture, but of the life experience itself. The listener maintains touch with his mythic self and the truths there represented. In losing touch with our myths, there may be a danger of losing touch with ourselves. Today, in modern society, there is a fragmentation which separates most of us from our central core or soul. With all our progress, perhaps something has been lost which earlier cultures knew to value: the soul connection.
Story has been the foundation of rituals that empower both individual and collective values since society began. Story provides both identity and standards to live by and is thus essential for our well-being. It serves as a mirror to reflect who we are and what we believe in. What story would you choose to live by? The answer offers a clue to your soul, your deepest self.
For thirty thousand years and in the earliest forms of oral tradition, shamans have tended the soul. The very word, shaman, coming from the Tungus people of Siberia, means excited, moved, raised. He journeys out of body to a realm beyond time and space. The shaman’s soul leaves his body in trance state and travels to the underworld or skyward, returning with a message for the community. In this way, the shaman becomes a bridge between the two worlds of earth and spirit. The shaman is an ear for his community. He discovers where their suffering lies, and speaks to that.
What has this to do with us today? We have been split off from spirit since the Industrial Revolution, and today’s Age of Information is a poor substitute for the callings of spirit. Information is not — nor was it ever— wisdom. Knowledge is more than the mere naming of names, survival more than material sustenance. Man needs connection with the worlds of both matter and spirit in order to find meaning and balance in life. The integration of matter and spirit is the making of soul or wholeness, which gives meaning to life. Soul combines body, spirit, and mind. In olden times, shamans interpreted psychological illness as separation from soul. The shaman’s job then was to retrieve the severed soul and unite it — or return it — to the one possessed or ill.
Is this not what the artist does? Is it possible that today’s artist or writer might fill the gap of the missing shaman? As an actress- playwright in New York and later as a screenwriter in Hollywood, I have often wondered if today’s dramatist is not carrying the forgotten role of shaman.
As the ancient shaman, so often will the writer descend into the depths of himself in order to return with a message. Though he serves the community, he is more often than not marginal — separate from society. Perhaps this marginality may be necessary in order to move freely between the opposite worlds, unrestrained by society. The artist often suffers from this separateness. Consider Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Vincent van Gogh, and Jackson Pollack who all opted for suicide in the end — even though the gifts such artists bring will enrich society long after they are gone.
Surely, the dramatist also provides a bridge between the split worlds of matter and spirit. In my play, On the Edge, when Vita Sackville-West asks Virginia Woolf how she is, this is her reply:
On the edge, I’m afraid. The strain, I think of inhabiting two very different worlds. This afternoon, for instance, when I was on my walk. At first, I felt the wet grass on my feet. . . and perhaps a robin sang. But then, I began to be drawn in. The more it drew me, the less touch I had with the concrete world. I was in another universe entirely. I was in myself. And this world seemed far, far more real than the one I had left.
From the early beginnings of Hollywood a century ago, the movie moguls were interested in one thing: the story. “What’s the story?” Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer would ask, “Just tell me the story.” Even today, Hollywood executives decide which story will make it to the screen by hearing the story pitched or told to them, rather than having to read it. Also, for better or worse, Hollywood and television have influenced how plays and novels are written. No longer will the reader patiently read fifty pages while waiting for something to happen. Books are chosen by publishers today with an eye to a possible movie sale. This is one of the reasons why today the principles of screenwriting apply to all forms of narrative writing. So, regardless of whether you’re writing a memoir, mystery, or novel, in the beginning is the Story…
Award–winning actor and writer William H. Macy (Fargo, Seabiscuit) commented in the Los Angeles Times:
They can pretty much do anything they want technically now, but they’re forgetting to write a story. You’ve got to keep in mind that audiences universally want one thing: a good story. And special effects make it better, but they can’t replace story.
So, what makes a good story? The answer covers all genres (types of story such as drama, comedy, mystery, etc.) and can be revealed in one word: character. It is no accident that the best films or novels are character-driven stories.
For instance, Gone with the Wind is not about the Civil War, but about Scarlett O’Hara. The Civil War is merely the venue or backdrop to this great love story. An important point to remember in writing period pieces is that the theme should be universal, that is, as relevant today as when your story takes place. If you wish to write a story about the Civil War, you must write a specific story about specific people. Remember, too, that it is important not to confuse venue with what a story is really about. Your job as author then is to find the story within the story.
It is no accident that many hit films carry the main character in the title. Examples are Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Forrest Gump, Driving Miss Daisy, Braveheart, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, The English Patient, and Erin Brockovich. Character-driven stories allow the readers or audience to identify with one major character