Hero Writers and Their Daily Journeys
Many (most?) heroes in stories go on quests once in a lifetime.
Hero writers go on a quest EVERY time that we write.
This week, I’ve been working on a novel. A new novel. Well, not really new. But this week’s work furthers the newest version.
In truth, I have been working on this novel for at least four years. But it’s part of a series that I’ve been working on for nearly 20 years.
WTF! Right?
Who would do such a thing? Who would keep going and trying for almost two decades?
The heroes in books and movies — heroes that we love, admire, that we want to be — go on quests. As Christopher Vogler could tell you, they usually resist the quest at first. Vogler writes, “Put yourself in the hero’s shoes and you can see that it’s a difficult passage. [From the ordinary safe world to the special world of the quest.] You’re being asked to say yes to a great unknown, to an adventure that will be exciting but also dangerous and even life-threatening…. You stand at a threshold of fear, and an understandable reaction would be to hesitate or even refuse the Call, at least temporarily” (2007, p. 107). Heroes in stories believe that they are not qualified for this challenge. Sometimes they don’t know what the challenge really is, but they need to move on with their lives and subsequently they move into the special world where they are tested.
Writers, those special people who actually write the stories, need not face any sort of physical dangers. We, like our readers, need not travel away from our desks, our armchairs. Which makes the journey even more challenging because no one has bid us farewell, or good luck.
Our favorite heroes — like Frodo, Harry Potter, Rocky — have some quality that really does make them the perfect candidate to take up the challenge.
They enter the special world and they train. They dedicate themselves to honing their skills — magic, physical endurance — and they get to live this life until they meet their foe or find the treasure or learn that they have the quality all along, they just needed to value their own self-confidence.
But writers dip down into the special world every time that we sit down at our keyboard, our lined pad, our typewriter.
We usually have other commitments that keep pulling us back into the ordinary world.
We steal away hours, minutes, in order to craft a new plot, develop a new protagonist.
Those commitment can be family. Young children that cry out when they need our help. A family for whom we cook and clean. Other people that rely on us to take them to appointments, watch their games, be there when they need a shoulder to cry on.
We usually work another job that helps to pay the bills.
And often — while we’re working that job — our minds lead us away to the special world that we are crafting, the world that we’re dying to capture on paper, or in a document, so that one day we can finally scream out to our ordinary worlds, “I write stories. Look what I wrote! I’m a writer!!!”
Sure, our family, our closest friends, even our coworkers, often know of our call to write, but unless they, too, engage in some secret quest to create, they may discount our efforts as a pastime.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with hobbies and pastimes.
But how often do those who create imagine a world where they can actually make money from their creations?
I did that for a while. For over twenty years, I was a professional seamstress. I worked for interior designers and home decorating stores. I got into the business not by intention so much as by association. I worked in a fabric store — one that also sold fabrics for draperies, upholstery, etc., and on occasion I would be asked to alter window treatments that the regular workroom had made incorrectly.
You might wonder ‘Why didn’t the workroom fix their mistakes’?
The simple answer is that the workroom never MADE mistakes.
It is amazing what one can learn by reworking a hand crafted item — taking the finished product and UN-sewing just enough to achieve a successful end result.
It is also amazing just how much fitting is required to achieve a successful end result when the thing that you are dressing is a static, stationary thing like a window, a door, or a couch. I mean, everyone expects an anxious bride to gain a few pounds or lose weight, but an interior French door should not wax and wane in the same way.
From my repairs I learned how to start. From my learning how to start, I also learned how to measure, calculate yardage, and maybe most important of all- how to deal with my OWN mistakes.
One time, I accidentally cut a drapery length in half. You guessed it. The 108” cut was sliced into two pieces at the 54” mark. And this was no ordinary fabric. This was the only remaining fabric in the country of a custom-run of a Frank Lloyd Wright design. It was going to adorn the windows in a Frank Lloyd Wright house.
As soon as I made the cut, I knew what I had done.
And I nearly threw up!
How did I recover?
I decreased the fullness in all of the panels so that I needed one less width of the precious fabric.
The irony of this situations was that I ended up with those two pieces left over.
I did not share this mistake with the designer.
Like so many of my mistakes that I recovered from, I never shared my problems. I only sought ways to recover.
I retired from sewing about thirteen years ago when I started teaching expository and research writing at two different colleges.
But through it all, I held fast to my dream to be a writer. To pen entertaining stories of heroes and quests.
The young boy who struggles to play violin and follows a thieving elf into Musicland.
The frustrated artist who finally learns to be happy.
The thirty-something granddaughter who escapes her grandmother’s tenacious talons and loves being single and being a mom.
When I wrote my dissertation, I discovered that writers, ALL writers, make regular quests.
We keep our day jobs.
We take care of our families.
We struggle.
We dream.
We think.
We write.
We write and write and write WHILE doing everything else.
We have no choice.
Our quest may not matter to any other living soul. But it matters to us. And we toil and task whenever we can.
Hero writers go on a quest EVERY time that we write.
It matters.
Know this: It really does matter.
