I’ve hear it before. Writing is a journey. Work on your craft. Feel the story. Stock your toolbox. Create characters so real they tell the story themselves. Melt your heart down in a small lead bowl and pour it onto the paper like molten soul and then the world will ache at your truthy tellings…

Blah.

It all sounded like hippie crap to me.  Writing was an intellectual pursuit.  It had plot, characters, and theme.  Cross those three streams and, like in Ghostbusters, you could acheive anything. Well, like most things I encounter in my life, I was wrong.  Writing is, indeed, a journey in more ways than one.

First, it is a hero’s journey in the classic sense. Joseph Campbell summarized the hero’s journey, or monomyth, thusly: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Someone who actually sticks with writing for any length of time is challenged by the field itself to learn various abilities.  Writing with an economy of words; writing figuratively, allegorically, or abstractly; writing with a journalistic style where facts are placed in order of importance; or writing from the mind underneath the super-ego are just some of the tools a writer-pilgrim may find at his command. While these tools were always right in front of the writer, it isn’t until he undertakes the study, begins the journey, that he deciphers what they are and how they can be used to great effect on the reader. With this education he is then able to bestow the boons, as it were.

The second and probably more unexpected journey is one of self-realization. Once that first work is complete it is necessary – let me say it again: necessary – to put it away for a while. Now I’m not talking about someone constructing a horror-page-turner or Felix Superspy’s Adventure 17. I’m talking about that first work where you let the words come out from under your fake self – the self the world knows – and you put it all out on paper as ugly as it was born. It’s slippery with nasty juices, vulgar, and raw as a rug burn. And most of all, it’s real. That work has to sit for a short time. Then you come back to it and read.

Why wait? Well, as soon as I finished the rough draft of my book I went right back to rewriting it. This had a dual effect – or rather, dual failure. One, everything I read I liked. Of course I did. I had just written it. Why change what worked the first time. Second, I didn’t see anything past the story I was telling. My theme was there looking at me and it worked out great. Yay! To paraphrase Shel Silverstein – And the author was happy… but not really. It wasn’t until I went back the second time, months later, that I realized what I put into my story. There were unresolved conflicts in my own self that I had worked out in the book. Several of the characters were manifestations of parts of me. Their conflicts paralelled my own. Some of the wisdom in the story mirrored wisdom gained as I moved through manhood. Holy crap. I learned about myself by reading something I’d written.

So, now I sit here with a mostly empty toolbox I’m filling up. I recognize that I’m on the path. I’m working on my craft. And now that I know this writing business can be so personal, I tend to wonder if it isn’t almost irresponsibly self-indulgent. I would suppose the answer is that it’s self-indulgent, yes. But not irresponsibly so since if even one person feels a kinship by reading the story, I’ve bestowed a boon.