The waves are still rolling in from the pebbles in the pond that were the original Writer's Journey and its second edition. Since almost a decade has gone by since the second edition was launched, the ideas in that volume have been strenuously tested in a number of story-making laboratories around the world. Concepts I had developed as a story consultant for the Disney company and as a teacher of story construction have been through a fresh battery of challenges in the real world that I hope have made them stronger. The new chapters of this book will, I hope, reflect some of the ideas that have continued to evolve around the Hero's Journey concept. There are new chapters on the life force operating in stories, on the mechanism of polarity that rules in storytelling, on the wisdom of the body, catharsis, and other concepts that I have developed in recent years in my lectures and in practical work in Hollywood and in Europe. I have gathered together this new material near the end of the book, in an appendix following "Looking Back on the Journey."
In the nine years since the last edition, I have traveled widely, applied my ideas to writing, publishing, and producing projects of my own, and done a few more "tours of duty" as it were for major Hollywood studios. The first of these jobs, commencing just after the publishing of the second edition, was a four-year return to 20th Century Fox, where I had been a story analyst at the beginning of my career. This time around I was operating at a slightly higher level, as a development executive for the Fox 2000 feature film label, with more responsibility and pressure. I was involved in the research and development aspects of films like Courage
Under Fire, Volcano, Anna and the King, Fight Club, and The Thin Red Line. My concepts of storytelling, shaped by the patterns of mythology and the thinking of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, were now being tested not only on animated features but on big-budget, live-action movies for adult audiences.
The office atmosphere of Fox 2000 was a fascinating place to study the ways of power. In the past I had been aware of places like it, but as a story analyst I had not been inside those meeting rooms where the decisions were taken about the writers, the stories, and the movies made from them. Power flows in those rooms like hot lava, and until I worked at Fox 2000 I had only heard it rumbling. Now I was standing hip deep in it.
It was the most adult environment I had ever been in, run on unspoken but rigorous principles of personal responsibility. No whining allowed, no excuses. And the same fierce intensity was applied to the stories. Every concept, every comment, every suggestion had to pass the most stringent tests of common sense, logic, and show business instinct. I had the good fortune to work with some of the best story brains in the business, foremost among them being Fox 2000's founder Laura Ziskin, but also many talented executives, writers, directors, and producers. In this exacting laboratory I learned useful techniques for analyzing stories, ways of looking at characters and describing story situations that I hope will inform the new sections of this revised edition.
Among the things I learned at Fox 2000 was to listen to my body as a judge of a story's effectiveness. I realized that the good stories were affecting the organs of my body in various ways, and the really good ones were stimulating more than one organ. An effective story grabs your gut, tightens your throat, makes your heart race and your lungs pump, brings tears to your eyes or an explosion of laughter to your lips. If I wasn't getting some kind of physiological reaction from a story, I knew it was only affecting me on an intellectual level and therefore it would probably leave audiences cold. You will find my thoughts about this in a new chapter on the wisdom of the body.
When my job at Fox 2000 came to an end, as all good things must do, I wanted to write and produce some projects of my own. I soon found myself writing the screenplay for an animated feature, the result of a lecture trip to Munich. I was approached by producer Eberhard Junkersdorf to write the script for his version of the merry adventures of Till Eulenspiegel, Europe's favorite medieval clown. I knew of Tills colorful character from stories I had read as a child and was delighted to take up the challenge. I enjoyed working with the energetic and charming Herr Junkersdorf and his international team of artists. Eberhard is so persuasive he even got me to contribute lyrics for two songs on the film s soundtrack, which really was a challenge. The film was released in Germany as Till Euknspiegel, and I am hopeful it will be released in English one day under its English title, Jester Till The experience taught me a multitude of lessons that I have tried to incorporate into the present edition.
Next up, I got involved as an executive producer of an independent feature, PS. Your Cat Is Dead, actor/director/writer Steve Guttenberg s adaptation of the play and novel by James Kirkwood. This took me deep into the editing room for a period of months, another of the sacred temples of the movie business and for me, a place of intense joy. I loved sitting in the dark staring at images all day long and making the pictures dance. I called it going into the submarine, a blissful world of concentration that called on every cell of my creativity and forced me to articulate my ideas in order to communicate with my creative partners. I could see many ways in which the editing process echoes the writing process, and imagined new possibilities for combining the two. I learned new principles and gave the old theories a good workout.
The process of editing seemed to me to be a lot like making a wooden boat, like one of those sleek dragon-ships the Vikings made. The spine of the story is like the keel, the major plot points are the ribs, and the individual scenes and lines of dialogue are the planks and rigging that complete the vessel, a vehicle for your vision that you hope will sail on the seas of public attention.
Another insight from the editing room was a greater appreciation of the importance of focus. I realized that focused attention is one of the rarest things in the world, and that an audience is giving a lot when they devote their full attention to your work for two hours. There is only so much focus available in a given work, and it seems the more elements you take out of a composition, the more focus is poured into those that remain. Cutting lines, pauses, and entire scenes sharpened the focus on the elements that were left, as if a large number of diffuse spotlights had been concentrated into a few bright beams aimed at select important points.
PS. Your Cat Is Dead enjoyed a brief theatrical run and then was distributed on DVD. After that adventure I concentrated for a time on traveling to give seminars for various international cinema and television training programs. Most recently I have gone back to the Hollywood studio world with a tour of duty at Paramount Pictures and a number of consulting jobs for other studios. I tried my hand at a new form, writing the first installment of Ravenskull, a story for a "manga," a highly stylized kind of comic book from Japan. This is a highly cinematic form, much like writing a screenplay and with a great deal of emphasis on the visual.
I hope something of what I have learned from collaborating with artists has found its way into this latest edition. It has been an intense pleasure to work with my artist friends Michele Montez and Fritz Springmeyer, whose illustrations provide the chapter headings in this volume.
And while I'm cataloguing the influences of recent years that inform the changes in the present volume, some of my most valuable time was spent walking the beach and thinking about why things are as they are and how they got to be that way. I tried to understand how the sun and stars move across the sky and how the moon got there. I saw that it's all waves, all of the Universe, just echoes and counter-echoes of the original cosmic sound, not the Big Bang, that's the wrong sound effect. It was more like a gong, that's it, the Great Gong, the original creative vibration that rolled out from a single pinpoint of concentration and unraveled and echoed and collided to create everything that is, and the Hero's Journey is part of that. I watch the sunsets march up and down the horizon, creating my own Stonehenge from the islands and ridge peaks that mark solstice and equinox, inviting me to puzzle out the place of stories and my own place in the story of everything. I hope you find your own place in that design. For those to whom the concept is new, bon voyage, and for those who are familiar with earlier versions, I hope you find some new surprises and connections in this work, and that it serves you on your own creative journeys.