The healing power of words is their most magical aspect. Writers, like the shamans or medicine men and women of ancient cultures, have the potential to be healers.
WRITERS AND SHAMANS
Shamans have been called "the wounded healers." Like writers, they are special people set apart from the rest by their dreams, visions, or unique experiences. Shamans, like many writers, are prepared for their work by enduring terrible ordeals. They may have a dangerous illness or fall from a cliff and have nearly every bone broken. They are chewed by a lion or mauled by a bear. They are taken apart and put back together again in a new way. In a sense they have died and been reborn, and this experience gives them special powers. Many writers come to their craft only after they have been shattered by life in some way.
Often those chosen to be shamans are identified by special dreams or visions, in which the gods or spirits take them away to other worlds where they undergo terrible ordeals. They are laid out on a table to have all their bones removed and broken. Before their eyes, their bones and organs are split, cooked, and reassembled in a new order. They are tuned to a new frequency like radio receivers. As shamans, they are now able to receive messages from other worlds.
They return to their tribes with new powers. They have the ability to travel to other worlds and bring back stories, metaphors, or myths that guide, heal, and give meaning to life. They listen to the confusing, mysterious dreams of their people and give them back in the form of stories that provide guidelines for right living.
We writers share in the godlike power of the shamans. We not only travel to other worlds but create them out of space and time. When we write, we truly travel to these worlds of our imagination. Anyone who has tried to write seriously knows this is why we need solitude and concentration. We are actually traveling to another time and place.
As writers we travel to other worlds not as mere daydreamers, but as shamans with the magic power to bottle up those worlds and bring them back in the form of stories for others to share. Our stories have the power to heal, to make the world new again, to give people metaphors by which they can better understand their own lives.
When we writers apply the ancient tools of the archetypes and the Hero's Journey to modern stories, we stand on the shoulders of the mythmakers and shamans of old. When we try to heal our people with the wisdom of myth, we are the modern shamans. We ask the same ageless, childlike questions presented by the myths: Who am I? Where did I come from? What happens when I die? What does it mean? Where do I fit in? Where am I bound on my own Hero's Journey?
At one point when the Disney company was remaking itself in the 1980s, I was called upon to review the major fairy tales of world cultures, looking for potential animation subjects on the order of Walt Disney's colorful interpretations of European folk stories, like "Snow White" and "Cinderella" from the Brothers Grimm and "The Sleeping Beauty" from Perrault's collection of French fairy tales. It was a chance to re-open the mental laboratory to study old friends from my childhood that Walt Disney had not gotten around to tackling, like Rapunzel and Rumpelstiltskin. It was also a great opportunity for me to sample many kinds of stories from different cultures, identifying similarities and differences and extracting storytelling principles from this broad sample.
In the course of my adult wanderings through what is normally considered children's literature, I came to a few firm conclusions about stories, these powerful and mysterious creations of the human mind. For instance, I came to believe that stories have healing power, that they can help us deal with difficult emotional situations by giving us examples of human behavior, perhaps similar in some way to the struggles we are going through at some stage of life, and which might inspire us to try a different strategy for living. I believe stories have survival value for the human species and that they were a big step in human evolution, allowing us to think metaphorically and to pass down the accumulated wisdom of the race in story form. I believe stories are metaphors by which people measure and adjust their own lives by comparing them to those of the characters. I believe the basic metaphor of most stories is that of the journey, and that good stories show at least two journeys, outer and inner, an outer journey in which the hero tries to do something difficult or get something, and an inner journey in which the hero faces some crisis of the spirit or test of character that leads to transformation. I believe stories are orientation devices, functioning like compasses and maps to allow us to feel oriented, centered, connected, more conscious, more aware of our identities and responsibilities and our relationship to the rest of the world.
But of all my beliefs about stories, one that has been particularly useful in the business of developing commercial stories for the movies is the idea that stories are somehow alive, conscious, and responsive to human emotions and wishes.
I have always suspected that stories are alive. They seem to be conscious and purposeful. Like living beings, stories have an agenda, something on their minds. They want something from you. They want to wake you up, to make you more conscious and more alive. They want to teach you a lesson disguised as entertainment. Under the guise of amusement, stories want to edify you, build up your character just a little by showing a moral situation, a struggle, and an outcome. They seek to change you in some small way, to make you just a bit more human by comparing your behavior to that of the characters.
The living, conscious, intentional quality of stories is here and there revealed in familiar fairy tales, like the one the Brothers Grimm collected called "Rumpelstiltskin," the tale of the little man with his power to spin straw into gold and a mysterious desire to own a human child. The story is found in many cultures where the little man is known by strange and funny names like Bulleribasius (Sweden), Tittelintuure (Finland), Praseidimio (Italy), Repelsteelije (Holland), and Grigrigredinmenufretin (France).
This was one of the stories that posed challenging questions in the mental laboratory of my earliest childhood. Who was this little man, where did he get his powers, and why did he want that human child? What was the lesson the girl in the story was supposed to learn? Later in life, as I returned to contemplate that story as part of my work for Walt Disney animation, many of those mysteries remained, but the deep wisdom of the folk tale helped me understand that stories are alive, that they actively respond to wishes, desires, and strong emotions in the characters, and that they are compelled to provide experiences that teach us some lesson in life.
THE STORY OF RUMPELSTILTSKIN
The well-known tale begins with a lovely young girl in a dangerous situation, an archetypal damsel in distress. She is the daughter of a miller who brags to the king that his daughter is so talented, she can even spin straw into gold. The king, a literal-minded fellow, says "That's the kind of talent I like!" and locks her in a room in his castle containing only a spinning wheel and piles of straw, warning that he's going to have her killed in the morning if she doesn't spin the straw into gold as her daddy promised.