QUESTIONS
1. Have you noticed examples of characters making wishes early in stories? Give an example and tell how the wish was granted (or not) by the story.
2. What has been the role of wishing in your life? Have you learned to be careful what you wish for? Is there a story in that experience?
3. What are your short-term and long-term wishes, and how can you convert them into will and action? How would that work for characters in your story?
4. Can you think of examples of a story providing an unexpected answer to a character s wish? Write a story around the idea of someone wishing for something.
5. Are there wishes expressed or implied in other classic fairy tales and myths? How are the wishes granted or denied? Write a modern version of a fairy tale or myth and use the concept of wishing.
6. Read a myth, view a movie, read a book and analyze what universal wishes the story satisfies. What human wishes are expressed in your story?
7. Are there such things as fate or destiny? What do these terms mean to you? Do they have a role any more in modern life?
8. Brainstorm around the concept of wishing. Write the word in the center of a blank page and then around it write all the things you have wished for or are now wishing for in the future. See if some patterns emerge. Are your wishes realistic? What happens when your wishes are granted? What is keeping you from granting your own wishes? Apply the same exercise to a character. What is he or she wishing for? How do they convert wishing into will to achieve their goals?
A persistent feature of the Hero's Journey is that its stories tend to be polarized like two essential forces of nature, electricity and magnetism. Like them, stories create energy or exert force through polarities that organize the elements present into opposing camps with contrasting properties and orientations. Polarity is an essential principle of storytelling, governed by a few simple rules but capable of generating infinite conflict, complexity, and audience involvement.
A story needs a sense of oneness — unity — to feel like a satisfying and complete expression. It needs a single theme — a spine — something to unite it into a coherent work. But a story also needs a level of two-ness, a dimension of duality, to create tension and the possibility of movement. As soon as you choose a single thought or character to unite your story, you have automatically generated its polar opposite, a contrary concept or antagonistic character, and therefore a duality or polarized system that conducts energy between the two parties. Unity begets duality; the existence of one implies the possibility of two.
As soon as you imagine two points in space, you have generated a line of force between them and the potential for interaction, communication, deal-making, movement, emotion, and conflict.
If your story is about the single quality of trust, the possibility of suspicion immediately arises. Suspicion is necessary to test and challenge the concept of trust. If your main character wants something, there must be someone who doesn't want her to get it, who brings out hidden qualities in your hero by opposing her. If not, there's no story. We enjoy stories that are polarized by a struggle between two strong characters, like The African Queen or Driving Miss Daisy, but we are also entertained by stories polarized by great principles of living that tug the characters in two directions at once, so they are torn between duty and love, for example, or between revenge and forgiveness. Many a show-business tale like The Buddy Holly Story is polarized by loyalty and ambition; loyalty to the group that the hero grew up with versus the demands of ambition that require ditching those people when the hero moves to a new level of success.
Every aspect of the Hero's Journey is polarized along at least two lines, the inner and outer dimensions and the positive and negative possibilities for each element. These polarities create potential for contrast, challenge, conflict, and learning. As the polarized nature of magnetic fields can be used to generate electrical energy, polarity in a story seems to be an engine that generates tension and movement in the characters and a stirring of emotions in the audience.
We live in a polarized universe, both as a physical fact all around us and as a deeply ingrained mental habit. On the physical level we are ruled by the very real polarities of day and night, up and down, earth and space, inside and outside. Our bodies are polarized, with limbs and organs distributed to the left and right sides, and a brain whose left and right sides have quite different responsibilities. We are polarized as a species, coming in two basic models, male and female. Polarized categories like age and youth or life and death are realities that no one can ignore.
The Universe itself seems to be polarized into systems like matter and energy, matter and anti-matter, atoms that carry plus or minus charges, positive or negative poles in magnetism and electricity. Our entire galaxy is polarized, a spinning disk of stars, dust, and gases that has definite north and south poles and its own polarized magnetic field. And of course the whole world of modern computer technology has been generated from a simple binary system, 0 and I, a polarized off-on switch which apparently can yield infinite computing power from one little polarity.
Polarity is an equally pervasive force as a habit of thinking. We often act as if all questions have a right or wrong answer, all statements are either true or false, people are either good or bad, normal or abnormal. Either a thing is real or it isn't. Either you are with me or against me. Sometimes these categories are useful, but they can also be limiting and may not adequately represent reality. Polarization is a powerful force in politics and rhetoric, allowing leaders and propagandists to mobilize anger and passion by artificially dividing the world into "us" and "them" categories, a simplification of the world that makes it easier to deal with, but ignores many intermediate or alternative points of view.
However, polarity is a real phenomenon in human relationships and an important engine of conflict in storytelling. Characters in relationships strongly tend to become polarized as part of their process of growing and learning through conflict. Polarity follows certain rules, and good storytellers instinctively exploit them for their dramatic potential.
THE RULES OF POLARITY
I. Opposites Attract
The first rule of polarity is that opposites attract. A story is in some ways like a magnet with its mysterious, invisible power of attraction. Two magnets, properly aligned, with the south pole of one pointed at the north pole of the other, will strongly attract each other, just as two contrasting characters can be drawn powerfully to one another. The clash of their differences attracts and holds an audience's attention.
Two lovers, friends, or allies may be attracted to one another because they complete one other, perhaps clashing at first because they possess contrasting qualities, but discovering that each needs something the other has. Unconsciously, people may seek out those whose strengths and weaknesses balance weak and strong qualities in themselves.