…how much I’m looking forward to being back in Georgia.
My flight leaves from JFK on Saturday and arrives in Istanbul at about 6 am on Sunday. The flight to Tbilisi doesn’t leave for another seven hours, so I plan to take the tram downtown and see some of the sights. I’ll arrive in Tbilisi late that afternoon, spend the night at a hostel…
…and then take off the next morning for Kars, Turkey. I plan to meet up with a friend there and go tour the ruins of Ani, ancient capital of Armenia. I have no idea yet how I’m going to get there, but there should be some buses in Tbilisi or Akhaltsikhe, and from Kars you can charter a taxi.
So after all that, I’ll head out to Baghdati to meet my new host family! For the fall semester, I’ve been assigned to the school in the village of Rokhi:
It’s about an hour south of Kutaisi, right up against the Lesser Caucasus mountains, and it looks like an awesome place! A couple of other TLGers have been there before me, and they tell me it’s really great. It’s definitely going to be a change of pace, going from city to village, but it’s one I’m looking forward to. There are only 300 students in the school (grades 1-12), so maybe I’ll learn all my students’ names this time.
The family I’ve been assigned to sounds a bit older, with a thirty year old son who works at the school. It sounds a bit rustic, with Turkish toilets and no internet at home, but I’m looking forward to that, especially the no internet part. Don’t worry, I plan to get out and blog regularly–I’m sure there are local internet cafes, plus Kutaisi isn’t that far and I know where to get internet there.
Getting out to church is going to be a bit tricky: I’ll probably go into Kutaisi on Saturday, take the noon train into Tbilisi (5 GEL) and spend the night at a hostel (15 GEL), or take the sleeper train (10 GEL) and show up in the morning. Getting back shouldn’t be too difficult: the Baghdati marshrutka leaves from Didube at 16:00 (or so I hear), and from there it’s only about 6 or 7 kilometers.
I have no idea how long I’ll be in Georgia this time: my contract runs until the end of December but I may extend again, depending on what other options open up. I’ve really fallen in love with Georgia since coming there, and may just choose to stay on another year. The Caucasus is a really amazing place, full of hidden treasures and remote places.
Which reminds me: I’m bringing a tent and sleeping bag this time, to do some backpacking in Borjomi and Tusheti. Packing them was tough: the airline restriction is 20 kg total of weight (44.1 lbs), and after a whole lot of work, I finally got it down to 42.5 lbs. The disassembled backpack frame is going to have to go as a separate piece of luggage, since it was too big to fit in any bag, but it shouldn’t be too hard to reassemble it out in Georgia.
That’s about it. I’ll leave you with this awesome Georgian song I found on youtube. The dance troop is Erisioni, and they put on an amazing show that’s kind of like Riverdance, except for Georgia. Let me tell you: when it comes to dance (folk or ballroom), I don’t think anyone in the world is as amazing as the Georgians.
I’m back from vacation, but I’m going to take a break from the Hero’s Journey trope posts to talk about something that I really feel passionate about. I hope you’ll forgive me if this turns into a rant, but I think this is an important issue that has some very dangerous implications that need to be explored.
In modern fiction, there’s a very prominent trope that a man is not a virgin. The basic idea is this: if the protagonist is an adult male and he hasn’t yet had sex with a woman, there’s something fundamentally wrong with him. Of course, because of his adventurous lifestyle, he can’t be tied down in a committed relationship–that would spoil the story. But he can’t be holding himself back, either, lest his manhood come into question. And most of the time, he doesn’t really want to, anyway.
This trope has a whole host of unfortunate implications, though, all of which serve to reinforce constrictive gender roles, disempower both men and women, drive a gulf of misunderstanding between the sexes, and emasculate true manhood and its role in our society.
To demonstrate this, let’s take this trope to the logical conclusions that our society seems to have come to.
In fiction, the sex as rite of passage trope is often seen in stories about angsty teenagers trying desperately to get laid. These are not typically stories about love–they are stories about peer pressure, objectification, and power. By equating sex as a rite of passage in this way, it actually divorces sex from any concept of love or commitment, and turns any form of physical intimacy into a caricature of itself.
It doesn’t stop there, though. If sex is a rite of passage, then it’s only reasonable that the young novice should have an older mentor to help him through the initiation process. Thus we get the professional sex-ed trope, where the boy’s mentors or guardians help guide him through his first sexual encounter. The implications for pedophilia and underage sex are more than a little disturbing.
We can see this trope in action in the way we treat female sex offenders. If a 30-something male teacher has sex with one of his female students, he gets a lengthy prison sentence and spends the rest of his life stigmatized as a predator. If a 30-something female teacher has sex with one of her male students, she gets a slap on the wrist and TV spot. She’s not a sexual predator–she’s just having a personal crisis.
Needless to say, this double standard is extremely destructive for the victims of such abuse.
If a true man is not a virgin, then a true man doesn’t say no to sex. Even if he can say no, he won’t because that’s just not what men do. Therefore, being a man is functionally synonymous with being a pervert.
The danger here is that it reduces men to their basic animal urges. If being a man means finding a warm, inviting place for your penis each night, then you might as well go out to the pasture and eat grass. Whatever happened to self control and delayed gratification? Do you think anything meaningful would ever have come out of our civilization if we couldn’t keep our pants on?
And yet, both men and women seem perfectly willing to believe that it’s not only unmanly for a man to control his animal urges, it’s impossible. On the Kindle Boards forum about a month ago, there was a thread on erotica and marriage and one of the members posted this:
I used to work as a forums admin on a large women’s forum (over 100,000 members) and the relationships forum had a lot of heated discussions on this topic. I won’t of course refer to any specific threads, but the discussions went a lot like this:
One woman concerned that her husband was spending too much time watching porn
A massive amount of women telling her that it’s ok, that ‘all men watch porn’
A small amount of women saying either they don’t agree with it or that their men don’t view it
A percentage of women saying their men are addicted to porn and would rather watch it than go to bed with a willing wife
A percentage of women saying it’s not the porn itself that concerns them, but the type of porn their husbands watch
Another group of women saying they either watch it themselves, or watch it with their husbands
Yet another small group of women who either were or are prostitutes/strippers/involved in amateur porn (who are either for or against based on their experiences)
A very vocal percentage of women saying that if your man says he doesn’t watch it, he’s a liar
A heated discussion ensuing….
How does it possibly empower men to tell them that they cannot control their own sexual impulses? It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, which harms not only men but women as well. If all men are perverts, then women can’t afford to wait for a decent man and should settle instead for a deadbeat porn addict.
This one really gets to me. I hear it everywhere, even from people who don’t consciously buy into the logic behind it. I used to buy into it myself. It’s the idea that women are so complicated that they are impossible to understand, whereas men are as simple as an on/off switch.
In my experience, men and woman are both human. Both of them are equally complex and equally emotional. Yes, they are different, but in such a way that it’s equally difficult (or equally easy) for the one to understand the other. Generally, women tend to externalize their complexity, whereas men tend to internalize it. At least, that’s what I’ve found.
Our society takes this to the next level, however, and teaches men that they should just swallow their emotions. If they don’t, they risk being seen as weak or effeminate (never mind that equating weakness with femininity is a whole other can of worms in itself). And after a lifetime of living this way, it can be hard not to believe that that’s just the way men are.
But this is perhaps the most insidious danger of all. It’s the falsehood that real men don’t cry, or show emotion, or have any capacity for compassion or tenderness. It’s the fallacy of equating strength with violence. It’s the destructive belief that men will never rise above the lowest common denominator of their hormones, and should never even try. And because men are so obviously different from women in this regard, any attempt to understand them would be futile.
But how can you have a committed relationship with someone you can’t understand? How can you possibly hope to make the necessary sacrifices for each other to make the thing work out? And if you can’t reach the understanding necessary for a committed, loving relationship, how can you ever hope to raise a family together?
So yeah, sorry for the rant, but this trope REALLY gets under my skin. It doesn’t help that one of my favorite authors, David Gemmell, is a big fan of it. I tried to get into his Rigante series, but this trope was so strong that I couldn’t finish the first book.
I should also clarify that the thing that irks me isn’t just the trope, but how much our society has bought into it. By themselves, tropes are neither good nor bad, but when something like this becomes so prevalent that it defines the entire operating system on which our society is based, that’s when someone needs to speak out.
And for the record, I am a 28 year old single male who is not ashamed to say that he is still saving himself for marriage. Am I gay? No. Has it been difficult? Yes. Am I anything less than a man because of it? Hell, no. In fact, I would argue that the wait has made me more of a man than I otherwise would have been, and I’m sure that my future wife will agree.
Real men aren’t defined by their hormones or their sexual history. They’re defined by the way they treat the people around them, especially the ones who are most important in their lives.
I know what you’re thinking: “Huh? Why does the hero die at the beginning of the story? Isn’t that supposed to happen later?” Well…yes, it does, but the symbolic death at this point is important, too. At its core, the hero’s journey is a story of transformation and growth. When the hero comes back from the lands of adventure, he isn’t the same person he was when he first left–he’s been changed in some way. And in order for that change to take place, the hero needs to let go of who he was and move forward.
Joseph Campbell describes it like this:
The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale. The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown and would appear to have died. This popular motif gives emphasis to the lesson that the passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation. Instead of passing outward, beyond the confines of the visible world, the hero goes inward, to be born again.
Of course, the death and rebirth doesn’t have to be literal (though it can be, as it was with Dionysus). The point is to show that the hero has fully crossed the threshold, cutting all his ties with home and burning his ships on the shores of the land of adventure. Once the hero passes through the belly of the whale, there’s no going back–it’s all or nothing now.
So how common is this trope really? Actually, it occurs more often than you might think. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, it happens when Harry boards the Hogwarts Express and realizes he’s leaving his old world completely behind. It happens in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when Peter and the others decide to go after Mr. Tumnas instead of returning to their own world through the wardrobe. It happens in Star Wars IV when the Millennium Falcon gets sucked into the Death Star, and in Final Fantasy IV when Cecil washes up in Mysidia.
The main theme running through all these examples is that adventures are hard. If they were easy, anyone could go on them–and no one would be changed by them. They may be fun, and they’re definitely worth it, but to set out on one, you always have to give up something close to you–and that’s hard.
At the edge of the familiar world lies a threshold, the boundary separating the peaceful, boring land of the hero’s home from the dangerous and exciting lands of adventure. The threshold might be literal, such as the wall in Stardust and Sabriel, or it might be more symbolic, such as the field in Lord of the Rings that marks the furthest that Samwise has ever gone. Either way, the threshold is often the site of the hero’s first significant challenge–and the one who offers that challenge is the threshold guardian.
According to Joseph Campbell:
The ‘threshold guardian’…[stands] for the limits of the hero’s present sphere, or life horizon. Beyond them is darkness, the unknown and danger…The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades.
In terms of story, the purpose of the threshold guardian is not to present some impossible test or to pose some sort of world-altering threat. Rather, they exist to mark the boundary between the familiar world and the unfamiliar, and to show how the hero is different from all the other people who chose to stay at home instead. In other words, their main purpose is to kick-start the adventure.
For example, in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, the threshold guardians are the Tusken Raiders who roam the Jundland Wastes surrounding Luke Skywalker’s home. Venturing out into the wastes is dangerous–yet Luke does it, to bring back R2D2 after the droid runs away.
When R2D2 warns Luke that the Tuskens are approaching, Luke doesn’t run away from them–he crawls to the top of the ridge to get a better look. This leads to his first real encounter with danger, and almost gets him killed. Fortunately, Obi Wan Kenobi rescues him and takes him home, telling him about the ways of the force and presenting him with his father’s lightsaber. The adventure is off to a good start.
If Luke had never ventured out into the Jundland Wastes, or if he had run from the Tuskens at the first sign of danger, he never would have been rescued by Obi Wan, never would have learned about his father, never would have left his home and probably would have died when the Imperials attacked his uncle’s homestead. If the Tuskens had never attacked him, he would have loaded R2D2 into the speeder and gone back home, never meeting Obi Wan as well. Without the Tusken Raiders, the whole story never would have happened.
In Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, Draco Malfoy plays a similar role. If Harry Potter had joined House Slytherin, Voldemort would probably have taken over before the end of the first book. Instead, the early animosity between Draco and Harry’s newfound friends pushed him to take sides, setting the stage for everything else that was to come.
The threshold guardians don’t always have to take an adversarial role. In a lot of stories, defeating the guardian means winning an ally, even sometimes a best friend. That’s what happens when Robin Hood spars with Little John–in fact, the trope is subverted because Little John actually wins. Or perhaps the whole thing was a secret test of character, because it’s Robin Hood’s good-natured reaction to losing that wins Little John over.
Not every instance of the hero’s journey has a threshold guardian, but many of them do. It’s a clear and compelling way to mark the threshold between home and adventure, which is present in every hero’s journey, simply by definition. When done well, it’s a great way to show what makes the hero different from all the other would-be adventurers who chose to stay home.
Under the hood of my latest ebook release, Star Wanderers: Part I.
So a couple of days ago, I set out on a quest to figure out a better way to build an ebook. In the process, I ended up learning WAY more about ebooks than I’d bargained for, in the most awesome of possible ways. Seriously, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so empowered as an indie author as I do right now.
My old process was extremely convoluted. It basically involved saving my manuscript as HTML (introducing all kinds of excess code) and using four or five programs to cobble together a Frankenstein-like creation, with bolts sticking out of its forehead and extra arms and fingers sticking out of weird places. The tools I was using were like blunt instruments, and I was operating them blindfolded.
So what changed? Well, three things:
I added the Writer2ePub plugin for Open Office / Libre Office,
I downloaded an open-source epub editor called Sigil, and
I watched this video:
So what did I learn?
<geek>
First of all, that ebooks are WAY simpler than I thought they were. An epub is basically a zipped folder containing HTML files for the text, jpgs/gifs for the cover and any interior illustrations, a CSS stylesheet, maybe some extra fonts (if you want to get fancy), and two additional additional files ending in .opf and .ncx that look a lot like HTML files.
So why is this so exciting? Because it means that if you know HTML/CSS, you can build a fully functional epub file using only notepad, windows explorer, and the command prompt. THAT’S IT! And if you want to learn HTML, you can do so for free at w3schools.com.
Basically, an epub is structured just like a website, except that an ebook reader reads it instead of an internet browser. If you can build a website, you can build an epub with very little trouble. Even if you can only tweak a website, you can build an epub with very little trouble.
</geek>
In other words, the barriers to entry for ebook publishing are ridiculously low. If you’re patient and a good learner (or hell, just a good learner), there is not a single reason why you need to spend any money to format your ebooks, upload them directly to retailers, or do anything else. Using tools that are 100% available for free, you can create a product that looks every bit as professional as anything coming out of New York–in many cases, even more professional.
So what’s my new process?
1) Format the master file in Open Office.
This includes adding the copyright page and table of contents, adding anchors (in OO they’re called “bookmarks”) and hyperlinks, adding the author’s note and acknowledgments, any teasers, etc. I save the file in open document format, add “Smashwords Edition” on the copyright page and save it as a .doc file for Smashwords.
At some point, I’m going to upgrade to Libre Office, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. When I do, it’ll basically be the same thing.
2) Export as .epub using the Writer2ePub plugin.
I cannot tell you how happy I am with this Open Office / Libre Office plugin. It pulls out all of the unnecessary formatting and breaks up every chapter into a separate, cleanly coded HTML file, all bundled together into a fairly simple epub. SO MUCH BETTER THAN SAVING AS HTML. Or Mark Coker’s “nuclear option,” for that matter.
I don’t add the cover at this point, though. Writer2ePub adds some weird stuff if you do it that way, and I find it easier just to code it manually in the next step.
3) Finalize the .epub in Sigil.
Sigil is basically just an HTML editor with some extra functionality that allows it to build an epub from those HTML files. It’s easy to learn, simple to use, and tells you exactly what’s wrong when something breaks. Unlike Calibre and Mobipocket Creator, you can always see what’s going on underneath the hood. Simple, clean, and elegant. I love it.
This is the phase that takes the most work. I add the cover, fill in the relevant metadata, tweak the CSS stylesheet for margins and indents, add the book guides, build the table of contents, etc. If you want to know exactly how I do this, let me know and I’ll write up a post on it later. It’s a little technical, but not too difficult. Like I said, if you know even a modicum of HTML, you can figure it out.
Once this step is finished, I have the final epub version of my book. I upload that to Pubit! and Kobo Writing Life, and just about anywhere else outside of Amazon where I sell my book. Someday soon, Smashwords will hopefully allow you to directly upload an epub, at which point I’ll do that here as well.
4) Convert to .mobi with KindleGen.
Amazon uses its own proprietary format for ebooks, unlike everywhere else, which takes the open source epub format. This is probably because of all the weird and funky stuff that Amazon likes to track for data collection purposes, although honestly, who knows? A mobi file is about twice as large as an epub, and I suspect that that’s the reason.
KindleGen is a free program that Amazon has made available to developers in order to facilitate conversion of epubs and other ebook formats into mobi. It’s a command line tool, which means that you have to get a little retro to use it. But hey, I grew up in the 90s with DOS, so it’s actually kind of nostalgic.
Once you’ve got KindleGen installed to c:\kindlegen, all you basically need to do is go to the file folder where your ebook is saved and enter the following command:
c:\kindlegen\kindlegen mybook.epub -c1 -verbose
“mybook.epub” is whatever you named your epub file, “-c1” stands for standard DOC compression, and “-verbose” stands for verbose output (whatever that means). There are other options you can enter, but I’m not sure what they do yet. All I know is that if you want to convert from epub to mobi, this will give you a clean result.
There are a few small things that get lost in the conversion, so you need to add them as redundancies in the epub. The biggest one I’ve noticed so far is the paragraph indents: if you go into the CSS stylesheet using Sigil and add p { … text-indent: 2em; … } that should fix it.
And that’s it! Once this step is finished, I’ve got the final mobi version and can upload that directly to Amazon and my kindle. Once that’s done, my book is available from every major ebook retailer in every country in the world. Total time = maybe an hour (plus however long it takes for the retailers to publish the files to their stores).
I know it’s 2012 and this is old news by now, but do you have any idea how cool this is? With one hour of work and two or three programs, all of which are available for free, I can produce a clean, professionally formatted ebook, and sell it around the world instantaneously with a marginal cost of zero.
And now, because I took the time to learn how to use the tools, I can be confident that there aren’t any bits of rogue or useless code in it either. The only “black box” is really the mobi format, but I could probably crack that and figure it out if I wanted to.
So yeah, needless to say, I am extremely happy to be an indie writer. 🙂
However, it is not typically where the story begins. In order for the hero to leave the ordinary world, he must first start out there, so we know what’s at stake and what he’s leaving behind. This is why Luke Skywalker starts out on his uncle’s homestead, and why Neo starts out as a bored and lonely employee of Metacortex. Events outside the hero’s experience may have already put him on a trajectory to leave on the adventure, but he won’t know it until the call comes.
The hero may start out in a quiet, peaceful village, far removed from any sort of conflict–or he may start out in the middle of a crapsack world, as is the case with dystopian fiction. The important thing is that it’s the world he’s always known–that he hasn’t ever really made an effort to leave or change it.
How he feels about his world largely determines how he chooses to respond to the call. In older literature, the hero typically refuses it. The advantage of this is that it gives the reader a sense of scope–that this adventure is not a small or a trivial thing. It also sets up an immediate minor conflict that gives some motion to the opening chapters.
In modern stories, though, it’s more common for the hero (or his friends) to jump at the call. There are also many advantages to this. In Lord of the Rings, it gives Frodo an immediate band of sidekicks. In Harry Potter, it plays up the sense of wonder at the magical world. In the Chronicles of Prydain, it highlights the impulsiveness and naivete of Terran, as he realizes later on in the story just how stupid of him it was.
I just read a fascinating Q&A on Reddit with Hugh Howey, author of the self-published phenomenon Wool. After six trancelike hours reading through all the comments, all I can say is “wow.”
Okay, I guess I can say a little more. Yesterday, I listened to Brandon Sanderson’s lecture on self-publishing from his English 318 class this year. While I agree with much of what he says, a lot of it is already out of date. Probably the biggest thing is whether it’s still advantageous for indies to go with a traditional publisher after making a name for themselves. In 2011, Amanda Hocking had some good reasons for going traditional. In 2012, Hugh Howey has some very good reasons not to.
The other big thing, though, is this idea of author platform–that to be a successful indie, you have to find some way to drive large numbers of people to your books. Well, not necessarily. Hugh Howey was a nobody for three years, and the title that finally pushed him over the tipping point was the one he promoted the least. To me, that shows:
current sales are not a predictor of future sales, and
a great book will grow into its audience independent of its author.
Granted, there may be a threshold that needs to be crossed before word-of-mouth really starts to kick in, but if a nobody with passable cover art and no author platform can cross it, that threshold isn’t very high–and that’s good news for all of us.
The way I see it, there are three big myths that writers struggle with in making the shift from traditional to indie publishing:
1) The flood of crap books will keep you from getting noticed
This grows out of the paradigm of limited shelf space–that the best way to get noticed is to have your book occupy more space relative to all the other books on the shelf. This might be true in the brick and mortar world, but the rules are much different in the digital realm.
Think about it: how many new blogs are launched every single day? Thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. And yet people still find the good content amid the sea of crap. On Youtube, an average of one hour of video content is uploaded every single second. And yet there are still entertainers making a lot of money through their Youtube channels.
The rules in the digital realm are completely different from everything in the physical world. Figuring that out requires a huge paradigm shift, one that even indie writers struggle with.
2) Publishing a book is an event that must be promoted
This grows out of the paradigm of velocity, or as Kris Rusch puts it, the “produce model” of publishing:
Every month publishing comes out with brand new product. Shelf space is limited in every single brick-and-mortar bookstore. Big Publishing makes the bulk of its money during the first few months of a book’s existence. So if a book sits on a bookstore’s shelf until the book sells and that sale takes six months to a year, the bookstore and the publisher lose money.
Better to dump the old inventory on a monthly basis—for full credit for unsold items—than it is to have the inventory sit on the shelves and grow “stale.”
Of course, the flaw in this logic is that digital shelf space is unlimited, therefore books do not “spoil.” No matter how much time passes, an ebook can still be found in the same place.
Therefore, does it really make sense to make a big deal over an indie book release? Maybe to jump start some word-of-mouth, but it’s not like your career is going to be harmed if you do nothing. In fact, it might be better to hold off until you have a few more titles up, so that when you give the first one that push, readers will have something else to read once they’ve finished it.
3) To succeed you need to find a way to “break in”
This grows out of the gatekeeper paradigm, where the system is closed and the few entry points are guarded by a select group of taste makers whose job is to bestow legitimacy on those who meet the qualifications to get in. It’s the concept of patronage, where success comes from being chosen by a wealthy benefactor, and it’s connected with the idea that you haven’t truly “arrived” until <fill in the blank>.
The flaw with this paradigm, of course, is that publishing is no longer a closed system. The gates haven’t just been flung open, the walls themselves have been torn down. The job of the taste makers is no longer to protect readers from the dross, but to lead them to the gems–which is honestly much closer to what it should have been in the first place.
So what does this mean for creators? It means that there’s no longer a system to break into. You don’t need to write better than everyone else, you just need to find (and keep) your 1,000 true fans. Success isn’t bestowed upon you by some higher authority, it’s something that you discover on your own as you hone your craft and build your business.
Honestly, this is one that I still have a lot of trouble with. When I left to teach English in Georgia, in the back of my mind I had this vague notion that I was going into a self-imposed exile, and wouldn’t come back or settle down until I’d “broken in.” Of course, this made me quite discouraged, because it felt like things were out of my control–or worse, that I’d somehow failed.
But listening to Brandon’s lecture and reading Howey’s Q&A session helped me to remember that it’s all still in my control. I don’t need a benefactor, I just need a good plan, if that makes any sense. So right now, I’m thinking things through and making the necessary revisions to that plan. There probably won’t be any big ones–I still think I’m more or less on the right track–but it will be good to update my paradigm.
By the way, the title of this post applies to the Q&A with Hugh Howey, not to the post itself. Though if you are thinking of self publishing, I hope it’s helped out in some way.
Also, I just finished part I of Wool, and it deserves every bit of praise that it’s got. Expect to see a review of the omnibus shortly.
For the next few Trope Tuesday posts, I’m going to pick apart one of my favorite story patterns, the monomyth or “hero’s journey.” Other tropes come and go, but the hero’s journey is truly timeless. If you can get it to work for you, it can do wonders for your ability to understand and tell stories.
In many ways, this is the trope to end all tropes. it is the source of almost all the major story archetypes, and can be found in the myths and folklore of almost every human culture–hence the term “monomyth.” It was first formulated by Joseph Campbell, who outlined it in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He summarized it like this:
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.
Campbell was an academic who studied mythology and folklore, and his book, though insightful, is pretty friggin dense (not to mention scientifically obsolete–he references a lot of Freud’s theories that have largely been discredited). Later, writers like Chris Vogler, Phil Cousineau, and David Adams Leeming analyzed and simplified the monomyth for popular audiences.
Enough background–what is it? Basically, it’s a story pattern that resonates powerfully with readers across all genres. In its simplest formulation, it follows three steps:
Freedom to Live: The Hero uses what he has learned to live the rest of his life.
Do any of those sound familiar? Yeah, I thought so. It might be hard to think of a story that fits all 17 points at once, but it’s not uncommon to find one that hits seven or eight (or possibly more).
A simpler formulation by Leeming goes like this:
Miraculous conception and birth
Initiation of the hero-child
Withdrawal from family or community for meditation and preparation
Trial and Quest
Death
Descent into the underworld
Resurrection and rebirth
Ascension, apotheosis, and atonement
My personal favorite, though, is Vogler’s:
So how useful is this trope really? Well, consider this: Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game was the first novel to win both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award in the same year…and it hits up all eight points listed above. The following year, Card published Speaker for the Dead, which also hit all eight points, and also won both the Hugo and the Nebula award.
The thing that made Star Wars more than just another campy sci-fi b-movie with (let’s face it) terrible acting and hokey dialogue is the fact that George Lucas drew so heavily from Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey. Think about it: Luke Skywalker passes through almost every one of the 17 points, right up to the awesome throne room finale at the end.
Well, this guy certainly helped.
Of course, it’s possible to go too far. Lucas also tried to use the hero’s journey in the prequel trilogies, and failed miserably. Why? Many reasons, but mostly because he used it as a rigid checklist rather than a dynamic set of flexible guidelines. The hero doesn’t have to have a literal miraculous conception; he just needs to be chosen in some way. The goddess doesn’t have to be literal, and neither does the father–those stages can be represented quite loosely, or merged with others.
In my own writing, I’ve found that the best way to use the hero’s journey is to use it to understand what I’ve already written, and to trust my subconscious to fill in the next step. In every book I read, or every movie I watch, I constantly pick it apart, looking for each of the steps. This trains me to recognize the hero’s journey in my own work without having to break out the hammer or force things too much.
So how do you use the hero’s journey in your own work? Do you find yourself hitting up all the points subconsciously, or do you use some other method? Or do you hate the hero’s journey and try to avoid it altogether? If you do hate it, I hope that my next few Trope Tuesday posts will help you to change your mind.
So I just got back from Racha this afternoon. It was a lot of fun! Saw Ambrolauri, Oni, and Shovi, only 20 km from the Russian border near Ossetia. Don’t worry, though, we were safe the whole time–though the home we stayed at had a wolf pelt hanging in the dining room!
This video should give you a pretty good idea what Racha is like. It’s part of a new ad campaign, and it does a good job capturing the feel of rural life in the region, as well as the blend of modern and traditional that you find throughout Georgia. The music is a combination of two famous Rachuli songs.
I went with a fellow TLG teacher from Slovakia named Tomas, and together we made a really good travel team. We met last week on the TLG excursion to Kakheti and hit it off right away, probably because I’m a quarter Czech. He speaks a bit of Russian, and I speak a bit of Georgian, so between the two of us we were able to manage quite well.
A rickety old bus crawling up the treacherous road from Kutaisi to Ambrolauri.The Rioni river near the Racha-Imereti border.
We took the Kutaisi-Ambrolauri bus up along the Rioni river. The road hasn’t been repaved since Soviet times, so it was quite treacherous, especially in places where the cliff had partially eroded. Spectacular views, though, especially once we crossed the border into Racha.
At Ambrolauri, we got out and hitched a ride to Oni. The local police actually flagged down a passing tour bus full of Israelis and had them take us. It was awkward at first, until we made friends with the guide–a veteran hitchhiker who has been everywhere from New Zealand to Mongolia to Turkey. When traveling to a country with a foreign language, the five phrases she always tries to learn are:
Please.
Thank you.
Hello.
I want.
I need.
Pretty sound advice. The numbers should come pretty soon after that, along with “how much” and “what price.” “No” is definitely important too.
Oni, a beautiful Georgian town nestled inside the Caucasus Mountains.
At Oni, we spent a couple of hours shopping around the local homestays before settling on Family Hostel, a bed-and-breakfast type place with some really nice accommodations. It was a little pricier than we were hoping, but was definitely worth it. The food was great, and the dad showed us a bunch of interesting sites the next day.
The Rioni headwaters, up near Shovi. Russian North Ossetia lies on the other side of that mountain.One of many mineral water springs in Racha.
We headed up to Shovi with another tourist from the hotel: an 80 year old Turkish man named Adnan. He’s a big time hiker/trekker, and showed us a bunch of photos from his hike up Mount Ararat. He also made us Turkish coffee when we stopped for lunch up in the forest.
Shovi is an awesome rustic resort way up near the Russian border. It’s on the other side of Mount Shota, which is about as high and as steep as Mount Timpanogos in Utah. Maybe I’ll come back and hike it sometime. Anyways, Shovi was pretty cool–definitely worth coming back for a camping trip, or perhaps for a couple of nights in the cabins.
The most interesting thing, though, was how many springs were in the region. Seriously, we stopped almost half a dozen times at places just like the one pictured above, with so much water bubbling up that it almost seems like someone forgot to turn off the faucet. It’s all natural, though, and comes out carbonated and infused with all sorts of minerals. Tastes just like the sparkling mineral water from Borjomi or Nabeghlavi–the locals come up quite frequently to refill their jugs and bottles with the stuff. You can drink it straight from the spring, without any need for purification.
Back at Oni, we had a fun time hanging out with the family and seeing the dad’s furniture-making shop. They’re good people, and we were really fortunate to find them. Showed them some photos of my family, and by the end, I think the mom had half a mind to set me up with a Georgian girl. To be honest, the longer I stay in this country, the more inclined I am to accept…
The next day, we took off with the 19 year-old son on the bus to Tbilisi. He was heading out for his final exams–he’s hoping to study law and tourism, to come back and help the family business. We came down past Shaori Lake through Tkbuli. One of the back tires blew out near the Kutaisi-Tbilisi road, but we made it out in one piece. Tomas continued up toward Zestaponi, while I got out to catch a bus heading back to Kutaisi.
Four months ago, I would have felt totally lost, but I’ve been around Georgia so much by now that it was a piece of cake. Went into town for some lunch, then came back for a much-needed shower.
So that was the trip! It was amazing–I definitely recommend heading up that way for anyone who has a chance. There’s a lot of beautiful country up this way, as well as some genuinely good people. The best sights in Georgia can be a little hidden, and Racha is full of them.
So today was the last day of school in Georgia, with all of the craziness that that entails. It was kind of sad to say goodbye, even though I’ll probably be coming back to the same school in September. In the meantime, I’m going to miss being a rockstar to all the 7-12 year olds and giving them high fives after class and in the hallways.
I haven’t posted much about my teaching experience, but it’s generally been positive, though not without its ups and downs. I’ve met a lot of great people, taught a lot of great kids, and lived in a culture very different from my own. I’m not sure how I’ve grown yet, or what I’ve learned from the experience, but it isn’t over–I’ll be back after the summer, for a least one more semester.
I asked to be placed in the same school again, though I’ll be changing homestay families. If they can’t find another family in this district, I asked to be placed in a village near Kutaisi. It’s impossible at this point to say what will happen, though, and things in this country tend to change without notice.
When I came to Georgia, my goals were to find out if I could balance teaching English with my writing career, to get some useful teaching experience, and to gain some cultural exposure that would enhance my writing. On all three counts, I think I’ve had success.
My writing productivity has gone down slightly since coming out here, but I think that has more to do with the homestay and finding a good, quiet place to write. I’m still writing every day, just 1.5k words instead of 2.5k. Teaching English isn’t the problem–in fact, it’s probably one of the best careers for aspiring writers, just so long as you know your creative process and have a modicum of self-discipline. I’ll probably do another post on that later.
As far as teaching experience, I don’t know how much my time here in Georgia is going to help my resume, but it has helped me to have a bit more confidence when it comes to teaching. I still feel like there’s a lot of room for professional improvement, though, and it’s going to be difficult to get that here. I like Georgia, though, so I’ll be happy to come back. If anything, I figure one year looks better on a resume than six months.
And as for cultural exposure, coming out here was definitely a good move. Living in a developing country changes your perspective in a lot of interesting ways, and Georgia is so different from America that I’m sure I’ll be talking about it for years to come. How all of this will affect my writing, I don’t exactly know, but I’m sure it will only enhance it.
So yeah, that’s been my experience so far. The last day of school was kind of bittersweet, but I’m definitely looking forward to coming back!
