EXERCISE: Your Mythic Journey (1)

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting: Sun, 01 Jul 2001 10:52:45 -0400

From Your Mythic Journey: Finding Meaning in Your Life through Writing and Storytelling by Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox

Page 12.  Viewpoints

Sometimes you can dispel shame or expand pleasure by sharing your secrets.

• what are the secrets that you never (or rarely) share with anyone?
• what secrets would you be relieved to share?  With whom?  What will become of them, once told?
• which are easier to share -- the secrets of your idealized self or those of your degraded self?

Degraded self-images revolve around feelings of fear, weakness, anger, and confusion.

• In fantasy, allow yourself to be as weak, inadequate, passive, and ineffectual as you have ever feared yourself to be.  Remember the times when you have felt small and helpless.
• Imagine that you are uncontrollably angry.  Describe the persons you would punish, torture, or kill, the things you would destroy.
• if you lost your reason, your inhibiting forces, what form would your madness take?

Idealized images of the self usually cluster around fantasies of love, power, perfection, beauty, fame, knowledge, or creativity.

• Create a fantasy in which you become the fulfillment of your ideal self.  You are strong, loving, beautiful, brilliant, etc.  What do you do with your power?  What gives you the most pleasure?
• Chart the way you bounce back and forth between idealized and degraded images and feelings about yourself, between Infant and Superman, Earth Mother and Temptress, Master Builder and Caspar Milquetoast.

That's enough from the source...

Okay, so let's see.  There's the idealized self and the degraded self, and the secrets we all hesitate to share.

Suppose, just for the moment, that you had a character with a secret.  What might that secret be?  And what happens when the secret becomes known, as these things do?  How does the character react?  How do the other people react to that hidden side of the character?

Go ahead, tell us a story.  Perhaps the tale of a man with a past, or a woman without a past?  Let us know that there is something hidden, and then slowly (or suddenly, via a bolt out of the blue) reveal that hidden mystery. Then walk us through the lives that twist and turn as that secret reverberates.

EXERCISE: A Quote For A Tale?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original posting: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 22:40:00 -0400

Quoth the Reader's Digest (p. 59, July 1993)

Education: What's left when you've forgotten everything you ever learned.

Okay?  Now, there's a story lurking in that quote (maybe even two or three).  Take some characters, and put them in a place, and show us what's left when they've forgotten everything they ever learned.

Yeah!  That's the story.  Now tell us about it.

EXERCISE: a short start...

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting: Wed, 03 Oct 2001 23:40:58 -0400

For the ghoulies and ghosties, how about...

The toshet fly landed on her shoulder, and bit her.  That's when she began to change.

There you go.  Short, and rather simple.

Who was she?  What kind of change?  And what happened to...

Write!