In the preface to their recently published writing guide, Writer's Companion, Carlos J Cortés and Renée Miller state, “we set out to compile everything a creative writer needs to write well into a single reference volume.” Over the next two months, Open Book will be posting the first chapter of the guide, “The Nuts & Bolts.”
Check out Carlos and Renée's online writing community, On Fiction Writing, a website that is “dedicated to writers who are serious about improving their craft and helping other writers to do the same.”
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Read Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four of "The Nuts and Bolts." Read Part Five for "Act One, Departure."
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Act Two, Initiation
Step One: The Road of Trials
Initiation: Having crossed over into the new realm and escaped “The Belly of the Whale,” Gladys enters “The Road of Trials,” a series of challenges to test her resolve. Like everything else in life — of which fiction writing is but a reflection — a decision only serves to determine the traveling direction. The toil and the test are through uncharted land, encountering wild beasts on two, four, or countless legs.
Initiation is the ordeal a character must undergo to begin his transformation through inner growth. At this stage, our Gladys must evolve and conquer personal limitations to develop her unrealized potential.
Without the city’s protective cloak, Gladys moves through an alien world with no laws to protect her from wrong decisions.
Crossing a border under a false identity, consorting with gunrunners and riding a spluttering flying machine scant inches over the waves, are trials. But most importantly, this stage explores Gladys’s discovery: the sobering realization that she has entered a parallel world where survival is no longer reinforced by the state, its agencies, or handouts. Gladys is alone with only her wits to survive, and she must learn fast.
Ben’s help is inestimable, but he doesn’t control the new environment. A fine companion and assistant, he tags along and contributes the contrasting point of view Gladys needs to test her interpretation of people and situations. Gladys must develop her self-reliance to remain a leader.
Campbell stresses the pivotal nature of this stage:
“This is a favorite phase of the myth-adventure. It has produced a world literature of miraculous tests and ordeals.”
Here, the writer should strive to retain the respective roles of characters undiluted. The helper is just that, an assistant. His role is to nurture Gladys’s development and growth as a hero. He should ease her passage through the trials by sharing her burden, not by solving the problems. Otherwise, the roles could easily be reversed.
Step Two: The Meeting with the Goddess
The Road of Trials leads to “The Meeting with the Goddess.” This is an encounter with the Queen of the World who can be seen as representing the Earth Mother or source of life. She can embody beauty and unrevealed mystery but mdash; and this is important — she unifies good and evil.
Although Campbell symbolizes this step as a meeting with a goddess, the concept does not have to be represented by a woman:
“And when the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal.”
In La Havana, Gladys meets Juan. She doesn’t know what’s hit her. Her knees buckle before Juan, the leader of the Cuban underworld — widower, late forties, suave, charismatic... and devilishly attractive.
It’s love at first sight. This is the point where Gladys glimpses the kind of love poets write about — all-powerful and all-encompassing — the unconditional love that a fortunate infant may receive from its mother.
This moment can be written in many ways; the character meets his soul mate, or discovers his own repressed sexuality, or encounters a pure ideal personified in another man or woman.
Juan is reluctant to help. It will be dicey. The U.S. Army uses the trailers as storage space in Guantanamo; easy to get into but hell to get out of in one piece. During their conversations, Juan ogles Gladys.
To bring fullness to Gladys’s character, it is important that she perceives a chance of emotional success, a hint or implication of what award awaits her when she finishes the quest. Thus Juan, as a prize, must appear remote but not impossible.
Step Three: Woman as Temptress
In myth, “woman” is a metaphor for the physical or material temptations of life. The source of such temptation does not necessarily have to be represented by a woman. Gladys’s trials have prepared her to recognize the richness of life that Juan offers.
As Ben puts together a team to hit Guantanamo and search Trailer 33, Juan becomes transfigured, in Gladys’s mind, as a fine man destined to live in a parallel world. After a night of passion, she no longer cares much about her quest and prefers selfish pleasures to adventure. In the Odyssey, the hero faces a similar plight; he would rather stay with Circe than brave the seas.
The ease with which the hero falls into temptation is significant, and Gladys must soar beyond her complacency. In real terms, these steps are a continuation of The Road of Trials. Gladys will encounter the negative side of Juan and overcome her egoistic desires. This process will be a major milestone in her character development.
Temptation mirrors The Refusal of the Call. The hero seeks excuses to give up. Even though her life has changed, she craves normalcy and security. She thinks she might stay in La Havana with Juan and let Ben travel to Guantanamo to risk his neck.
Failing to illustrate this continuous inner battle between a thirst for adventure (change) and the natural temptation to stop playing and cash the winnings, results in cardboard characters. One of the recurring errors writers make in character development is to paint protagonists so strong, committed, and free of doubt, they appear inhuman to the reader. As character traits, doubt and weakness are as important as self-assurance and courage.
Step Four: Atonement with the Father
In myth, the hero may encounter a fatherly figure responsible for guiding him through the journey. This representation — the pivotal point of the journey —
echoes the trauma of transition from childhood into adulthood. The previous steps have brought Gladys to this place, and the following ones will move her out of it. Although this phase is symbolized by an encounter with a male entity, it does not have to be a male, just someone with power.
As Gladys recovers from an eventful night, sunbathing by a pool, the Cuban Army hits Juan’s state. The soldiers kill him (along with a few hundred of his lieutenants), arrest Gladys, and throw her into a dungeon.
For the transformation to take place, the hero must die, so that the new self can come into being. Sometimes this “dying” is literal, and the hero’s journey is at an end, though it may continue in another realm. More often, the hero dies a figurative death to be reborn as a new person. In more than one way, this stage shares echoes with Belly of the Whale.
Gladys realizes she has betrayed Uncle Tom, the rabbi, and Ben. Alone in a roach-infested cell, the air alive with the cries of other inmates, she breaks down.
Enters the rabbi from Topeka. He tears a strip of her skin and offers salvation—he has influence with the Castro clan — as long as she continues her quest.
According to the Monomyth, the father can be someone who feels threatened by the hero, a malevolent figure, or it can be someone who helps the hero in his journey. Just as the mother may be portrayed as good and evil, the father can represent ambivalence as a positive and negative force.
Gladys reconciles with the father. In the process, she understands him, the greatness of the quest, and herself. Thus, she is released from the situation through reconciliation, forgiveness, and mercy.
Step Five: Apotheosis
A hero’s apotheosis is his realization of the purpose of life and himself. With an expanded consciousness, he views the world in a different way than when he started his journey. At this point the hero often becomes a selfless person who cares for others before himself.
To apotheosize is to deify. Gladys hasn’t suffered a physical death but she’s nevertheless reborn on a higher plane. In James Clavell’s unforgettable Shogun, the gaijin reaches a point where his only honorable recourse is seppuku, or ritual disembowelment. A samurai stills his hand when the Tanto knife grazes the skin of his belly. What follows is his apotheosis. After the event, the air tastes different and even the flowers display renewed colors; he feels reborn.
Gladys has gone with Ben and his cronies, staged a masquerade, and recovered a sealed package from Trailer 33. It was a heroic deed fraught with danger, but she has floated through it because she’s a different person. The new Gladys is stronger. She is whole. She has happened.
To confuse this with grit or bravado would be a mistake. In On Writing, Stephen King recounts the accident that left him a mangled heap of flesh and broken bones by a roadside. He recovered, and his fellow writers and millions of readers rejoiced. But he wasn’t the same man. Oh, he still lived in the same house and had the same family and friends, but his plane of existence was forever changed.
When a character dies a metaphorical death, the hero’s transformation invokes a realization of the essence of life and ultimate purpose. Once more, we move through the Hero’s Journey by change, the single element capable of moving a story forward.
Step Six: The Ultimate Boon
The ultimate boon is achieving the goal of the quest. It is what Gladys went on the journey to get. All the previous steps have served to purify and prepare the hero to share the boon with humankind, whether it is an elixir of immortality, true love, the meaning of life, or a book full of long strings of numbers and notes.
The book contains the numbered bank accounts—one number shy—where Nazi criminals deposited billions. Next to the codes are riddles she must decipher to identify the bank names and missing number.
But this step goes much further. In many novel plots, this would be the end. The detail, to our view, demonstrates the vastness of the Monomyth’s scope. We could shuffle most of these steps — as many scriptwriters and writers have done — and create a twist anywhere. The resulting plot would be different. What follows in the next act could be omitted in some cases. In others, the steps could be interspersed earlier, or rearranged, as James Cameron did in Avatar.
Gladys has left her old life behind and found change, a new persona, and the treasure. The End.
The wonder of this plotting tool is the interchangeable nature of its steps. In The Odyssey, Homer plays through all the steps, in different order, and revisits a few several times.
In our plot, though Gladys has found the treasure, she must still solve the riddles and return. She can try to go back to her old life, but a complete return would be impossible. The school would be there, as would her apartment, friends, family, and acquaintances, but she is a different person.
1.4.5.3 Act Three, Return
Step One: Refusal of the Return
After eating manna, drinking ambrosia, and chatting with the gods, why return to this valley of disenchantment and aridity?
The quest over, the hero generally sets off for home to bring the knowledge of his adventure to others. In some cases, the hero does not wish to flee the newfound world or circumstance — this is Refusal of the Return.
Travelers have experienced this strange phenomenon often enough. Juanmi, one of the rare people we call brother, is a sailor. A real sailor. Make that a real crazy sailor. He eschews going out in the absence of force-four winds. Juanmi once spoke of a French sailor who finished a solo round-the-world sail in a bucket. As he reached the point where he should change tack and head home to a hero’s welcome, family, friends, and the bright lights, he paused and thought it over. Then he carried on south and said to hell with it all.
Of course, in most practical plotting applications, the writer can find ways to hand over the treasure to a Government representative or other agency who could, in turn, deliver the good news. This plot remedy has been used countless times by genre writers.
Gladys likes La Havana, its shapes, colors, and smells. She is welcome to stay and Don Antonio — Juan’s successor — is making eyes at her. The temptation— another plot driver — is strong. On the other hand, she could head for the family farm in a hollow with views of the bluffs and valley of the Illinois River. But she has still to figure out the riddles, and Uncle Tom’s correspondence, which may contain overlooked hints, is at her apartment in Atlanta.
Campbell sums it up:
“The full round, the norm of the Monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity.”
Step Two: The Magic Flight
We reach this step if the hero agrees to return home after completing his quest. There are numerous instances in story and play where the hero chooses to remain in the god’s realm and forgo human miseries. Once the hero has decided to return there are two possible scenarios: flight or rescue.
If the treasure was obtained through conflict or without consent, The Magic Flight will become a race full of obstacles, the hero pursued by the angered force. It makes sense that returning from the journey can be as adventurous and dangerous as it was to go on it.
A protector or assistant, to help overcome the perils the hero might face on the return, may accompany the hero.
Campbell remarks that:
“...if the hero’s wish to return to the world has been resented by the gods or demons, then the last stage of the mythological round becomes a lively, often comical, pursuit.”
Gladys sets off by boarding another single-engine flying machine, carrying with her the notebook rescued from Trailer 33 at Guantanamo, and chaperoned by a morose Ben. When they land on a barren field in Mexico, a welcome party awaits. A group of armed men kills the pilot and seizes Gladys and Ben. Before passing out, Gladys recognizes Zvi, the Atlanta grocer.
Step Three: Rescue from Without
In the classical Monomyth, the force that has been robbed of the treasure may be angered indeed, and prove difficult to dodge. This scenario requires the outside world to pull the hero back from the adventure. This is the Rescue from Without.
Campbell writes:
“The hero may have to be brought back from his supernatural adventure by assistance from without. That is to say, the world may have to come and get him.”
Zvi can be charming. He claims to be working for Mossad, the Israeli cousin of the CIA. He sets Gladys up in a nice house and promises a percentage of the bounty, a sort of finder’s fee, and a pretty residence in the land of milk and honey.
Though Gladys suspects something is amiss and Ben is incommunicado, she settles down to work and thus once again turns into a reluctant hero unwilling to take on the burdens of the world. Of course, she may be rescued from her state of helplessness and bliss. By a combination of overriding reasons or circumstances, someone or something may facilitate her return.
One night, a shadowy figure enters her room. Gladys awakens to find Ben metamorphosed into a ninja-like warrior. He is the real Mossad agent and Zvi is none other than Kurt Freiherr von Richthofen, the Nazi criminal and direct descendant of the Red Baron.
Just as the hero may need guides and assistants to set out on the quest, often he must have rescuers to bring him back. Sometimes the hero doesn’t realize that it is time to return or remember that others need the boon.
Step Four: The Crossing of the Return Threshold
Thresholds and gates are trials the hero must negotiate to cross over. In other phases of The Hero’s Journey the thresholds identify with change, the hero must endure yet another trial, to perish or rise above the difficulty. The narrative now brings the hero full cycle; his destiny is to depart from the world he has discovered.
In the late stages of the Monomyth, Campbell writes:
“The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life.”
The Crossing of the Return Threshold is a harrowing race through the Mexican desert, hounded by relentless pursuers. If caught, Gladys and Ben will face death.
To return, the hero must retain the wisdom gained on the quest and then figure out how to share it with the rest of the world. This can be difficult. Gladys now retreats into a world of doubt, overwhelmed by her own frailty. Exhausted beyond endurance, frightened, hungry and wounded, she doesn’t want to carry on; nothing seems worth this struggle and pain. She wants to be in control of her life once more. As they flee from their hunters, she collapses. She gives up.
Gladys may have to defeat another gatekeeper, and relive the harrowing process of crossing the threshold the first time. But the Monomyth roles are interchangeable. The hero’s assistants and rescuers can be the agents responsible for saving the master. The supernatural guide, incarnated in good old Ben, saves the day. He scoops the comatose Gladys into his muscular arms and with her on his shoulder, Ben gallops across the Mexican tundra toward salvation.
Step Five: Master of Two Worlds
On return, the hero must resolve duality: divine and human, known and unknown, yin and yang, real and imagined, dream and reality. To understand the myth, the hero must realize the two kingdoms are one. The unknown is another dimension of the world we know. To explore that dimension is the quest of the hero. By crossing this final threshold, the hero understands that the apparent separation does not exist. When this happens, the hero becomes the Master of Two Worlds.
As they near the border crossing, all hell breaks loose. The Rabbi from Topeka — in reality he’s a Mossad colonel and Ben’s handler — leading a band of Tohono O’odham1 bravos pounce on their pursuers. The Native Americans kill a few baddies, round up the others, capture Zvi, and send him off to Tel Aviv for reckoning.
Gladys rises like a Phoenix from the ashes of her old self. In Topeka she rests, pampered by a grateful Mossad. Healers tend to her body and spirit, supervised by a solicitous Ben.
In myth, a transcendental hero like Jesus or Buddha represents this step. For a human hero, it may mean achieving a balance between the material and spiritual. The person has become comfortable and competent in both the inner and outer worlds.
When she’s recovered, Gladys sets out to unravel the riddles, helped by Uncle Tom.
It turns out that Uncle Tom didn’t die in the Andes. As an undercover DEA agent, he’d been kept prisoner by a Mexican cartel. The Mossad just exchanged him for a truckload of dope and the rest of Zvi’s helpers.
Step Six: Freedom to Live
The riddle solved, the Israelis bang on Swiss bankers’ doors to recover the Nazi plunder. Our hero achieves a Freedom to Live. This step signifies the ability to pass freely between realms. Of course, this implies that the hero has become familiar with her existence. She is transfigured. Gladys has become a presence perpetually renewing herself, understanding perfected knowledge is imperishable.
Free from the fear of death, Gladys is unencumbered by personal limitations. This high plateau is the freedom to live. This stage, recreated in countless fiction works, brings with it a sensation of serenity and completion to a narrative end, with the hero at peace with himself. The hero understands that the present is the only reality, as the future has not happened, and the past only lives in memories. This is sometimes referred to as living in the moment, neither anticipating the future nor regretting the past. For we can’t change the past; it’s gone. The present we cannot change either, as any change would have to manifest outside the present. We can only change, or attempt to change, the future.
In a succinct sentence, Campbell sums the essence of the voyage.
“The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is.”
The new Gladys looks at the novel world around her to discover a fresh depth and a roguish twinkle in Ben’s eyes. And, hey, his IQ isn’t as borderline as it first seemed.... To be continued.
Endnote:
- Group of Native Americans who reside primarily in the Sonoran Desert of the southeastern Arizona and northwest Mexico.
"The Nuts & Bolts" is an excerpt from Writer's Companion (2011) by Carlos J Cortés and Renée Miller. Reprinted with permission.
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