Feel the Fear

This is one of the best cartoons I've ever seen.

I'm blogging today over at Blame It On the Muse

On how to live in your 'essence' as Michael Hauge puts it.

Stop by.

Just don't ask me to...

gearcave.com 10 amazing high crimes

Sorry except for blogging at BlameItOnTheMuse I haven't blogged in a couple weeks due to slow satellite which I've blogged about ad nauseam. Quick update: after nine months of trying to convince the tech support people there was something wrong with my modem, they changed it out. All it cost me is $115 and reupping for another year on my contract. 'Nuff said.

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With the Atlanta conference coming up in a month, there's a lot to be done. Besides preparing pitches I have to make sure my car is serviced.

ON THAT NOTE: I have fairly new tires but last week I was driving through a small town nearby that's had a nightmare of road construction for five years. I came back with a flat tire. On the way home yesterday, I had another and another tire was very low.

At first the car felt like it was being buffeted by heavy wind but I didn't see the tree limbs moving, and it's not a great place to pull over - four lane with small shoulders - so I kept driving. Then I heard that familiar roaring sound and decided to pull into a closed car dealership where the surface was clean, level and concrete. I knew before I popped the trunk but verified that it was indeed a flat. No sooner had I popped the truck and picked up my phone than an SUV pulled in and a couple asked if I needed help.

I gratefully accepted after he informed me changing tires was what he does for a living. His wife got out and introduced herself and said that they had driven from a town approximately 45 miles away on the way to Natchez for a night out. The reason he pulled into this dealership was not because he saw my trunk up, but because he'd received a flyer in the mail about a sale on cars and they thought they'd just walk the closed lot without the hassle of a salesman around. His words to his wife, "Let's just get out of town and go spend time together and hope we don't see anyone with a flat!" We all laughed. She said, "So you're our blessing." Certainly it was the other way around. He even had his portable air gun in the trunk. How much more serendipitous could a flat be?

It reminded me of what Michael Hauge says in his workshop (which he's presenting in Atlanta). What does your character give lip service to? What does he SAY he wants and what is he willing to do to get it? To get your character's conflict right, fill in the blank. "I'll do anything you want me to, but just don't ask me to _____."

My man, George, may have wished NOT to change a flat on his night off, but he obviously enjoyed doing a good deed for someone who appreciated his kindness.  He could have kept driving or ignored me. Good good people. They are everywhere regardless of the negativity we hear on the media.

Oh, Yeah? You wanna be a hero? Heh heh...

It's been rain, rain and more rain lately which usually means no internet so I've been making good use of my time reading, asking questions, taking notes.


While some of my fellow writers were at actual workshops at actual conferences in the past couple weeks, I had to content myself with a very valuable DVD workshop in my living room. I spent the entire day yesterday studying and taking notes. RCPN was in a good place - I'm fixin (one word I would never give up if I moved) to put the notes I'd been taking about world building into my WriteItNow program where I am organizing and dropping all information on characters, settings, notes, ideas, and paranormal beings. I was literally worn out from concentrating on all the information/formula imparted therein and the ideas and solutions it generated for me.

If you haven't been lucky enough to catch Michael Hauge at a writers or screenwriters conference, you can take advantage of some powerful storytelling instruction on The DVD Hero's 2 Journey, a 3 dvd set of lectures by Michael Hauge and Chris Vogler on their versions of the Hero's Journey with a bonus CD of application to the movie, Erin Brockovich.

Hauge's workshops at RWA were called From Identiy to Essence. In both workshops Hauge talks about the identity being like the ego, what we present to the world. And essence being what we are without the masks, money, ego, fear, and excuses. If we take a character who 'says' he wants to have a specific quality and throw everything at him that challenges that, the conflicts and plot points create themselves, throwing him out of his everyday world and into a new one where he has to decide if this is what he really wants. Of course, he's our HERO, so after a few trials and backslides, he will take the bull by the horns and overcome.
This guy looks like he's refusing the call, lol.

Vogler's system which is based on Joseph Campbell's A Hero with a Thousand Faces, lines up nicely with Hauge's Six stage Method. With examples from well known movies, it doesn't seem like so much formula as an effective and proven storytelling process.

Actually, the first time I heard the Hero's Journey presented was on the 2005 RWA CD with Elaine Stirling doing her Heroine's Journey, tuned toward the romance genre. It was excellent. Her paper on the Feminine Myth is still available here.

It was well worth the extra pennies I spent on the DVDs since both Hauge and Vogler use a white board to illustrate their own version of the journey.

Have you seen any of these Journey workshops?