On Wednesday my Creative Nonfiction students have to turn in a rough draft of their Big, True Story. I went into today’s class determined to make a last-ditch effort to get them to think about narrative arc.

Not that it’s the only way,  or the best way, but I like to look at stories through the hero’s journey. Well, I like to, but — I admit — the hero’s journey doesn’t always work for me. I’ve looked at a model called the heroine’s journey, too, but there’s always something slightly “off.”  It has to do with not taking it quite so literally. You can’t cut a story out with a pattern. It has to come from a very deep place inside of you.

Today — partly because of a conversation I’m having with a friend via email, partly because of a big break-through in my story during my foil-star time in the morning, and partly as a function of having a 35-minute drive to work, plus as a result of my plan to talk about graphic stories in class today — I came up with a graphic model of the hero’s journey. I don’t think I’m talented enough to represent it here — graphically — but if you email me at bethany.alchemy@gmail.com I can send you a PDF of it.

I gave each stage of the journey one box, sometimes a circle (for mentor and for inmost cave), sometimes a quick series of smaller boxes (ordeal, seizing the sword, and road back). As often happens when I attempt to teach something visually, I got a big lightning-flash bolt of insight.

I’ve known for a long time that the inmost cave is not just “the darkest moment,”  “lowest point,” “belly of the whale,” but also that it’s the place where you rest and get strong enough to carry on. You HAVE to do that in order to face the ordeal, seize the sword, and make the good but often difficult choice to follow the road back.

I didn’t realize, however, that those three steps are PART of the inmost cave. Duh! The road back is the threshold step, the step OUT of the cave. Until you face the ordeal and seize the sword, you can’t get out of the cave.

One student talked with me after class about how she can’t use the hero’s journey, how it will not work. This young woman has a particularly dark story to tell. The reason it doesn’t feel like a journey is that she’s still curled up in the cave in a fetal position. She hasn’t decided yet if there’s a going to be an end to this story. In her position, a lot of people would retrace their steps and take the back way out of the cave. They would take up knitting or watch a lot of TV or do good works. They would not face this.

I told her she had my permission to write whatever she needs to write for this rough draft. I’ll read it. It might be that it’s beautifully lyric and formless. That could be fine. But it might be that she needs someone to hold her hand while she walks out of the cave.

I had a really interesting experience the other day in class, and I’ve been debating with myself as to whether or not to share it here. Given our current national debate about guns and violence, it feels like one of those hot topics that I tend to veer away from. You know how it is, in fiction conflict is EVERYTHING, but in life, I have lots of company in the avoidance category.

So I have this assignment that my young students just love. Even the older ones tend to like it. It begins as a setting exercise. I tell the students to take out their notebooks and do a “here and now” (as Priscilla Long calls it), jotting down everything they observe about our classroom. Sometimes, when I remember, I have a candy bar for the student who comes up with the longest list.

The next step is to write a scene using ONLY what turned up in the setting exercise. That’s your stage set, I tell them. It’s all you have. No bombs or Uzi’s in your bookbags. In this scene, they have to kill someone. “Can we save someone,” a student asked me this time around. I liked that. “Yes.”

Vampires sometimes turn up in the scene. More often, the flat-screen TVs fall off the walls. People are bludgeoned with Rockstar cans, choked with scarves, tossed out windows, stabbed with pens. Once, a student was stabbed by the clock hands. (The writer hadn’t put anything else vaguely weapon-like on stage.)

We read all of the scenes out loud (they get only 5 to 7 minutes to write it), and who knows why we all have such a good time. There must be some catharsis going on. We laugh. Everyone is better friends afterward.

The reason I’ve been wanting to tell you about it, is because this time around, for the first time ever, several students killed me. For the first time ever, I killed myself! 

In my morning writing time I’ve been carrying on a series of dialogues (David Morrell suggests this in The Successful Novelist) and one of the issues that keeps coming up for me is a need to get myself — or my ego, I guess — out of the way. I think, really, that I’ve just been given a clear signal that this is the right work for me to be doing. Who am I? Who is the real me? What does she need? If she had permission to act, to confront whatever conflict, what would she do? In truth, we can say we avoid conflict all we want, but it’s here all around us all the time, not just in our stories.

As I walked out of class, I felt lighter than I had in days.