Your Life, Your Story, Let's Get Started

Alicia's Response:

"I've put the memory of that night away like a room with one door in and one door out. So clearly do I remember being the girl who stands outside that room, hand on the doorknob, ready for anything. Funny, when people say that..."ready for anything"...they don't really mean anything. They mean a happily-ever-after, tall, dark, and handsome or short, blonde, and rich kind of anything. They certainly don't mean crushing terror or retching pain. They don't mean death.

That girl who stands there one hand on the door knob and one hand on her hip, tossing a fat glossy braid over her shoulder, she certainly wasn't expecting that truck to come out of nowhere, barreling down a hill with no road, smashing into her car with no warning. In fact, when she opens the door and walks into that experience, that memory I don't think of, she tells herself "I didn't see it coming."

The girl on the other side of that room, through the Out Door, the one missing a hand, she makes sure she sees everything. her fat glossy braid lies heavy down the middle of her back. Her hand presses back against the door, holding it shut, pushing herself forward. She is not ready. But that's okay.

Because she will be. No matter how many more rooms she has to live through, next time, she will be ready.

Excerpt from Assignment #25: Experience as a Room

You’ve been with your character for several adventures and quiet moments alike by now. I’d like for you to pick one or two and imagine them as a room with two doors – one exclusively for entrance and the other exclusively for exiting. Take a while to get a comfortable image going because you are going to walk your character right smack into the middle of the scene....

When you have the scene clearly and lushly imagined, place your character outside the In Door. You may be able to feel their anticipation as their hand rests upon the door knob. This experience, this room, will change them. Your job is to record those changes. Begin by feeling deeply into the character to identify their Before portrait. You have the benefit of knowing the experience that awaits them and even how your character responded to the individual elements of the experience. Quickly, without over-analyzing, check into those memories and awareness of your character Before they entered the room."

Buy Assignment #25 $10.00

I admitted to my homeschooled daughters a particular weakness in my own research skills. For good or bad, I tend to be obsessive in my investigation until I have found atleast one respected source that agrees with me. In my defense, all facts and opinions get fair consideration in the final analysis - I'm just not satisfied until part of the sampling of other opinions includes one that looks like mine.

Very often, this other source has been able to articulate my thoughts and feelings far better than I had, bringing clarity and expansion as well as familiarity. Such is the case with Dmitry Orlov's latest post on Club Orlov. If you've not read much of his work, time spent cruising around his blog will be well worth it. Mr. Orlov brings the task of Journey School Stories right into your lap with this excerpt:

But there is also an alternative: compose your own fiction instead of accepting anyone else's, then go ahead and turn it into reality. A good first step might be to write a short story. It can be very short, and it doesn't even have to be particularly interesting. Something as trivial as this might do for starters: “The next morning she woke up and, instead of having a bagel with cream cheese and a cup of coffee for breakfast, she fasted until sundown.” And then, the next morning, she woke up, and something curious happened: this short story came to life, and so it came to pass. Next came other stories, each a bit longer than the previous one, bridging the present and the future in new ways, and eventually spanning decades. And as these decades rolled by, these stories too came to life.

This, as I see it, is the best way forward in a depressed and increasingly demented and accident-prone country that is heading straight for collapse, where the present (reality, what people think is going on, common notions of the state of things) is degenerating into useless noise—the clamor of clueless but self-important people desperately begging you to continue giving them your attention, so that they can stuff your head with more “B”-rated trash. But if you ignore them long enough, they will go away. Don't hope, don't wish, don't dream, but do write your own fiction and use it to create a present that works for you. Invent places for yourself and for those you care about in your stories about the future, and then go ahead and live in them.

Towards this goal, we will begin posting excerpts from our own Journey School Character Development program. While we'd love to have you as full-fledged participants complete with your own character and seasonal gifts, this task is too important to each of us, to all of us, to make it solely contingent on the exchange of money. Each week, we'll post a bit of the Assignment for free, offer the purchase of a full PDF of the single Assignment for $10, or of course, the entire 26 Assignment program with Character and gifts for $300. Our family has been working through this program for personal healing and character development in our own fiction for quite some time. So, we'll also share our responses here on the blog and hosted on our website www.luckyfarm.us in character specific collections.

See you next week for the beginning of your unique story!