4. Introducing the Protagonists
Slow Journeys in the Same Direction blog post written by Associate Chaplain, Geoffrey Baines.
Every engaging story has one.
The protagonist is the person who needs something and cannot, or will not, give up until they have it.
In a movie there’ll be an instigating moment to set the protagonist on a new trajectory, usually within the first ten to fifteen minutes. Our protagonist comes to the realisation that something must change and set out on a quest, or their life is interrupted by something from outside that pushes them into their adventure.
We are telling ourselves stories all the time: family stories, love stories, work stories, political stories, shopping stories, religious stories … . These contain the meaning and purpose we need and/or desire for our lives, for our relationships, and for the world as we perceive and understand it.
Screenwriting lecturer Robert McKee suggests that we love a movie because of the way it provides us with the opportunity both to experience and to reflect: we’re usually caught up in the busyness of experience without an opportunity or the means to reflect on just what is happening.
Here is our slow journey intent: in this story to be the protagonist who experiences and reflects.
Mythologist Joseph Campbell spoke about how we need both a personal myth and a social myth in order to live life fully: one story for our identity, the other for connecting us to our society and time. Making his remarks in the 1985, Campbell warned that whilst we have left the myths of the past behind, life is happening too fast for new one ones to be formed: and just think of the technological changes that have occurred since 1985.
We often think of myths as fiction whereas they are more accurately understood as our attempts to say something about life that our more functional or everyday language is unable to – stories that make visible the invisible, both about ourselves and our world.
Here are two expressions of storytelling that caught my attention: an intriguing reality about life in Iceland is that 1 in 10 of the population will publish a book: we, too, are learning to be publishers of our own stories; a Moth story is a true story told on stage before other storytellers: whilst an extreme storytelling experience, the reality is this is exactly what we do every day of our lives when we turn up with the truth about ourselves before others and within our work. We are meant to be writers of our own stories, not the victims to the storytelling of others.
SOMETHING TO DO
Print off the doodle and take a little while to colour in “Introducing the protagonists,” remembering this is about you within your story.
Take a few moments to open your journal and write about where you find yourself right now - a decision for the future you may have to make or a challenge you face. Perhaps your life is calm, too calm, becalmed even, and you need to reflect on why. Is there something calling you or pushing you towards an adventure?
Pixar uses a template with six prompts for all of its movies. You may like to use this to write your story so far:
Once upon a time …
Every day …
One day …
Because of that …
Because of that …
Until finally …
Through your slow journey, you are aiming to create a storyline or narrative arc for bringing together all the elements of your life – this towards the future – and there’ll be several elements you aren’t even aware of yet that only a journey will reveal.
RESOURCES YOU MAY ENJOY:
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller
Story by Robert McKee
The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall
Beneath the Unpredictable Plant by Eugene Peterson
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Jospeh Campbell
Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull