Writing is a Way to Think Deeply and Find Others Who Do Also

[GreatGazoo]

Reading great works can challenge us or, by comparison, make us notice how little effort or attention span many people exert in their communications. How little precision. How little thought. Social media posts are 94% hit and run. Angry hot takes, many of which completely miss the point of whatever they are responding to.

But writing is another mode altogether. Clarity. Revelations. The first audience for anything you write is you.

Carol S Pearson's seminal work "The Hero Within" is filled with deep psychological revelations, the kind that come from years of writing professionally and working with others who do:

“No matter how much people want to feel loved, appreciated, and a part of things, they will be lonely until they make a commitment to themselves, a commitment that is so total that they will give up community and love, if necessary, to be fully who they are.”

She analyzes the archetypal character arc used in most great stories. The protagonist goes through there archetypes in this order: the orphan, the wanderer, the warrior, the martyr. These correspond to the checklist used by Disney executives when evaluating potential projects:

Who is the Protagonist? = orphan, searching for the context of who they are
What do they want? = wanderer, searching for their purpose in this life
What stands in their way? = warrior, fighting and struggling to fulfill their purpose
What will happen if they don't get it? = martyr

She ties the wandering orphan phase to real life, uses a Carl Jung dynamic:

“Abandonment actually is quite facilitative at this stage. When Wanderers do not let another in, whether it is parent, lover, therapist, analyst, or teacher, it is important for that helper to pull away so that Wanderers can experience fully the aloneness they have created for their own growth. Otherwise, they will be diverted from recognizing their loneliness by fighting off the assaults of others against their walls.”

Ultimately we find revelation in our writing process. It forces us to look more closely at our lives and our role in it as parents, partners, helpers and mentors:

“Paradoxically, it is in resolving what sometimes seems an intolerable opposition between parental or professional responsibilities and personal exploration that people often find out more fully who they are. They come to know themselves moment by moment by the decisions they make, trying to reconcile their care for others with their responsibility to themselves. Maturity comes with that curious mixture of taking responsibility for our prior choices while being as imaginative as possible in finding ways to continue our journeys.”

Thinking deeply is worth the effort. I really wish more people would do it.

[Bayard]

1. People want a quick fix, that doesn't require much time, effort, or thought

It starts young. Do they get actual, physical books anymore? Required reading in my classes were things like Shakespeare's plays, The Odyssey, Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter. You had to really think about characters and motives to write essays about them (No Cliff Notes allowed!) One of my favorite classes was, "Greek and Elizabethan Drama and Derivatives." I also wonder if they still have Creative Writing classes. Has AI already taken over schools?

I think history books/tv series also stimulate thinking to answer the question of, "Why?" (Yes--I'm addicted to The History Channel!) Curiousity about all things seems to be in short supply.

[A-Schwarzenegger]

2. Post of the Day/Week/Month.

Thank you, Great. Your posts are rich & important & likely don't get the readers or attention they deserve.

[GreatGazoo]

4. Thanks, very generous feedback

I am on writing journey right now. Trying to break through what has held me back. I have a BA in English Lit but reading and deconstructing is a different skill set than writing. Kind of like how you can be a passenger in a car without being able to drive or navigate.

I find it much easier to improve fiction that others have written, eg as editor, than to write my own. In my 20s I felt I had no trauma to base my fictions on but as another writer asserted "Each of us has experienced enough heartbreak by the age of 20 to write four novels." The trick remains translating that heartbreak. My excuse was that I did not want to expose my issues and life to the world. I am not Tennessee Williams.

But being nearer the end than the beginning of my life has brought urgency and honesty. The best reason to write anything is because you need to. Compulsion. Confession. Whatever the purpose, you seek answers through revisiting old stories with new eyes. Like the way a clam turns a painful grain of sand into a pearl, we polish our own suffering until it is good enough to potentially have value for others. (and 'value' doesn't mean money, unfortunately)

I'm writing a short film I intend to make: An estranged father covertly, even illegally, helps his adult daughter until she finds out its him and pushes back. I'm trying to get it down to a quick tight and extreme version of the experiences of parenthood and adolescence. We parent not to hear "thank you' but because we have to. We are compelled to. In many senses it is more for us than for our children. OTOH, it lowers people's self-esteem to be helped and in that sense it truly IS "better to give than to receive." As Pearson notes, we need space in our lives to know that we are making our own choices and not being controlled, even in rebellion, by the expectations, needs and desires of our parents or mentors. There is enough in that to explore to fill a feature film but I think it can play nicely as a short. My goals is not to give the audience answers but to leave them with good questions.

An early version of the story got angry reactions from women. I knew the daughter was under-written and the ending was convenient (eg she tentatively forgave the father). I found the intensity of the anger disproportionate but it let me know that story was going to be good if I could get it right. I rewrote the outline 3 different ways, starting with making the daughter the protagonist. That helped greatly. Then I stewed on where this story was really coming from in me. Got that answer. Now I have an outline that I think is the winner and will tweak and test and finish writing it but I still want to leave room for the actress to bring her emotional truths to that character.

As the saying goes "Growing old is mandatory -- Growing up is not". I'm last in the birth order, a "baby", and we stereotypically want two things: to entertain people, and to have everyone get along with each other. My maturity has lagged but I don't want to leave this life without a few more answers and writing has become a way to find some of them.

[A-Schwarzenegger]

9. Again, lotsa good stuff.

Last edited Mon Dec 8, 2025, 10:43 PM - Edit history (1)

Your every paragraph sets off a slew of thoughts and responses. Most of this i hope will relate to what you wrote, but some will be me wandering inevitably through my own patch of the woods.

Where i'm at right now in my writing is less compulsion and more pleasure and sanity. Writing is one of several pursuits that keep me sane. The pleasure i find in it is like the pleasure i find in gardening, growing vegetables mainly, but in both (writing and gardening) there's a solitude and a freedom that bring clarity and a kind of understanding of myself and life that maybe i don't need to put into words so much anymore. In fact as soon as i try to verbalize that understanding it turns to sand in the hand of my mind, which is fine with me.

I'm 80 and my two books, novels, were published (at small independent houses) when i was 77 and 79. They were the two books out of the four i've written which i most wanted to be published. They are very different from one another. Because i got what i prayed for, despite neither one doing much in the world or the marketplace, i feel satisfied. I don't feel compelled to write, though i write every day. Or maybe what was once compulsion has simply calmed down through time and aging. But i know i write for the pleasure of the nuts & bolts of it, and for the sanity it gives me, a sanity separate from the world but which helps me live in my mortal body among other human beings in that world.

I've never been ambitious. i'm lazy, willful, rebellious. The things/events that most affected & shaped me were my father dying suddenly when i was 13, discovering alcohol at 17, getting sober at 40, and marrying at 50. Most of who i am is inside. My life in the world is unremarkable.

I dont think i ever wrote to find answers to questions, or to ask questions. I just loved words, i was drunk on words. I had to express my different selves when i was away from home in college and in Germany in the Army (in the late 1960s), writing home to family, friends, girl friend. For each person i wrote i had a separate persona. I wasnt faking it, it was just that communicating with each different person brought out of me a different side of me, a different slice of my personality. I'm still sort of like that. I'm not the same with different people. Writing those letters was how i found myself, or my selves, which later would come out in characters in my fiction. I wrote plays for a while because i think i love dialogue, conversation, more than any other part of writing. I think we find ourselves as human beings in real-life conflicts with ourself & others, just as we find ourselves as writers through our characters and their internal and external conflicts. I'm more confident, at peace, and stable as a writer writing characters and their stories, than i am as a human being in the world. I know who i am as a writer more than i know who i am as a human being.

I'm just gonna stop there for now and see if anything in there is useful to you. I hope you sense that what i wrote is at least partly in response to what you wrote. Like i say, you opened a lot of deep, important, mysterious boxes in your post.

P.S. Your film sounds very intriguing. I'm glad you were able to adjust to feedback, as long as you don't lose what inspired you to write it in the first place. I had a couple critical comments about the marriage in one book (the husband's treatment of the wife) but i had made it sufficiently clear in the text that it was not being excused or celebrated. Write on.

[GreatGazoo]

10. There is definitely something about externalizing, even if only for yourself,

that makes a difference -- a journal, letter, logbook. Oddly, for me, it feels more like I can let go of something once it is on paper (or screen).

>Most of who i am is inside. My life in the world is unremarkable. < Wish I could credit this quote but a writer said 'Each of us has experienced enough heartbreak by age 20 to write 4 novels.' I like the YouTuber "Model Strangers" -- he compresses strangers stories down to 3-minutes and they are all fascinating.

https://www.youtube.com/@modelstrangers/videos

Thanks for sharing.

[A-Schwarzenegger]

11. the older i get, the more mysterious and clear it becomes, i become to myself

"What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words!
His real life is led in his head
and is known to none but himself.
All day long, and every day,
the mill of his brain is grinding,
and his thoughts (which are but the
mute articulation of his feelings)
are his history.
His acts and his words
are merely the visible thin crust of his world,
with its scattered
snow summits and its vacant wastes of water,
and they are so trifling a part of his bulk!
The mass of him is hidden--
it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil,
and never rest, night nor day.
These are his life, and they are not written,
and cannot be written.
Every day would make a whole book of 80,000 words
three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man--
the biography of the man himself cannot be written."

--Mark Twain, Autobiography

[SheltieLover]

3. Great post!

Ty for sharing about Pearson's books.

[GreatGazoo]

5. Thanks. More quotes and info here

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/347793-the-hero-within-six-archetypes-we-live-by

[SheltieLover]

6. Thx! She offers two free ebooks on her website

And I found one of hers at my library.

https://www.carolspearson.com/free-books-3

[GreatGazoo]

7. Thanks - had not seen that

I just bought her 1998 book "Hero Within" on Ebay. She is 81YO and still at it.

The history of women in early film making has been minimized and eclipsed by dozens of docs on "the moguls". Women were thought to be better story tellers than men were (imagine that ) and they were better paid. I am seeking more perspective for the project I am currently working on and that brought me back to Pearson.

[SheltieLover]

8. Awesome! Thx for sharing!

I'm a big fan of Jung & his contemporaries, but I'd never heard of Pearson.

I love the Jung Platform, loads of on-demand courses. They're doing their big annual sale, 40% off sitewide! I loaded up on the creativity ones & am esp looking forward to watching the Find Your Myth one!